[FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[David Eric Smith]

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important.  But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric



> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world."  What sort of heuristic is THAT? 
> 
> N
> 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
> 
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
> 
> I TOLEYA!
> 
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>> 
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the 
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize 
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as 
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of 
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation 
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the 
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also 
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to 
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more 
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s at 
>>> least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
> 
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