The Roommate thought experiment is literally a locked-room mystery. It’s the exact type of scenario famous for narrowing the epistemic space enough (at least in fiction!) to allow unusually large deductive leaps. Most types of evidence will be much more open-ended, including anything miracle-related.
1. I think it's funny that Brian Blais works in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences department at Bryant University. I mean how many more Bs can you even fit in one sentence?!
2. I think one may understand the roommate analogy as you considering various competing legitimate hypotheses about your future roommate at the start of the week:
a) my roommate will arrive before the end of this week
b) my roommate will not arrive before the end of this week
c) my roommate will arrive during the day on Tuesday, October 13
One can understand these three views as competing views that make some predictions, but not very clear predictions about the state of your belongings upon your own arrival to your house each evening this week (although it's much less likely that your belongings would change at all this week if (b) is true). But I mostly wanted to say that these three are perfectly legitimate guesses as to what will happen regarding one's roommate that one can formulate in advance without having to wait til a week to even formulate any guesses on what might happen or is most likely. So, I don't get your point about conclusions vs hypotheses. Whenever we have some evidence that strongly favors some hypothesis that we've linked via argument, we conclude that some hypothesis is true. So I guess you're denying that the moved belongings count as good evidence for hypothesis (a), but I don't see that as being anything to do with conflating conclusions and hypotheses or something.
My point is that conclusions and hypotheses function differently from each other. One is formulated at the beginning of an investigation, while the other is at the end. In Noah’s case, I was pointing out how it doesn’t make sense to say you’re forming a hypothesis at the end of your investigation and say that the hypothesis was “conclusive” it just seems like an abuse of vocabulary.
Keep in mind, in his thought experiment, the hypothesis wasn’t formed before the week, but after all of the evidence was gathered. That’s odd! That seems like a conclusion to me, and i think calling this a hypothesis is just wrong.
What’s more, I think there’s a distinction between something we can be confident in, vs something that’s conclusively demonstrated. This goes back to the difference between a logical and a probable inference. And so, I would say that if we’re formulating only three hypotheses ahead of time and closing epistemic space to only be three of them, then yes, certain data can confirm one vs others. But I think a better word, in the spirit of Popper is that it corroborates because we don’t know what the epistemic space actually looks like. As I say in the final section, I think we can use this language of confirmation in morally certain terms, but it doesn’t make sense in mathematically probabilistic language.
That may sound like a word game or linguistic disagreement, but I think the substance of it is real.
The Roommate thought experiment is literally a locked-room mystery. It’s the exact type of scenario famous for narrowing the epistemic space enough (at least in fiction!) to allow unusually large deductive leaps. Most types of evidence will be much more open-ended, including anything miracle-related.
This perfectly encapsulates the problem I flagged yesterday! Great read.
1. I think it's funny that Brian Blais works in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences department at Bryant University. I mean how many more Bs can you even fit in one sentence?!
2. I think one may understand the roommate analogy as you considering various competing legitimate hypotheses about your future roommate at the start of the week:
a) my roommate will arrive before the end of this week
b) my roommate will not arrive before the end of this week
c) my roommate will arrive during the day on Tuesday, October 13
One can understand these three views as competing views that make some predictions, but not very clear predictions about the state of your belongings upon your own arrival to your house each evening this week (although it's much less likely that your belongings would change at all this week if (b) is true). But I mostly wanted to say that these three are perfectly legitimate guesses as to what will happen regarding one's roommate that one can formulate in advance without having to wait til a week to even formulate any guesses on what might happen or is most likely. So, I don't get your point about conclusions vs hypotheses. Whenever we have some evidence that strongly favors some hypothesis that we've linked via argument, we conclude that some hypothesis is true. So I guess you're denying that the moved belongings count as good evidence for hypothesis (a), but I don't see that as being anything to do with conflating conclusions and hypotheses or something.
My point is that conclusions and hypotheses function differently from each other. One is formulated at the beginning of an investigation, while the other is at the end. In Noah’s case, I was pointing out how it doesn’t make sense to say you’re forming a hypothesis at the end of your investigation and say that the hypothesis was “conclusive” it just seems like an abuse of vocabulary.
Keep in mind, in his thought experiment, the hypothesis wasn’t formed before the week, but after all of the evidence was gathered. That’s odd! That seems like a conclusion to me, and i think calling this a hypothesis is just wrong.
What’s more, I think there’s a distinction between something we can be confident in, vs something that’s conclusively demonstrated. This goes back to the difference between a logical and a probable inference. And so, I would say that if we’re formulating only three hypotheses ahead of time and closing epistemic space to only be three of them, then yes, certain data can confirm one vs others. But I think a better word, in the spirit of Popper is that it corroborates because we don’t know what the epistemic space actually looks like. As I say in the final section, I think we can use this language of confirmation in morally certain terms, but it doesn’t make sense in mathematically probabilistic language.
That may sound like a word game or linguistic disagreement, but I think the substance of it is real.
nice piece … reminds me of a part of sobels chapter in design arguments
honestly, I wonder after mackie and sobel why is phil rel even a thing still lol … (just kidding but something there for me at least)
i really need to read sobel, don't I?
Congratulations on your anniversary. Many happy returns!