The Epistemology Problem

Most folks want to use epistemology as a way of justifying what they already "know" to be true.  The challenge instead is to find an epistemology that lets us discover what is true, and allows us to update our beliefs when we find out that we were wrong.  I argue that the best of these is an anti-certaintist inductive bayesian empiricism.  Indeed, I think we are specifically scientifically justified in accepting empiricism, even though I am generally more than a little suspicious of using science to ground philosophy.

Observations:

• Certainty is a feeling, which is not run by the brain subsystems responsible for logic.  Rather, it's part of the same subsystem that handles love and anger.
• Deductive conclusions outside of math have a hideous track record.  No sane person could inductively conclude that deducing about the world (absent experimental evidence) is substantially more justifiable than astrology.
• Induction, with Bayes, gives us NO way to reach logical certainty.  Solution: bail on certainty.
• People make LOTS of mistakes.  Any epistemology with no error-correction mechanism is broken.
• We know scientifically that the human logical mind develops as a goal-directed induction-engine.