Thus begins the ancient parable:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.”
If there’s a foundational skill in the martial art of rationality, a mental stance on which all other technique rests, it might be this one: the ability to spot, inside your own head, psychological signs that you have a mental map of something, and signs that you don’t.
Suppose that, after a tree falls, the two arguers walk into the forest together. Will one expect to see the tree fallen to the right, and the other expect to see the tree fallen to the left? Suppose that before the tree falls, the two leave a sound recorder next to the tree. Would one, playing back the recorder, expect to hear something different from the other? Suppose they attach an electroencephalograph to any brain in the world; would one expect to see a different trace than the other?
Though the two argue, one saying “No,” and the other saying “Yes,” they do not anticipate any different experiences. The two think they have different models of the world, but they have no difference with respect to what they expect will happen to them; their maps of the world do not diverge in any sensory detail.
It’s tempting to try to eliminate this mistake class by insisting that the only legitimate kind of belief is an anticipation of sensory experience. But the world does, in fact, contain much that is not sensed directly. We don’t see the atoms underlying the brick, but the atoms are in fact there. There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don’t experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light. To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back into the unseen causes of experience. It may seem like a very short and direct step, but it is still a step.
You stand on top of a tall building, next to a grandfather clock with an hour, minute, and ticking second hand. In your hand is a bowling ball, and you drop it off the roof. On which tick of the clock will you hear the crash of the bowling ball hitting the ground?
To answer precisely, you must use beliefs like Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second, and This building is around 120 meters tall. These beliefs are not wordless anticipations of a sensory experience; they are verbal-ish, propositional. It probably does not exaggerate much to describe these two beliefs as sentences made out of words. But these two beliefs have an inferential consequence that is a direct sensory anticipation—if the clock’s second hand is on the 12 numeral when you drop the ball, you anticipate seeing it on the 1 numeral when you hear the crash five seconds later. To anticipate sensory experiences as precisely as possible, we must process beliefs that are not anticipations of sensory experience.
It is a great strength of Homo sapiens that we can, better than any other species in the world, learn to model the unseen. It is also one of our great weak points. Humans often believe in things that are not only unseen but unreal.
The same brain that builds a network of inferred causes behind sensory experience can also build a network of causes that is not connected to sensory experience, or poorly connected. Alchemists believed that phlogiston caused fire—we could simplistically model their minds by drawing a little node labeled “Phlogiston,” and an arrow from this node to their sensory experience of a crackling campfire—but this belief yielded no advance predictions; the link from phlogiston to experience was always configured after the experience, rather than constraining the experience in advance.
Or suppose your English professor teaches you that the famous writer Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a “retropositional author,” which you can tell because his books exhibit “alienated resublimation.” And perhaps your professor knows all this because their professor told them; but all they're able to say about resublimation is that it's characteristic of retropositional thought, and of retropositionality that it's marked by alienated resublimation. What does this mean you should expect from Wulky Wilkinsen’s books?
Nothing. The belief, if you can call it that, doesn’t connect to sensory experience at all. But you had better remember the propositional assertions that “Wulky Wilkinsen” has the “retropositionality” attribute and also the “alienated resublimation” attribute, so you can regurgitate them on the upcoming quiz. The two beliefs are connected to each other, though still not connected to any anticipated experience.
We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other—call these “floating” beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens’s ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict—or better yet, prohibit. Do you believe that phlogiston is the cause of fire? Then what do you expect to see happen, because of that? Do you believe that Wulky Wilkinsen is a retropositional author? Then what do you expect to see because of that? No, not “alienated resublimation”; what experience will happen to you? Do you believe that if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, it still makes a sound? Then what experience must therefore befall you?
It is even better to ask: what experience must not happen to you? Do you believe that Élan vital explains the mysterious aliveness of living beings? Then what does this belief not allow to happen—what would definitely falsify this belief? A null answer means that your belief does not constrain experience; it permits anything to happen to you. It floats.
When you argue a seemingly factual question, always keep in mind which difference of anticipation you are arguing about. If you can’t find the difference of anticipation, you’re probably arguing about labels in your belief network—or even worse, floating beliefs, barnacles on your network. If you don’t know what experiences are implied by Wulky Wilkinsens writing being retropositional, you can go on arguing forever.
Above all, don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.
I think that this is really a discussion of explanatory power, of which scientific causation is one example. All theories attempt to explain a set of examples. Scientific theories attempt to explain causation in natural phenomena, thus their "explanatory power" is proportional to their predictive power. A unified theory of forces at the planetary and subatomic levels would explain more examples than any do now, thus it would have great explanatory power.
Yet causation isn't the only type of explanatory relationship. Causation implies time and events, whereas these are only one type of explanation. For example, the Pythagorean theorem explains why physical right triangles in reality have the lengths that they do. It doesn't "cause" them to have the properties they do. It would be foolish to say that any property of physical triangles "explains" or "proves" the Pythagorean theorem, because mathematical truths exist independent of practicalities. Plato's dialogue The Euthyphro beautifully explains why even if the set of things which are x and the set of things which are y are equivalent (in that case, the set of pious actions and the set of god loved actions,) they are not the same quality if one (god loved) explains the other (piety) and not vice versa. Similarly, the total number of hydrogen atoms in a glass of water is always even, but it is the quality of evenness (any number which is a multiple of two must be even) that explains this, not any quality of hydrogen. The one "explains" (but does not "cause") the other.
Thus, I think some parts of this post would be better understood as being stated as thus: any theory which provides no additional explanatory power should be ignored.
So, looking at the case of Phlogiston, the OP is not saying it is "wrong," but that it lacks the explanatory power that justifies it as a useful theory. If I take the Neils Bohr model of the atom, and say that there are extra invisible subatomic particles, and that these particles are "god," you would be hard pressed to prove me wrong. But this theory does not predict any new phenomena, nor is it falsifiable, nor, most importantly, does it have an explanatory relationship with any other known truth about atoms: none of them explain this theory, and it explains none of them. It exists completely independent from any other aspect of atomic theory, thus it lacks any explanatory power as a theory.
Yet there are theories which have great explanatory power but not empirical predictive power. Lets say I'm a simplistic deontologist who says that killing is wrong because human life is good. Along comes a utilitarian who says, I have a theory which explains, in all the cases where you're right, why you are right, and in those cases where you aren't, why you aren't, according to your own first principle. In terms of my very simplistic ethical theory, the utilitarian would absolutely be "less wrong" than me, for he has provided a theory which better explains the hard cases my theory failed to (justified killings, kill 1 save 2 etc.)
In the case of the post-utopian author, I think that we again are getting wrapped up in "prediction" when we should concern ourselves with explanation.
What is a plumber? Is it a man who comes to your house, sits on your couch, eats your food, watches your TV, and flirts with your wife? Even if this is true of all plumbers, it is not the definition of plumber. Definitions should be proscriptive, such that they give you the means to determine what counts as an x, and what a good x is. If a plumber fixes pipes, anyone who fixes pipes is a plumber, a good plumber fixes them well, and no one who doesn't fix pipes is a plumber.
Thus, hold literary labels to the same standard. Don't ask, "is this label true"? Because as we saw earlier with the god particle example, many theories cannot be proven false but still have greater or lesser explanatory power (see economics, ethical theories etc). The better standard is explanatory power. Is there a definition of the quality "post-utopian" such that any book with quality x is post-utopian, x explains why it counts as post utopian, and the more x it is, the more it is post-utopian it is? Saying post-utopian is a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h, but failing to provide a single explanation of the aforementioned form is like calling the plumber a man who eats your food and flirts with your wife: it is a descriptive definition, not a proscriptive definition. It may be true of the every plumbers, but it is not the thing that makes plumbers count as plumbers.
I think the OP meant to say that literary labels like post-utopianism fail to meet this standard. Sure, you can come up with descriptive statements of the terms which may be true (post-utopian books do not portray utopian societies as possible) but this is not a definition because it is not this quality that a. makes post-utopian books count as utopian, b. without which a book cannot be post-utopian, and c. designates a clear set of books which either are, or are not, post-utopian. Textual analysis perhaps can be more wrong and "less wrong," but literary theories are just not the sorts of truth-bearing statements that mathematical, scientific, or philosophical theories are.
Compare "post-utopian" to "even". Even numbers are a set of specific numbers, but there is a single quality they have (being multiples of 2) which explains why they are in the set. Without that quality, they would, "by definition", not be even. This is the standard we should be looking for in definitions and theories. Not just that they are "true" (plumbers do steal your food, watch your tv, and flirt with your wife) but that they have the sort of explanatory power we've isolated.
Thus, I think the larger point of the post stands. There are better theories and worse theories, and we should prefer the better ones.
Aaaaaaaaugh.