Author Archives: Lee Kelly

I’ve been having an ongoing exchange with Ryan Murphy and Gene Callahan about Popper, the problem of induction, and falsifiability. What follows is brief summary of our inconsequential little argument to provide context. If you don’t care about all that … Continue reading →

We do not have direct experience of physical things: evidence is theory-laden. That is well-understood and generally regarded as true. Much less appreciated is that we do not have direct experience of abstract things either: self-evidence is theory-laden too. The … Continue reading →

Critical rationalism is sometimes mistaken to be little more than a call to be critical. Some object that advocacy of the critical attitude is hardly unique to critical rationalism; every first year philosophy student is instructed to be critical of … Continue reading →

I wrote this as a quick comment on d’s blog, but then the post disappeared for some reason. Anyway, I thought I’d share here.

I have been reading Human Action and decided to share some thoughts. Mises is troubling for a critical rationalist. Some of Mises’s proclamations seem adamantly anti-fallibilist, and appear to have been interpreted by many of his followers as such. Here … Continue reading →

This thought has been hovering around in my mind for a while. It seems to me the core of the critical rationalist mindset. We create our problems by choosing our ends, and we can dissolve them just by changing our … Continue reading →

Yesterday I discovered an interesting paper. It is “Why do Humans Reason: Arguments for an Argumentative Theory” by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Here is the abstract: Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better … Continue reading →