Miloš Taliga

Cognitive overlap between art and science can be found in the processes of learning through experience. What necessarily needs to be present in these processes are not good reasons in favor of what is known or learnt, but the following features: The first feature art and science have in common is the negativity of learning processes: What a cognizer C learns through experience is that her theories, expectations, attitudes, trials, etc. are wrong and should be abandoned in order to advance. This leads us to the second common feature of art and science: if C is to err, and thus to learn through experience, she must create something in advance. It is further argued that C learns through experience due to causal relations between the environment and her sensations and beliefs. This cannot be accomplished, however, if C is not aware of the notion of objective truth. Empirical knowledge is social and public, yet its truth is not reducible to social agreement. More could be learnt about the learning through experience in art and science, if anyone showed that some of the features or relations proposed in this paper are not necessary for learning

In his paper, Armando Cíntora (2024) argues that the notion of criticizability, I proposed in my paper (Taliga, 2022) to show that critical rationalism can be comprehensive and non-paradoxical at the same time, faces the challenge of relativism. In this reply, I shall first summarize the notion of criticizability and Cíntora’s objection to it (Section II), then I shall argue that creationists or flat-earthers introduced by Cíntora (2024) do not do criticism, but fake criticism (Section III), and, finally, I shall explain why, and how, that blocks Cíntora’s charge of comprehensively critical rationalism from relativism (Section IV).

The paper introduces a new non-factive theory of knowledge, employing the recent theory of verisimilitude developed by Jakob Süskind to model the relative adequacy of representations as their approximation to truth. It makes the relation of representation one of the necessary conditions of knowledge without requiring the truth condition to be satisfied. However, the relation of knowledge to truth is built at the meta-level into the notion of the adequacy of representations, which enables the proposed theory to cover any thinkable case of research yielding real knowledge, although of a non-factive kind. Despite its universality, the theory relativizes knowledge to a set of research questions, while rejecting alethic relativism, which — it is argued — does not provide a satisfactory explanation of truth in reasoning about the growth and extinction of scientific knowledge.

The article distinguishes between subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of scientific method, links subjectivism with good reasons, and argues its uselessness for our understanding of science. It applies the distinction to the method of falsification, explains why objectivism regards falsification to be conjectural, immune to the Duhem–Quine thesis, and immune to the problem of underdetermination. It confronts the falsifying mode of inference with the fallacy of begging the question and with the paradox of inference, and suggests how modus tollens helps scientists to find out that a tested theory is false, in spite of the fact that the falsity of the theory is asserted in its premises.

The paper deals with two mistakes ascribed to Popper’s theory of verisimilitude. The first is the well known critique of Popper’s qualitative definition of verisimilitude produced independently by D. Miller and P. Tichý which argues that that definition is false. The second is the claim that due to Popper’s theory of verisimilitude and his theory of corroboration inductive and justificatory elements enter his theory of science. This accusation was raised e. g. by I. Lakatos and J. Watkins. The paper tries to show that while the first critique is true, the second is false.

In this paper, I try to show how the ambition of William Bartley, the founder of comprehensively critical rationalism, can be realized, i.e. how critical rationalism can be comprehensive. I argue that the alleged paradox of comprehensively critical rationalism, formulated, among others, by Bartley himself, depends on a faulty understanding of criticizability. I therefore propose a new understanding of criticizability, and argue that under the new understanding there is no paradox of comprehensively critical rationalism. Finally, I try to explain how critical rationalism can be comprehensive, i.e. without any concession to irrationalism, or to any dogmatic faith, including the faith in reason.

The aim of the paper is to restate the problem of language dependence as first invented by D. Miller against Tichý’s approach to the problem of verisimilitude. The question is whether the verisimilitude appraisals can be dependent on language in which they are formulated in the sense that this dependence could determine their truth values. If the answer is “Yes”, one of the consequences is that one language, when compared with some other one, may lead to different verisimilitude appraisals in spite of the fact that the situation to be compared is the same. So the answer has to be “No”. The author of the paper tries to explain this by analyzing Miller’s critique of Tichý’s counting method which was a part of Tichý’s theory of verisimilitude

The paper tries to analyze critically what is usually taken for granted – the causal relation between empirical knowledge about external world and the world which is (supposedly) known. The aim is neither to propose a new definition of knowledge nor to restate an old one but rather to take a closer look at the claim that knowledge is a true belief caused in a proper way by facts, events, etc. of the external world. This claim is a core of the epistemological approach usually labeled as “causal theory of knowledge”, but there are many causal theories distinct from each other. The paper therefore sketches the causal components of D. Davidson’s epistemology and the roles they play in the process of cognizing, first. Then it exposes more details of Davidson’s approach and pushes some of them further critically

Abstrakt/Abstract Článok argumentuje, že idea tzv. sociálneho obratu, ktorá pochádza z dielne normatívneho pragmatizmu a ktorú v jednom zo svojich textov propaguje aj Vojtech Kolman, neprináša žiadne ovocie, ak je prenesená do oblasti epistemológie. V závere článku je preto načrtnutá alternatívna interpretácia idey sociálneho obratu a jej dôsledky pre epistemológiu. The paper argues that the idea of the so-called social turn introduced by normative pragmatism, and promoted also by Vojtech Kolman in one of his papers, bears no fruit when transferred to the field of epistemology. Therefore, an alternative interpretation of the idea of social turn, as well as its consequences for epistemology, is outlined at the end of the paper.