Three Old School Epistemic Essays

Originally published January 10, 2016

It is expensive to keep track of multiple partially overlapping partially contradictory models. You must do it anyway.

— Will Newsome (@willnewsome) August 5, 2012

You should read The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses, by T.C. Chamberlin

For those who wish to avoid reading a PDF, I have reproduced the paper here.

This blog post started as an attempt to summarize the essay in order to seduce people into perhaps reading it, but then I got bogged down in the effort, so, nah.

It reminded me of William James's The Will to Believe, published a year earlier. Reading this, I noticed he quoted W.K. Clifford's The Ethics of Belief, which is excellent. Man, there's this whole world of old school practical epistemologists that I've been ignoring up to now!

I would beseech you to read these three essays. All are excellent. But I know that such exhortations would be useless. They aren't easy reads. Even if you wanted to, you have to already be in the habit of reading things from that era to understand a word they say.