The most recent brough-ha-ha from one of Mark's posts seems to center on rationality and philosophy, but underlying all the stuff in the "new rationality" is understanding the process of updating our current knowledge with new information through Bayes Theorem (LW calls the process belief updating or bayesian updating). Bayes Theorem is both very useful and very interesting Continue Reading …
Nelson Goodman on Induction (Grue and Bleen!)
On our Goodman episode, I start out by trying to give a short explanation of Goodman's "New Riddle of Induction." When we're presented with evidence for a general claim, how do we tell which general claim the evidence is in support of? Goodman contrasts the predicate "green," which we might think we can project to future cases when we see that all current emeralds are green, Continue Reading …
Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know? (Citizens Only)
On David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
This is a 31-minute preview a vintage 2 hr, 5-minute episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and Continue Reading …