Create Signed Justification with airSlate SignNow

Create signed justification

I don't know it just started a new job the apartments a mess I really justify doing the thunk right now well wait a second what am I talking about just look at it it is justified [Music] the half-dozen airports around London are dense with business travelers at just about any time of the year and none are busier than Heathrow the number-two airport in the entire world it's not unusual to suffer some sort of delay for one's flight because of traffic to or from the airport or because someone's a little slow getting out of the terminal when booking flights for bigwig executive types secretaries might opt to send their bosses to one of the five airports around London that aren't Heathrow maybe save some cash or avoid traffic but knowing all the drawbacks all the chaos and the likelihood of problems their Heathrow is still the most popular option for business travel out of London the problem is that Heathrow is viewed by most people as the default option one which can be justified easily a secretary who sends someone out of some other Airport will inevitably get interrogated for any issues that might arise even if statistically speaking getting stuck in traffic or being delayed is less likely if anything does go wrong they will be asked to justify their decision and if they can't supply a decent justification for making that choice they will be held accountable for the outcome there's a much much safer play to sign someone up for the slog out to Heathrow so that's exactly what happens again and again the Heathrow option is a lovely euphemism for decisions which are easily justified but not necessarily rational that is not aligned with the most desirable outcome we usually think of those terms as being two facets of this same thing if a belief is rational then it's justified having a justification for what you're doing means that you're acting rationally there are ways of looking at the situation and saying well the decision isn't really justified or well it's technically rational but we can feel the tube being teased apart in some sense it's not an uncommon thing in game theory there's a whole class of cases like the Heathrow option called paradoxes of rationality or the most justified course of action invariably results in worse outcomes that's kind of weird if you think about it I mean the whole point of formal analytic tools like logic and argument is to justify our assertions which is supposed to ensure that our conclusions are rational take the classic logical syllogism Socrates is a man all men are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal it's a deductive proof showing how to justifiably navigate from a set of known premises to a rational conclusion or does it looking closely you might notice something peculiar about the second premise all men are mortal how exactly do we know that that's true well we could use induction generalizing from a few men who turned out to be mortal to all men but there are some uncomfortable problems with induction as we've discussed on thunk you might have heard that correlation does not imply causation but that's all that induction is assuming that it does the number of federal dollars spent on science and tech correlates very closely to deaths by strangling and suffocation so inductively speaking we should expect a sudden increase in NASA funding to cause a sudden spike in gurrah Tex but we don't because that's crazy yet we do expect one more man to result in one more mortal even though the only evidence we have is that when we see one we see the other but hey this syllogism is pretty simple so let's just do this deductively ignoring the logistics for a moment if we're being really thorough in making sure that we've got a truly watertight deductive argument we'd simply have to go through and verify that for every member of the set of men each member truly is mortal but that set includes Socrates to accept this premise it seems that we'd have to verify that Socrates is mortal which is what we're supposedly proving in the first place if you're familiar with logical fallacies you might notice a whiff of something like begging the question a logical misstep where someone assumes the thing they're trying to deduce like the prime directive is important the card is the best captain in Star Trek therefore Picard is the best captain in Star Trek it doesn't actually demonstrate anything we didn't agree with already we're not getting anything more out of it than we're feeding into it some philosophers think this question begging thing is endemic to all logic that if you're doing a logical proof intrinsically begging the question and assuming the conclusion that you wanted to demonstrate that's a real problem if you want to say prove anything with logic it seems that we're in a bit of a bind here on one hand we've got a problem with proof by induction on the other hand we've got a problem with proof by deduction as maryberry might say we're just a touch under proofed it seems that we've disqualified all methods of normative justification in this chain of reasoning so we don't have any good reason to believe it there are a couple of directions we might go from here philosophical irrational lists assert that the dictates of reason tell us that we should reject reason itself as a basis for truth and I hate to say it but these sorts of observations might well push one in that direction if justification doesn't have any place in reasoning you can just choose to believe or act however you like and if you want use reason to feel good about it afterward as David Hume put it reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them but there is another option Karl Popper is most well known for his philosophy of science specifically the demarcation problem of how we can know silence from non science he asserted that one of the things that you absolutely need to call a theory scientific is a criterion of falsification some observation are finding that would imprint upon proof that the theory was incorrect popper found this business about justification reason fascinating but rather than following Hume into irrationalism he found a way to rescue a normative sort of rationalism from the problems we've examined in a familiar way poppers theory of critical rationalism accepts these critiques of justifications role in reasoning head-on justification is a masturbatory exercise to feel better about decisions and beliefs we already hold if you want something to be true you can always gather evidence to believe it or prove it logically without too much trouble so justification is simply bankrupt as a foundation for knowledge but what about criticism what about things that reason tells us can't be the distinction might seem subtle but it makes a world of difference when we're talking about how we might use reason to know things asmath poppers scientific demarcation according to critical rationalism when we're reasoning properly were guessing what might be true then subjecting that guest to various tests of consistency in comparison with evidence not to see if we can justify it but to see if there's anything that disqualifies it from the realm of potential irrational notions that puts objective truth much further out of reach that we generally like to think that it is without the option of confirmation all we have left is a set of ideas that we happen to come up with which are internally consistent and aren't explicitly contradicted by any of the criticism or evidence we've raised so far that's a pretty small needle to thread and if we're limited in some important way in what sorts of guesses we can make in the first place either because our puny human brains can't even come up with the right sort of ideas or because we can't recognize them as being worth reasoning about it's possible that we simply can't get close to the truth but importantly this still allows room for reasoning as a normative process something that can in principle distinguish between irrational and potentially rational beliefs and behaviors by eliminating justification as a mechanism of rationality it undercuts a lot of stuff we normally associate with reasoning the sort of prescriptive approach of proving that the rational thing to believe or do is despite or the other that sort of thing remains in Humes a rationalist camp a frivolous bit of rhetorical posturing but by abandoning justification it allows us to focus on the meaningful work of criticism poking holes and ideas finding inconsistencies or counterfactual evidence to prune away the bits that we can be sure are wrong the ideas that seem especially useful in resilient against criticism while still making a substantive claims are probably closer to being right we can't ever really know for sure but we can compare notes and get better guesses than we would on our own the resemblance between critical rationalism and poppers theory of demarcation is striking by focusing on disproving things that aren't true rather than proving things that are built a convincingly robust account of how these tools can continue working even under highly persnickety philosophical scrutiny it's fascinating that he establishes such a relationship between reason and scientific investigation maybe even helping to explain some part of the fruitfulness of scientific methods skeptically minded philosophers find poppers defense of reason insufficient to rescue it from relativist or postmodern arguments saying that even his deflated account of recent role in objective truth overstates what it can reliably do more positively minded philosophers find his defense lackluster suggesting it's defeatist to abandon induction entirely of course popper would probably have welcomed these critiques of his theory but what do you think of his anti justification is position of critical rationalism please leave a comment below and let me know what you think thank you very much for watching quick plug the discord server is phenomenal I have a link down in the video description please please please come and say hi and chat with some of the remarkable people there they're very interesting to talk to you and don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and don't stop honking [Music]