Episode Details

Vaden comes out swinging against David Chapman's work on meta-rationality. Is Chapman pointing out a fatal flaw, or has Popper solved these problems long ago? Do moose see cups? Does Ben see cups? What the f*** is a cup?

We discuss

• Chapman's concept of nebulosity
• Whether this concept is covered by Popper
• The relationship of nebulosity and the vagueness of language
• The correspondence theory of truth
• If the concept of "problem situation" saves us from Chapman's critique
• Why "conjecture and criticism" isn't everything

References

• The excellent Do Explain podcast. Go listen, right now!
• In the cells of the eggplant, David Chapman
• Chapman's website
• Jake Orthwein on Do Explain, Part I

Chapman Quotes

Reasonableness is not interested in universality. It aims to get practical work done in specific situations. Precise definitions and absolute truths are rarely necessary or helpful for that. Is this thing an eggplant? Depends on what you are trying to do with it. Is there water in the refrigerator? Well, what do you want it for? What counts as baldness, fruit, red, or water depends on your purposes, and on all sorts of details of the situation. Those details are so numerous and various that they can’t all be taken into account ahead of time to make a general formal theory. Any factor might matter in some situation. On the other hand, nearly all are irrelevant in any specific situation, so determining whether the water in an eggplant counts, or if Alain is bald, is usually easy.

• David Chapman, When will you go bald?

Do cow hairs that have come out of the follicle but that are stuck to the cow by friction, sweat, or blood count as part of the cow? How about ones that are on the verge of falling out, but are stuck in the follicle by only the weakest of bonds? The reasonable answer is “Dude! It doesn’t matter!”

• David Chapman, Objects, objectively

We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

• David Chapman, The purpose of meaning

Popper Quotes

Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems. ‘A hungry animal’, writes Katz, ‘divides the environment into edible and inedible things. An animal in flight sees roads to escape and hiding places . . . Generally speaking, objects change . . . according to the needs of the animal.’ We may add that objects can be classified, and can become similar