Facts & Sources

[A friend recommended this blog to me and said there might be some "monster brain power here", so I couldn't resist this post.]

That comic is now posted on a blog ... doesn't that, by virtue, now make it untrue? If so, what are we then to believe?

My favorite philosopher in all the world, Karl Popper, believed that we must never discredit any piece of information merely because of it's source.

Popper wrote the Logic of Scientific Discovery (L.S.D.) which became the founding rule for the Scientific Method, and ultimately was used to conclusively show that Einstein's Theory of Relativity was far more widely applicable than Newton's related Laws. This was done with Popper's Theory of Demarcation (the question of whether a given statement/theory is repeatably and reliably testable or not) and the Theory of Falsification (do not search for tests that support your perspective, rather, search for "risky tests" that would likely show something you believe to be false). Popper's two laws were used to compare/contrast Newton's Laws of Gravity and Einstein's Theory of Relativity to determine which was better. All kinds of "risky tests" were done to try and break the two laws. This testing showed that in certain cases Newton's Laws do not hold reliable to things we observe. However, the amazing thing about Relativity is that (at least to all the reading I have done), there has not been an experiment devised that is reliably repeatable that shows Relativity is inaccurate within it's defined constraints.

The sources we think are liars are the sources we should most pay attention to, and only in that way (befriending that which we believe is 'evil') would a persons knowledge grow and continue to grow. Just because source 'X' has been a liar in the past does not necessarily mean that some new thing they are offering is a lie itself.

Rather, from the Popperian logic perspective, it is always the actual observation that matters (he didn't seem to like the word "fact") that must be paid attention to itself. And when you take a given observation, you examine it for it's verisimilude (truth content).

So, if I decided to apply Popperian Logic and someone tells me the air is full of uranium oxide from a war and that they read it on a blog ... I don't believe the answer is to discredit the blog(s), but rather, to go buy a uranium-oxide air testing kit, step outside and test the air.
And in this case, our air is most probably clean. But the air in and around ground-level targets in Iraq, that have had a truck drive through recently kicking up a lot of dust, and have recently been D.U. targets might not be. ;)

The great problem with "Facts & Sources" is the problem of induction and/or "justificationism". People with a given agenda, belief, feeling, or goal, will often selectively choose one observation that supports their beliefs and then run around saying "this proves I am right". It is this process of showing people their observation that they use to get other people to believe what they think, a.k.a., "justificationism". When people want to do things they know there will be criticism about, the first thing they do is try and "justify" what they are doing. "Justificationism" (i.e., the act of ignoring observations that show what we think is probably false, even if it comes from an 'evil' source), at least in my view, is the root cause of almost all the really nasty human-created problems in the world.

A better model for "Facts & Sources" is ... for anything we are being told that we wish to know if it is true, we must go out and make a sincere and real effort to test that theory, i.e., "risky test" it by searching for hard material observation that would falsify what we believe.

If we fail to find any hard material observations that falsify a given theory ... only then should we accept it as "truth", and even then, we must not forget that we can't predict the future, and that at some point in the future, someone might find a "risky test" that shows something we believe isn't true.

Popper was also known as the founder of "Critical Rationalism". He isn't taught in our schools or much of anywhere, because people who

Anyway, I highly recommend to Karl Popper's "Open Society and It's Enemies", and other books he has written under the "Facts & Sources" topic ... they are the best I've ever read.

Kyle, thanks for the inspiring comment. The monster brain however is a dinosaur brain and it needs a bit of time for producing a proper response. soon.