Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by "truth" (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There's a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist. Web site PhilPeople profile The Sooty Empiric Blog Paper on "Is Peer Review a Good Idea?" Talk on Why Do Scientists Lie? Twitter

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And as you know, we are not afraid here at Mindscape about getting deep into things. And today we're going to get deep into some of the most profound ideas in philosophy. You know, we've talked about philosophy before. We've talked to philosophers about pretty darn deep ideas, about realism, about consciousness, about physics. Today we're going to talk about truth. And truth is one of those things you think, well, you know, maybe it's a pretty straightforward. idea. Some things are true, some things not true. Anyone marginally acquainted with modern philosophy should know better than that, right? Of course things are going to get really, really complicated. The analogy that I have in my brain is Gertl's theorem in mathematics. Kurt Gertl proved that if you have a sufficiently strong formal system, a system where you can like prove theorems and so forth using logic and math and deduction, then there will always be one of two choices. Either there are true statements in that system that you can never prove, or the system itself is somehow incomplete, somehow internally incoherent. It's not consistent. And this is a surprising result, right?

You might think, people did think, you could prove everything that was true in a formal system, not true. And in fact, that lesson generalizes to other ideas that we might have about truth. It's very, very hard to be formal and rigorous and careful about what you mean by the word truth. So today we're going to an expert. Liam Cofi Bright is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. If you want to know why the department's called that, Carl Popper was a influential person back at the London School of Economics back in the day. So things Carl Popper was interested in became an entire department, philosophy, logic, and the scientific method. We're going to talk about all of those things today.

Liam is an expert not only on the formal aspects of what truth is. You know, there's a lot of symbol manipulation and proving things and being very, very careful and rigorous that goes into this kind of game, but also the down and dirty, how do we figure out what is true? So not only what is true, but how do we figure it out, right? The game of epistemology. So we can go from this crystal clear set of theorems and axioms and so forth to really difficult real-world questions.

You know, when you say, how do you figure out what is true, you might say, well, I'll use the scientific method. Okay, well, what's that, right? What not only do we say the scientific method is, but how does it actually play out in the real world? How do we decide who gets published in journals? What is the role of refereeing? How do different kinds of scientists bring different perspectives to the questions of what is true and what is false? Even if we all think that the universe is real and it's out there and what is true about it is going to be objective for everyone, the ways that we get to that truth might depend a lot on who we are and what we bring to the table.

So there's a lot going on here. It's a wonderful, fun conversation. This is the last holdover from what I got to do when I was visiting the UK a little while ago. It was nice enough to let me delay this while other podcasts got into the queue. So I think we're going to have fun here. It's a little brain teaser. Let's go. Kobe Bright, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

Hi, Shum. I do want to mention for the listeners. that we're in swinging London and at a university. So there is construction going on outside. Yeah, sorry about that, listeners. That's okay. Listeners are a flexible bunch by now. They've learned to accept things.

I thought that we would talk about the nature of truth and the nature of knowledge and the nature of science. And then with all the extra time we had left over, we can figure out things today. Well, bloody, once you settled knowledge, truth, and science, you know, we'll still have that in our life. Yeah, I know. You'll have to fill in the time. We'll tell jokes.

Okay. Oh, so truth. Let me, let me, let me, maybe the good way to get this is to sort of say, look, there's a way that scientists think about what they're doing. You know, they come with a model. Maybe there's words like particles and forces and fields involved. And if the model works, if it fits the data, they will say, look, I have found some truth. The truth is reflected in the relationship of my model to reality. So what do sophisticated growing up philosophers think of,

about that picture of truth. Sophisticated, you're asking you what in the Noe class. So there's a kind of interesting feature of the way philosophers think about truth, which is, as far as I can tell, it diverges from how everyone else in the world thinks about truth, and yet philosophers tend to think of themselves as only explaining the common sense view. For what it's worth, my experience of talking with scientists has actually been very different. Scientists tend to be very averse to describing the results of their inquiry as truth, and partly because I think they're working in the background

with a more loaded vision of what truth is or would have to be than philosophers tend to be. Let me explain what I mean. So philosophical thinking about truth as it's done nowadays, there's a kind of sort of classic dialectic which, for instance, we teach undergraduate students. I teach a first year course and this would be how I would introduce them to it. Where there was in the early 20th century, late 19th century,

a debate between these kind of stylized positions, which we nowadays remember as the correspondence theory of truth, the pragmatist theory of truth, and the coherentist theory of truth. According to the correspondence theory of truth, truth consists in a relationship of correspondence between judgments of some sort, be either utterances or written sentences or something like that,

and the facts, where the facts are these metaphysical composite entities out there. So, for instance, if I say, understand examples, the cat is on the mat, then that is true just in case there is this thing, a fact out there, which is this structured complex of a cat, a map, the relationship on that, on the cat actually being the thing, which is bearing that relationship to the mat. And that's the correspondence theory. Yeah. This seems like a not crazy theory so far. I think that would probably, that's the view which especially, for us tend to think of as the correspondence theory, as the common sense theory. truth rather. The pragmatist theory of truth, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through them, then I'll go back into what the problem is. The pragmatist theory of truth has many different iterations. There's not like one canonical formulation. His sort of famous slogan is a truth is what's good by way of belief. And there the idea is something like truth, true beliefs are those which one expects to work for you in the long run or something like that, where belief has a certain purpose,

us, which is helping us orient ourselves and act successfully in the world. True beliefs are those which consistently and systematically help us achieve those purposes. They allow belief to fulfill its functions successfully. The cash value of ideas was the slogan that I was taught. There you go, right. It's the same thing. It's like the things which, like, in the end, how does this belief play out in my life, in my actions?

What good is it for me? In the scientific context, that will often be seen as sort of linked to empiricism, where the idea is that true beliefs are those which sort of bear out experimentally, which when I try and test them, they don't end up being wrong. And so that would be the pragmptus theory of truth. And the coherentist theory of truth is a bit different from both of those, where the coherentist theory more or less has it that a true belief is a belief which sort of fits into the maximally coherent theory of the world.

So imagine you had a sort of fully worked out theory. theory of everything, which was able to accommodate all of your observations of everything you come across, a belief is true just in case it would fit into that sort of very, very complex, no doubt will always be hypothetical, but hypothetical totality of beliefs. So I said this is sort of classic dialectic with these to stylized positions, because more or less all of those have now been abandoned. Like, you wouldn't find you very ready. I was just going to say that I'd gone through believing in all those different theories, and I've landed at the coherence theory more than anything else. So now you're going to

tell me that I've spent my life being wrong in different ways. Yeah, and, you know, that's just everything. You're wrong. You, Sean, and you listeners are wrong about everything. But, and me, I guess, except for the claim that you're wrong about everything. I was right about that. Okay. So, the issue is, of course, you'll find sort of people who have more sophisticated versions of the initial formulations and so nothing ever dies. It just gets reborn and rebuilt. But there are sort of big problems with each of these, which make people a bit wary of assuming any of them.

I'll go in reverse order. So for the coherentist theory, typically the worry is just there's no way of specifying a unique best theory under that. The problem is that multiple, very consistent, very coherent, for what we can tell theories can be formulated, which would allow contradictory beliefs in. And now I have no fact of the matter as to which of those, well, I ever have to endorse true contradictions,

or I have to or I have to find some way of deciding between the maximally coherent wealth views I can formulate. And that doesn't seem quite right because the natural way of deciding between a very, very consistent fairy tale and a very, very accurate description of world is that one of them's true and one of them isn't.

But like that's now being denied to me. I mean, the reason why it took me so long to even entertain the coherence theory is that it seems obvious to me that there's different coherent theories that are completely different. And what sort of broke the tie for me was thinking that, well, one of the things that your theory needs to be coherent with are your observations of the world, right? And so it's not just they're internally coherent.

There's some external coherence as well. Yeah, I mean, I should say I'm probably don't endorse the coherence theory, but I'm more sympathetic than most. This is just kind of the standard objection to it. That said, what I think people would say to things like what you just said would be that there are always lots and lots of ways of explaining. my immediate experience, right? So, you know, it's a sort of classic example. Brain and a vat. It's a demon deceiving me, the matrix, whatever.

Ultimate brain. And so the worry is that whatever things I try and bring in to shore up my coherent theory and introduce constraints on it, a sufficiently clever storyweaver can find a way to weave those in and yet still come up with a fundamentally wacky view of things. Okay. So that's kind of the classic problem. Of course, you know, there are things be said in the favor of the theory and some people still defend it, but most people, I think, don't accept it and they don't accept it on board on those grounds.

For the pragmatist theory, so the worry for the pragmatist theory is roughly that the thing it just said has almost nothing to do with truth. It all sounds good, but we're looking for truth. Yeah. And so you can formulate that in a couple of ways. Firstly, depending on how sympathetic you are to ideas like this, If you did insist on the kind of empiricism interpretation, then it seems to many people that there are candidates for truth or falsity which don't look like they're going to have any experimental predictions at all. So classically, is there a god? Tell me some properties

of that god. Whether you're an atheist or a theist, it seems like, or even an agnostic in some sense, you're committed to there being some truths wherever or not we know them and what they might be. and if you interpret the pragmatist maxim in a way which it's sort of experimental validation is what it means to work out for me. I just did air quotes. You can't see me doing air quotes, but I'm doing air quotes. Yeah, no. Trust me if you watch me, it would be very good.

So the experimental validation looks like it's just going to miss out on a bunch of things which do seem like candidates for truth. And the other worry is it just looks like you can have kind of useful lies, right? So if I usefulness is relative to a goal and you could have different goals. It's sort of the same thing's coherence, right? It's like there's this indeterminacy. Right, exactly that, right? So precisely because you can imagine sort of now I have another parameter to play

with in deciding something's true, like what I believe, how the world is and what I'm trying to do. And now it looks like I can worryingly make things true or false by varying that third parameter. And that just seems irrelevant. It wasn't like what we were initially trying to do. We want truth to be univolent in some way. Right, in some kind of sense.

And so that puts a lot of people off the pragmatist theory. I mean, it also, it was unpopular for a while because in a way which a lot of people think is fair. After the war, Bertrand Russell sort of alleged it was complicit with fascism in some kind of way because he was, he more... I've heard that one, yeah. So, I mean, sort of the line being that, like, well, if anyone gets to pick the goal. Oh, okay.

And so you end up some kind of, like, what's useful is what's useful as the Volk. And so then we're And then we're in a very bad place. Yeah, then we're in this all-fax world. And so, you know, that was another thing which I think which contributed to its own popularity. And then the correspondence theory, which is probably still of those three the most popular of them.

And the most common sensical. And the most commonsensical, yeah. It's more or less viewed by a lot of philosophers to, it has a kind of dilemma it faces where either it seems a bit trivial. It doesn't really explain anything. It's like, okay, I want to know what truth is. You told me that truth consists in correspondence to reality. Well, you've just used a lot of other fancy words, which sounds kind of like describing what I...

What's reality, what correspondence? Yeah. And so if you just leave it at that or something not much more sophisticated than that, then people worry that, well, it's not really informative. You haven't told me anything about truth at all. on the flip side, and this is where he feels sorry for the crosswinds, they get that complaint, but then whenever they fit in the details, philosophers start to worry that it's kind of crazy metaphysics.

So it's both trivial and wrong. Yeah. It somehow manages to like tell us nothing and also tell us things which is certainly false, which is, you know, something which I thought only my students could achieve. I've been accused of that many times. And so there the worries, you know, if you really start, taking seriously the idea that, okay, it's not just that there are cats and mats and sometimes they sit on each other, but also in the world there is this ordered complex, which isn't quite

any of those things individually, but which is the unity of them out there in the world. And there is this relationship you can form between your utterance and that thing, apparently instantaneously, reaching out to this ordered complex and obtaining and fading to obtain. And people just, like, what on earth are you talking about? Like, it becomes people's worry. There's no way of spelling that thing out, which won't end up invoking mysterious entities. And so for many people, that was, while some people do still endorse that. I mean, philosophers aren't that in averse to wacky med physics.

But that is off-pointing to some people. And so it has sufficed to put many people off the correspondence theory of truth. Okay. What are we left with? Well, so one thing I said, you can always argue about those forever. But the other... No, I'm not necessarily giving in. I'm not necessarily accepting,

but clearly if people are rejecting those three. So what I'd say is, and this is kind of what I initially was getting at when I said it was distinctive about philosophers, because this is, I'd say the fault I'm about to outline is the view most distinctive to contemporary analytic philosophy. I never hear it anywhere else. And I think it's a large part of why scientists

and philosophers end up differing so much on truth. So the last view, nowadays, which I think is more popular, I don't think it's the most popular, but it's more popular, is what's called deflation. According to deflationism, it's not a great sales pitch. It's really, really not. And I'm, you know, as I explain it to you, it's going to sound really boring.

But you know what? It's your podcast. That's kind of your problem. So according to deflationism, to say something is true is almost just to repeat it. It's like truth is just a kind of a linguistic device which helps us streamline certain conversations, but does nothing more than that. So there's this sort of classic schema, which is X is true if and only if X. So snow is white is true just in case snow is white and if snow is white and as far as white is true. So it's sort of leaning into the objection to the correspondence theory

that it's just trivial, so I saying. Yes. Indeed, right? It's trying to make a virtue of that. And it's saying that having that schema, the truth schema, available to us, it allows us to do some things which we might not otherwise be able to do. You have to clean it up a bit. Technically, if you just relied on that schema, you end up for a contradiction. Consider the sentence, this sentence is false. If I'm allowed to say this sentence is false is true, then I'm going to be in trouble because this sentence is false is true, if only if this sentence is false and then oh. So you have to clean it up a bit. But if you clean it up to avoid contradictions, then the thought is a theory like that technically it allows for some mathematical results. You can

speed up proofs. You can show that proofs can be made shorter if you're allowed to invoke that kind of thing. And linguistically, it allows to do what people call blind descriptions, where I can do things like, say, whatever Sean said last night was true. Well, I don't need to know what you said. I can kind of affirm it in a convenient way. So it's not the only linguistic way of doing that task, but it's one linguistic way of doing that task. So there's a bunch of kind of tasks truth does for us in terms of expressing agreement or doing some mathematical work. But there's nothing more to truth than that. There's no deep metaphysics here. There's no kind of interesting theory of what this amounts to. It's kind of, it's as if you're having a sort of, I was just about saying an

interesting theory of pronouns, but actually that's super debated nowadays. That's not a good example. Yeah, no, it's hard to come up with things about which there are no interesting theory. Right. So truth is like uniquely uninteresting. And so that's a view which is very popular in analytic philosophy, which has no uptake anywhere else. The relevance of this, I think, is very often when people outside of analytic philosophy, but I think especially in the sciences, hear talk of something being true, then truth has, I think, in ordinary language often has a kind of connotations which are sometimes moral, like, you know, being a truthful person is a good thing to be.

And sometimes a bit mystical, you know, the Christ says he is the truth. and so that seems to a sort of imbue of a degree of religious significance. And also, unrelated to this, in fact, this would be something which almost all of the theories I just named to project, but also is often taken to be related to certainty. So if I say something like is true, I'm kind of like really backing it up. I'm affirming it in a strong way. And all of those things are totally separate for philosophers. Philosophers, especially, I mean, not just, but especially if you have that deflationary view,

it doesn't have any moral significance. it's just like a means of summarizing things. You know, it doesn't have any connotations of certainty. It's unrelated to that. And it doesn't have any sort of spiritual religious significance. But if I say something like the universe is expanding, how do I categorize that within a deflationary theory? Do I say, I mean, is it possible to make sense of the statement?

That's true? Well, so upon a deflationary theory, you know, you have whatever you want to say about the university expanding. Presumably, as someone who's very educated in physical theory, like yourself, when you say that thing in the background, there's a kind of, there's a theory of what it means for university expanding. There's a sense of,

like, what kind of things we should expect to observe. And there's a whole bunch of statements connected with that. When you say those things, you know, that licenses me to now make predictions on those grounds, to ask, to assume that you're going to affirm the consequences

of that claim and stuff like that. But it being true doesn't add anything to saying, like saying the universe expanding or saying it's true that universe expanding doesn't add anything new to all of those like entailments which are already there. It makes it very, I don't want to say subjective, but it's from the point of view of people talking rather than from the God's eye view.

Like scientists would like to say that, you know, when they discover the universe is expanding rather than contracting, that would have been just as true if there were no people around talking. about it, right? Can I still say that in the deflationary? Well, that's a bit complicated. I mean, in some sense, yes, right? Because you can just say, for instance, you can say the exact sentence you just said, even if no one had discussed it, the universe would still have been expanding. And that has certain, actually, it's rather

complicated, but perhaps that makes certain predictions. I mean, maybe that's, for instance, affirming that there aren't any sort of causal dependencies between our words and the rate of expansion or anything like that. And those are all things we can test and we can, we could bet them out, we can agree them or disagree with them. But saying it's true sort of doesn't do the work of affirming that thing. To like to get that out, you need to sort of make additional claims and make your argument for those claims.

For instance, that there aren't these causal dependencies. So I think what a deflationist would like to say is anything you were inclined to say by means of using the predicate truth, you can still say under their theory, it just won't be the case that like the property of being true is ever doing any work for you. I think I'm finally getting it. And so that's why it's deflationary, right? They're not, so to speak, deflating what claims you can make about the world. What they're defating is what the role truth plays in those claims. So it's not a claim, it's not a theory of objective reality or, you know, it's not denying realism. It's just that this truth relationship is nothing so special.

Yes, that's exactly right. And so this view, it's sort of, the, The common objections to this view are, firstly, I made that sort of glib remark, clean it up to go out of the contradictions. Yeah. You can get that. Yeah, there are then sort of multiple things you're left with and you have to decide which of the ones you prefer and then it ends up being controversial. And the other thing people object, and I think this goes back to Michael Dermott, but nowadays a lot of people make subjection, is that it just misses out a key part of what truth does, which is that we want true beliefs. the point of inquiry is to like get true beliefs rather than false beliefs. And the deflationists, you know, while they have, of course, have things to say in response to

objection, they seem to be sort of missing out a key role of like truth in our conceptual mental lives if they don't have that. So Dummit rather describes it describes as if you explain to someone the rules of chess, the nature of the pieces and whatnot, and then decline to mention that the point of chess is to like check the opponent. Yeah. Like you really haven't explained what chess is unless you also give people that detail. And so the worry about deflationism is kind of its account of the role of truth in our lives, these communicative roles, these technical roles, is missing out a key thing and explaining that key thing, you'll have to invoke something a bit more substantial about what truth is to explain

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for considering theories like this. There's this bit that Tarski established, right, about he was thinking, and I guess he followed Girdle, right? Gertl showed that there were certain statements that I would say, you know, are true in a formal system, but you can't prove them. And Tarski basically proved that there were statements

that sounded like they should be true, but you couldn't prove them. I'm not sure exactly how to say it. Like, like, the statement, P is true if and only if P is true is not a theorem, something like that. So, so listeners, you can't see, but I'm also nodding. I do air quotes and nods when I am on podcast. So do I.

They're used to it. I'm going to get more complaints that I don't have video on my podcast now, but okay, yeah. I just love creating problems for you. That's really why I came on this. So broadly, yes, there is a relationship between Tarski's work and Godel's work and deflationism was kind of, one of the big props or supports for it was that people were able to sort of take Tarski's work and say, once you have Tarski's work, that's really all you need from a theory of truth. So what Tarski did more or less was find a way, the first, the first rigorous and

consistent way of retaining a lot of that, you know, FI is true if and only a FI formula without outrunning into those contradictions. The way he did it was by saying what you need as a kind of hierarchy of languages, where in the base level, there's no truth predicate at all. Then a level above that, you can speak about formulas in a level below that

as being true. And then you can have another level of truth predicate where you could also affirm those ones and so on and so on. You just live with the infinity of... You live within the hierarchy. Yes. So that's kind of one way

of trying to get a consistent theory out of this. There are other ways of doing this. There are also people who try and avoid the hierarchy. So there's now a lot, this is sort of thriving technical field of mathematical logic, which is looking at how to do this. Yeah, it's pretty firstly technical if you look at these papers, right? Yes, it quickly gets. Yeah, gibberish, really.

Chiverish. How very dare you, sir. How dare you? And there's also a thriving theory of trying to give sort of axiomatic theories where your axioms governing the truth predicate and see how they behave. So there's kind of, you know, there's a thriving technical field, which is related, but not as closely related as you might think. So those philosophical theories I just mentioned, like Tarski, for instance, in his work at various times suggested he was doing something kind of like a deflationary theory and also something kind of like a correspondence theory. And it's not really clear that he knew what the correspondence is.

Yeah, he certainly sort of didn't seem to know or care that much. which was actually this was, and I have just guaranteed you a bunch of angry emails from scholars. I would forward them to you. No worries. No, okay. Done. But so good. Now you convinced me that I had little idea of what truth is, but also, given the history,

100 years from now, no one's going to accept any of these theories. We haven't settled yet anyway, right? Yes, it does look like... equilibrated. Yes, it does. Well, as far as I can tell, philosophy only ever knocks things out of equilibrium. But, I mean, yes.

Right now, I'd say, if I was to make a prediction about where this is going to go, is there will eventually have to be some kind of unification of the advanced technical work with the more traditional theories of what truth amounts to. Right. There has already, there are some logicians who are now, sort of building on Tarski's initial suggestions, to be serious, he was a very good scholar,

obviously, and who are trying to claim that in some sense you can see this technical work as a vindication of deflationism. But like, all I need to do is lay down kind of sparse or fairly minimal rules. Yeah. And so you're starting to get that. There are other people going in other directions too, but I predict that as time goes by, we'll get more of a sense of how the technical, logical, mathematical, more scientific work relates to the sort of traditional, or high-level philosophical work, and that will give us a sort of better understanding of what truth is and what kind of role it plays for us.

Okay, good. I want to sort of go back to moving this to connect with science once again, but I think there's still some more philosophy that we need to get out of the way. You know, when we talk about true statements, or when we talk about statements, different kinds of truth, right?

There's things that you can imagine proving logically, things that you have to go out and experimentally verify, right? So, and I know that, Let me try to say this in my words and then you can fix it. There's there's the notions of the reasons why things are true. Some things are true in virtue of themselves or the definitions of their words.

And we call those analytic. There are things that are virtue of, you know, because that's how the world is, but it might have been otherwise. And we call those synthetic. There's also how we know that things are true. There are things we know just from reason alone, a prior. and things we know by going and doing experiments, A posteriority.

So these are two very similar sounding things, but a little bit different. Do they get it mostly right? That's, yeah, a reasonable summary of the sort of traditional distinctions you're drawing. Yeah. And so to me, and I guess to David Hume, it sounds like there's this very close connection

between a priori truths, ones that are true that you can sort of show just by logic and analytic truths, ones that are true just by virtue of their definitions, whereas there's a lot of. another relationship between posterior synthetic things that you go out and

how did I define synthetic, I forget, but synthetic sounds like a posteriori, analytics sounds like a priori. Do people basically buy that? I know that Imaniwal Kant tried to argue there was wriggle room there. Yes, so Kant famously

argued that there's a category of things which are sort of synthetic making substantial claims not just about, not just given in their definitions, but really making claims on the world, but which are nonetheless a priori, which are things you know by means of reason, reason alone. And as far as I can tell, and this is another one where to scholar. Eventually, I'm just going to have to say scholars steal of it. Like, you can't get me fired. I'm safe now.

And so, you know, subject to correction from scholars, can't, seems to have been kind of thinking about then relatively, relatively recent Newtonian science and thinking, like, he was very confident, like, finally we've achieved knowledge, like, we know something about nature, which is that it works on board the Newtonian lines. And the sort of the dominant epistemology, from many sources, primarily Locke on the European continent, was that this is kind of experiential knowledge. We know this because we've done the right kind of experiments, again, the right kind of experiences, and it sort of validates our claims, and we sort of just finally worked out to do that.

And Kant saw that that couldn't quite work, and the reason it couldn't quite work, he thought, and I think many people agree with him, is that some of the claims that seem to be necessary for Newtonian physics didn't seem to admit of those kind of tests. For instance, it seems to people at the time, although we would now disagree with this, But it seemed at the time that that space has something like Euclidean structure was something we presupposed when we did our experiments. We didn't test that rather when we were making other, like, testing claims about the distance between things or the speed at which things moved.

We were then presupposing it. And so can't worry that this seemed, therefore, like there's this worrying fact that a bunch of really foundational claims to this science, which he really wanted to validate as, like, not achieving long. of the world, were just not supported by the means that we had to support things. And so Kant built a sort of a philosophical apparatus to explain how there could be some claims actually, which were substantial, for instance, that space is Euclidean structure, while at the same time not requiring empirical validation, we could know that just by

reflection. And so that was for Kant, it was called the synthetic a priori. Okay. And that sounds wrong, especially because it's not even exactly true that space has in Euclidean structure, right? So that might have been a little premature on Emmanuel's part. Yes. Now, right, so it's a little bit complicated what the relationship is between what Kant said and what eventually became refuted.

I mean, it did seem in the end. He is not a famously clear writer. Not quite, no. And in particular, the issue is, it's not like what happened was we stopped having apparently a priori roles for some kinds of geometric structure we may not use the particular one

which can't thought we had to use but still there's something playing a similar some people might argue there's something playing a somewhat similar role I had to be frank have no real opinion about this and those people are wrong just so you know yeah so But some people claim that at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, you could maintain Kant's claim he was just too specific in saying this particular structure of space has to have.

But he wasn't wrong that space does to have, that we need to, our priori, attribute to space some kind of structure in order to do our reasoning. But this is where we're getting back into truth, right? I mean, I'm open to the idea that there are preconditions for us making sense of the world. but that's different than saying those preconditions are true, right? You can then say, and I have made some sense of the world, therefore empirically I have verified that this particular presupposition works.

Well, I guess, you know, this does actually, this might be a point where which of those theories of truth we endorse makes a difference to how you want to understand what's going on, right? So more or less, you know, for the deflationist to say that, you know, it's true that space has such a structure is more or less just to repeat the space is such a structure. So once you've told me your theory, you're not adding anything to it by telling me it's true.

And to that extent, kind of there's not really, he would just disagree, I mean, I say he is in, I'm the deficientist, I would just disagree with the claim that, like, to say that space has a structure is different from saying it's true that space is a structure. On the other side to a correspondence theorist, Maybe there might be more involved, because maybe when you say that it's space as this structure, there's something extra involved in saying, and that corresponds to some external thing, maybe some claims are like different and they don't need to have that correspondence. This would be a version of what people call true pluralism, where they have that there's kind of more to the correspondence relation because different claims correspond to the world in different kinds of ways.

And so I need to tell you not just that space has a structure, but what kind of correspondence relationship? you need to be looking for in order to bear this kind of claim out. And that would make it such a, there is like a little bit of extra work to be done, at least in explaining exactly what you mean when you say space as this structure. And so this might be a point where like which of those theories of truth seems tempting to you at least makes a difference to what kind of things you think you need to do to fully explain what you mean when you make things about structure of space. That's fair.

But it does sound like at least provisionally I'm okay in making my, naive statements about, you know, there are mathematical and logical truths and there are scientific truths and they're different. So, no, I just didn't get to that yet. We have all the time. Don't worry. Alas, in the 20th century, this is kind of associated with quine, eventually this division between analytic and synthetic truths, truth which are true in virtue of their meaning versus truths,

which are true and virtue of something about how the world is independent of language, came under quite stern criticism within philosophy. And more or less the criticism was that, like, so to speak, it's a little bit arbitrary how you categorize things on one side of this versus the other. Okay. So the thought being that, you know, I'm not quite sure what the thought is, because I've always thought the attacks were just silly. We can categorize whole regions of philosophical debate as silly.

That's okay. Oh, I'm on Twitter. I do that all the time. But, I mean, I guess it's just the thought being that this notion of sort of an analytic truth, something true in virtue of meaning, when you try and cash it out, it's kind of similar to the same place about a correspondence theory. When you try and cash it out, what you'll find is it depends on notions which are themselves quite mysterious and we don't have a theory of it.

that, you know, you have to sort of invoke notions of synonymy or necessary equivalents, which themselves aren't well theorized. And once you try and, like, really think about this or really make sense of it, eventually what you're left with is something more like, well, there are some claims which I'll do more to defend than others in terms of you really have to do a lot of work to make me give up on the claim that all bachelors are unmarried men. like that's something which really, really, really,

it requires a pretty drastic change in my worldview. But you could do it. Like you could, it's just, so to speak, I haven't yet found the circumstance where it would be convenient for me to give up that claim, but you could do it. Other claims are sort of like closer to being revisable in light of my experiences.

And so what a lot of thoughters came to think was this notion of analytic versus synthetic was a sort of bad way of making theoretical sense of this, the difference between how entrenched beliefs are for us. us and like really all there is is this entrenchment and that's a sort of much more that comes in degrees so quine is trying to give a spectrum rather than just a two options yeah more or less that thinks to be more or less central to our belief structure and uh but are you advocating this

or mentioning that there are people who advocate it because it does not sound very convincing to me I think that all bachelors are unmarried men I'm I'm mentioning it rather than advocating yeah okay um I tend to think that um you know it's one of those things where it relates lies on a crucial point in this argument is that there were these somewhat mysterious notions we just can't make sense of. Quine, the person who was influential, which is attack, was making it in the 50s just before there were a lot of developments where we developed tools where I think we can just make sense of those notions. And so I think it was a sort of sensible in light of the state of theoretical development at the time, but I don't think it really bears out. And so

it sort of entered philosophical law that this was refuted. But I think it was sort of that decision warrants reexamination in light of data developments. Yeah, I have this vague feeling from a completely unqualified perspective that if we fix some things up in our use of language and logic and things like that, there would be a clear distinction. And maybe it has to do with possible worlds. And if something is true in every possible world or something like that, that's different than being true in some possible worlds, but not others.

Well, that's like some of the technical machinery which philosophers use to analyze a bunch of concepts will be in terms. of what's called modal logic, which is the logic of possibility and necessity. But how philosophers tend to think about that is there will have possible worlds, which, depending how you describe them, are either kind of like concrete, real existent worlds, just not ones we can physically reach. Yeah, that's one scientists don't care about.

Yeah, right. There are philosophers who buy that, yeah. Or sort of more, more sensibly, just like sort of complete descriptions of the world, which you could, like, which may or may not be actual, which may not endorse, which may not be true. but you can sort of give their descriptions of the world. Sorry, I really need to, before I forget, mentioned that Max Tagmark, previous podcast guest,

really does believe in all the other possible worlds also. He's a mathy version of David Lewis. Well, you know, one of the genuine, and I mean it's like genuine joys of being in academia is whenever I think something's just too wacky and no one who believe it, there's only very respectable people 10 times smarter than me who like have passionate defenses of that.

And, you know, I'm just, in awe of what the human mind can do. But yes, right? So you could view possibilities as just sort of of erstats things, descriptions of how the world might be. And then the sort of the apparatus of modal logic is a way of reasoning about like, well, given it, you know, if we think of ourselves in this space of possibilities,

what follows, what's necessary from here, what's only possible from here, et cetera. And some of that machinery can be brought in to try and make sense of the notions required to make sense of an analysis. You know, I don't want to give anyone the impression that this is settled. Like,

I happen to think you can do it, but, you know, there are reasonable intelligent people who don't think you can do it. But, like, those are exactly the developments I have in mind. And that just kind of,

it's a sort of nice illustration, really, of, if you follow this story, right, there's, um, the beginning of kind of,

uh, already in the early modern Europe appear, sort of a kind of interaction between, like, philosophy and scientific perfection, where you have philosophers and scientists trying to think about, like, how can we be confident and what seems like a very well-grounded theory. From that, we get new sort of technical, mathematical machinery designed to try and help us make sense with those notions, which philosophers

then used to sort of problematize some of the initial notions that our theory then was built on, but then that itself spurs new technical developments, and we are, like, getting better at being able to validate this. And it's a really nice sort of virtuous circle of critique and response to critique, which is to very important us new tools, and allow us to make sense of things which were hard to make sense of before. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay,

the Audible and I Heart Audio Book Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent?

And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to EIRSA, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Good. And I think this leads us right into the sort of scientific practice that I was hoping to get to, right? I mean, the system you just described is what science would ideally like to be like with a little bit of data thrown in, right? We come up with theories, we compare them with data. We still unfortunately teach kids, at least in the U.S., that there's something called the scientific method that Francis Bacon laid down and all scientists follow. And, you know, a little baby hypothesis grows up to be a theory and then finally graduates to being a law. None of that is actually true in scientific practice. But there is some sort of, you know, the give and take between hypothesizing and collecting data is certainly there. I mean, well, what does your read on a

better way that we might teach high school students how science is done than the Beconian scientific method. Yeah, right. I think this is a really fascinating topic and it's actually something I think about professionally, where exactly as you say, I mean, it's the same in the UK. People are taught this kind of stylized vision of scientific method. It really just doesn't correspond to how I think science and practice works and even how it should work. It wouldn't be good if we try to make science world like that. And the irony is very thick, right? A theory that has no relationship to experiment. Okay.

So I think, you know, right now I think the best bet I could have for how to reform scientific practice, scientific education, would be to base it actually on some ideas from a different philosophy. This would be Dewey from the American pragmatist version, where Dewey was this kind of famous. educational theorists, it's actually one of the places where he had most influence. And he had sort of learned by doing was the philosophy. And he really actually kind of modeled his whole theory of education on what he took to be kind of a more realistic model of scientific inquiries is done. And the idea would be you sort of give people problems, materials with which to

solve those problems, and space to reflect on what they're doing as they're doing it. And so, you know, you give people some materials and tell me, how can I make this chemical do that, to turn this colour, whatever it might be. They then get some space to play around around the materials they got, and then after they've got to tell you, what did you do and why? In the process of doing this, you're going to learn a bunch of

facts about scientific inquiry, because in some sense, science is that kind of activity but scaled up and in much more communication over people. And so, for instance, a classic example, Well, here's something which doesn't tend to feature much in stylized descriptions of scientific method, but it's actually super important and is the subject of much debate now around the replication crisis. At some point, when you're testing a claim, you have to stop testing it, stop seeking new evidence and decide I have enough evidence to write this up.

How do you do that? What are the rules which decide how you do that? That doesn't feature at all in the normal picture of the sort of the stylized picture of scientific method. Sometimes people talk as if at one point nature rings a bell. It's binary. You got it or you don't. Right, exactly. If you set children that task, they would have to discover that problem because you have to

at some point work out like now we've done enough to be confident this is the way it's done. And in so doing, they could reflect on like what kind of features of the scenario made me think that now was the time to do that when what would have made me think we need to do more or if we need to do less. And so by engaging in scientific research, they'll learn. kind of key features of how the practice is done, how these decisions can be made in a way which like don't fit the status method, but aren't arbitrary either, are responding to features of your investigatory situation. And we do so I know which is kind of fun, right?

Like, it's way more fun, learning all the elements or whatever. This is the kind of thing which I'd be really interested in there being much more experimentation around. But I think the part that is valuable or important to me that maybe you didn't mention there is this idea that we are comparing different possible worlds. We have hypotheses. Going back to the previous discussion, like a big part of the scientific method is saying,

I don't know which world we live in. Like there's different theories that might describe the world. They're all theories that describe some world, which one do we live in? So we're going to collect more data. And maybe it's not binary, but at least as good basians, we will increase our credence in one of these hypotheses and decrease in the other. Well, I mean, actually, I would hope that

a good process of due in education would help people do that. Because one of the things one wishes to learn, right, is what kind of experiments are worth doing? And eventually you need to learn that, like, some experiments don't differentiate between hypotheses, because in either of these possible worlds, you would expect the same given this test. And so in learning about, like,

well, how do I do an experiment which decides, or at least gives me evidence relevant to deciding between these hypotheses, you're having to think about it, about a process of doing that, like, you sort of have to hold in your mind, well, what would be true of this hypothesis and what would be true of that hypothesis? Listeners should be aware of now doing very helpful hand gestures for each hypothesis. So what would be true in each of those hypotheses, sort of do the sort of work out what the consequences be and how they'd apply for the materials

you have available? And, you know, that is a sort of baby version of something like hypothetical deductive reasoning, which is, if not the B or and End all the science is at least part of it. And that is also a type of reasoning which necessitates you thinking about. about different possibilities. And so again, like, allowing people, like throwing people into scenarios, so long as they have the time to communicate and reflect of each other,

really, I think actually teaches in practice a lot of these things, as long as you sort of guide them to, like, point out features of, like, well, here's what you've just done, right? And so, yes, like, I certainly agree that, like, a core feature of any scientific reasoning is, like, in some sense,

it's counterintuitive, but it's actually important to be reasoned about what's not actual, like science requires that your reason about possibilities which aren't true, which aren't accurate descriptions of the world. And that's kind of interesting in many ways. I also come back to think something you first said, like, there's a core reason why you say like, I have my model. Isn't that true? Like almost all models, in fact, involve false claims. Right. Right. So that can't quite be right. And so there are all these times in science where kind of another thing people would

learn really by doing this is in some sense, science doesn't just consist in like saying true things. there's a bunch of non-true stuff you have to deal with, but that doesn't invalidate it either. No, not at all. It validates it. Exactly, right? That's how, in fact, we gain reliable knowledge. And so one of the advantages which philosophers,

like Heather Douglas or Philip Ketcher, often claim for citizens or young people being able to do this kind of more engaged duty in education is that a lot of attempts to undermine public trust in science involve pointing to these features which people aren't aware are a typical feature of scientific practice but which is just part of how we do things

and pointing out like, you know, well, did you know that these models involve a bunch of false assumptions that how can you really trust what the climate scientists are saying. If you knew how science works, like, yeah, the models involve false assumptions. It's not, it's how we do modeling, right?

And so, you know, by giving people practice and seeing for themselves, like, oh, you know, like I made some simplifying assumptions, that wasn't a problem. That's what allowed me to get the answer. it would immunize them in some sense to certain kinds of spurious skeptical attacks. Right, right. But the idea, I really just, maybe I was repeating myself,

but the idea that we could be wrong, you know, that we are not simply purely reasoning our way to how the world works is very crucial to me in science. I remember hearing a talk by an unnamed evolutionary psychologist who was founding an institute or something like that. And, you know, they made it very clear, the purpose of our institute is to show that blah blah blah is true. And I wanted to raise my hand.

It's like, that's not really very sciencey there. How about to find out whether or not it is true? There's a slightly, there's a slight but important distinction. Well, I mean, I'm an employee of the London School of Economics. This department was founded by Carl Popper. So, you know, I'm legally obliged to agree with what you just said. But there are some philosophers, heretics, who, might think is at least a bit more complicated. Now, I mean, you know, jokes aside, I honestly

am actually pretty sympathetic to a broadly falsificationist view of what we're up to in science. It doesn't always sit so easily of the basinsism. I'll set that aside for now. Well, sorry, I'm much more basing. I'm not very falsifiable. I think I got in trouble by writing a paper saying the title was beyond falsifiability, right? And to point out that, look, this was, Popper put his finger on some things that were really, really important. but it's not the final solution to the demarcation problem. And I think that Bayesianism helps get us closer to a more nuanced view. Right.

Okay. I mean, in that case, I think we're probably sympathetic. Like, I think there's something to be said for the falsificationist picture, but I agree it's not the be able to end. Either way, you have this idea that you could be wrong. Yes. But what I was going to mention is, you know, there's a vision of scientific practice,

which is, in some sense, dependent from Kuhn, although I'm quite sure Kuhna would probably not want to be associated with some of the people you perhaps have in mind. Wherein, like, the way science works, right, is by setting up paradigms. Those paradigms involve kind of not unquestionable, but at least relatively unquestioned assumptions. And it's sort of legitimate to go forward, like, the way I do science is, like, in light of those assumptions, I'm now going to draw out the implications and test for other things you can make sense of in light of those. but not necessarily Tesla's. I mean, we're in the Lackatoch building right now,

and so Lackatoch is famous for saying, you know, scientific theories have protected or a hardcore in the center, and that, you know, eventually that can be penetrated, but it's a reasonable procedure to begin with assumptions which you are less willing to give up. In some sense, that actually relates to the client input you're saying earlier, where many people do think a sort of reasonable vision of how rational inquiry goes is you have some beliefs

which are much more central, which are much less willing to give up, and it's okay to do things by first trying to swap out the less core beliefs in seeing how you can do things. And of course, you can imagine a sort of quasi-Basian justification. Well, this is why, you know, one of the issues with falsifiability as a solution to demarcation problem is there's plenty of examples where I have a theory. It's very well established. An experimental result comes along that is in contradiction to that theory. And everyone in the right mind says, oh, don't worry, that result will go away. I still think light grows fast, you know, some of the trees are built after the light, yeah, you know.

It would be an example. Yes, that's right. Yeah, I mean, scientists, you know, do, they have their preconditions. They have their what we call cherish principles. This is what we like to call them, right? And you don't want to give them up, but eventually you end up doing it. If you get enough evidence against it. And to me, that kind of fits in with the correspondence theory a little bit. Sorry, with the coherence theory, I wanted to say a little bit. Can you seem about how? to be coherent is to be coherent amongst a bunch of beliefs, and some of them will be more switchoutable than others, right? Right. Some of them will be more foundational, some of your beliefs. So the thing about both the pragmatist and the coherence theories of truth

is they clearly pick up on aspects of our mental lives, which are important. Like, we do in fact have goals, and beliefs do help us fulfill those goals, and there's some reason to prefer a belief if it helps you fill you. goal. Our beliefs can be more or less coherent, at least in the sense of being self-consistent and not being self-consistent. And you may prefer to be self-consistent. I think there are true contradictions. So I don't know if I, but like you one may prefer to be self-consistent. And in that case, you know, and so for that reason, the coherence theory must be picking up on something because it's more or less just saying that particular virtue of your belief system

being coherent, like that's the one which makes a difference for truth. So what non-coherence theorists are going to say is, like, we have a way of recovering within our theory the importance of coherence. So, for instance, the correspondence theorist will tend to have a metaphysical theory about what the facts are and just say, like, it turns out that the facts can't be such that they're inconsistent of each other. And so if your theory is incoherent in the sense of being inconsistent, we know it's false because we know that the facts aren't incoherent. That's fair. Everyone wants to be coherent, just whether or not that's the same one on. Yeah. And so, right.

And so what you'll find is that theories of truth, and this is, I think, one of the reasons why theory of truth tends to, like, something which kind of attracts maybe people to deflationism, is it tends to be the case that you can, like, recover whatever nice things you want to say about one theory of truth within the other theory of truth. And, you know, without just being a justification for deflationism, it can sort of prompt the thought that, like, truth. it doesn't really matter what you end up saying about truth.

You always find a way of saying the nice things you want to be able to say in anyway. And so, like, truth isn't really doing much there. You just have some additional principles you're able to bring in, which get you the goods you want. Is it sort of a dirty little secret of philosophy that so much of it is driven by things you want to be the case? And then finding ways to make the things you want to be the case, be the case. Or maybe that's a virtue. I don't even know, but certainly when I think of moral philosophy that often is being true. maybe even epistemology.

I'm not sure it's either dirty, little, or a secret. But other than that, but other than that, I think it's dirty. It's certainly the case that, so is it a secret? I mean, people say mean things to be on the internet all the time, which suggests that they think this is a philosophy. So plenty of people apparently know us about philosophy. Is it little or dirty, and it's a bit more complicated? because yes, it's true that philosophy as a field

precisely because it's kind of relatively unconstrained by direct empirical data or relatively unconstrained by sort of rigors of proof mean that, you know, if you come in, it was like, I'm really committed to keeping this principle, you can find a way of constructing a worldview which retains that principle, but which has other desirable features.

And some philosophers more or less just think, and that's the game. The game is you come in of the things you're really committed to. Your my commitments. And you have to then. The world will no doubt still present you with puzzles, right? So, you know, I just mentioned I believe there are true contradictions. Suppose you don't. Like, what do you want to say about sentences like this very sentence is false?

Do you, so you do believe there are true contradiction? Yes. That was okay. I do. Right. So I more or less think what we want to say about this very sentence is false is that it's both true and false. and so like if you don't and you know I don't not going to defend it right now but if you don't think that like you have to do you have to tell me something because it turns out there are sort of pretty minimal and apparently plausible things you might say about truth which will get you that sentence is both true and false and so you know it's not the alternative must be that it's meaningless or unsayable out of bounds somehow so you can have out of you can out of bounds somehow so you can have it sort of like not well formed because you're applying a truth predicate to itself in a wrong kind of way, or you can have it such that it gets no value,

like it just fails to be evaluated. But in any case, like, building a worldview, which gets you either out of bounds or meaningless or not well-formed or whatever, that requires work. And so the thought is, it's not a trivial game, even if you do come in with your strong commitments, like to build a theory which does that. And in the process of building those theories, you often are forced to. to do things which are themselves intellectually quite valuable. And so some people will say that this activity of kind of elaborating upon and defending

one's core commitments is actually, in the end, intellectually very valuable, because if you take that game seriously, you'll find it's really difficult and what you have to do to play it well is just a real driver of innovation. Okay. Some of my best friends are philosophers. I don't want to... No. No.

Yeah, like I just, you know, I'm perfectly happy of being self-loathing. There you go. That works. Yeah. But the, speaking of self-loathing, let's not let scientists off the hook. You already mentioned the replication crisis. I want to get a little bit down and dirty into the difference between the pristine way in which scientists, naively think of their own pastime and the ugly truth of how it gets done. And because the ugly truth always becomes a little bit prettier when you really like,

face up to it, right? I thought we were being self-loathing. I'm not self-loathing at all. Like, someone's got to love me. Why not me? It's certainly not the YouTube commenters. I know that. I love you, Sean.

All right. So the replication crisis. I think most people have heard of it, but why don't we say what it is? Sure. So in social psychology, especially, but not just in social psychology, it's in relatively recent years, been found. that a bunch of results which people took to be secure, which were featuring in textbooks, and which public interventions were being based on, in fact, don't replicate,

which is to say when we try and retest the experiments which initially validated that those phenomena were real, we find either that we can't get the effect at all, or it's much reduced in its strength and four degree of influence that we initially thought. So the sense that's just replication failure. What made it a crisis were, in a sort of ill-defined sense, this happened. so many times to so many results that people felt that there was a sort of systematic problem here. I, you know, I raised that explicitly because I'm often a little bit underwhelmed by the

arguments for that second part. Like, what is the rate at which we should expect true ideas in science? Like, I think people are at least blasé about assuming it's crisis. But nonetheless, in the course of the fact that this prompted a kind of panic reaction is too strong, but this prompted quite a strong reaction from the scientific community in the social sciences and statistics especially, and nowadays as well actually philosophy of science, led to a bunch of problems being uncovered with the way science was done, or at least things which people were pretty clear could be improved upon, and so now there's a sort of

quite broad reform movement sweeping through to social sciences, which is trying to address the problems thus identified. And presumably part of it, part of the worry that it was really serious was that, like you say, it's not just random, but reflects systematic biases in the field. When you get an exciting result, that's where you publish it, right? When you just get a null result, no one is going to care. Yes, I mean, one of the fascinating things about the replication crisis is that a lot of the things we're sort of now responding to it in light of, but all of these problems, people were aware of them in some sense for a long time.

And so there's the kind of, the classic one is the file draw problem, right? where if I get a positive result suggesting there is an effect, that's exciting, especially if it's a new thing I can go and publish that in a high-prestaged journal, which lots of people will read and become aware of. If I fail to find anything, and even if I just replicate that, that's not exciting. It's much hard to get published, and often that information will only be available to the particular scientist who did the third experiment. And so, like, there's a massive bias in what kind of information is transmitted to community at large.

Now, that has certainly been a thing which people have discussed a lot in light of the replication crisis but there's no way that people only became aware of this possibility inside of publishing in 2015, right? Like, you know, that's a thing people have worried about for a long time.

And so I think one of the things the replication crisis has really done, it's like the replication failure is dramatic and drew people's attention to problems but what we're actually now doing in light of that is really cleaning up house in ways we probably should have done a long time ago. And so right now, of course, there's a lot of,

a lot of sort of anger in some ways of people sort of arguing each other about what should be done. Some people are feeling defensive, because they feel like their life's work is under attack. But in the long run, I'm actually very optimistic that what this is is like only doing what we should have been doing for a long time and hopefully it will lead to a much stronger,

much improved scientific process in the future. But once you do admit that even scientists have biases, then maybe they have. have other biases as well, right? I mean, this becomes a problem of much wider scope, and we can start questioning, I mean, people take it seriously, right? It sounds like you're questioning their integrity, although you're really not. You're just, you know, doing epistemology in some sense. Yeah, I mean, so there are all sorts of other biases besides just sort of the bias towards publishable or fancier more exciting results, and other ones which, of course,

get much attention, a sort of like demographic, like gender biases, for instance, and who can get published and where. We don't have those in physics, but I've heard that you have those in other fields. Yeah, like the gender utopia, which is physics. But, you know, certainly that's like one source of, you know, bias, which is, you know, really negatively effect that all people's lives have been serious. And so other kind of biases you might see are, for instance, towards not just things which the scientific community will find exciting,

like in terms of publishing fancy journals, but also, and this is kind of very worrying in light of what we do with science, there might be biases towards like the kind of thing which the media will pick up on or which policy people will pick up on. And so you get some cases of what look like outright fraud, and the outright fraud being driven basically

by the sense that there's a way to sort of clout with the media and with policy makers. And so like, yeah, all of these things do inference how scientists behave. They can have the social biases which are very common. they need to get published in order to advance their career. In fact, most of my research is about the effects those career incentives have on working scientists. And also, you know, like anyone else, they want to change the world in ways they view to be desirable.

And so that desire to influence policymakers or people who are going to make a difference to world, that can really affect their behavior. And, like, yes, like some of these seem like they admit of relatively simple force, relatively simple fixes. It's like, it's not exactly clear how to check the Fardorah problem, but they're both technical, statistical, actually, Bayesian methods, which- You do statistics better. They do statistics better, and you can also reform how journals publish or, like, what kind of things get given uptake, in such a way that we can mitigate, at least, the effects of the Fadrower problem.

But, like, do you have a solution for gender bias? Yeah. And do you have a solution for the subtle influences of wanting to be influential in the world? Like, you know, like, these things, so there are a bunch of things here, which are going to be much harder to really fully correct for, but which is part of the phenomena we know is the replication crisis. I think that what we have to do, so to speak,

is do our best to fix these things, but also in some sense it's just quite right for people to decrease their trust in this institution, insofar as their trust was previously based on a image of scientific researchers or science as a social process, which made it immune from those things. It's not immune to those things, and so a well-caliated agent trusts it to the degree that they've taken into account the real presence of these biases. Sadly, there are no well-calibrated agents, right? People either think it's infallible or completely untrustworthy, right? That's the problem. I mean, I'm not so pessimistic about that. But the reason I'm not so pessimistic is just because I think I encounter people quite frequently who are, of course not perfectly well calibrated, but much better calibrated than just

like unthinking deference versus toll, skepticism, the climate scientists are all in on it too style reasoning. And those are people who are familiar with it as a practice. I find that both philosophers

of science and also working scientists don't tend to have this kind of attitude except about their own work, right? And then that's just all you self-loathing or wildly overconfident

and those the only two options. But so then relating then to that previous, book on education, this is kind of what meant by immunizing people. I do think that, like, it seems that familiarity of the practice being engaged with science tends to actually give you a sense of, like, there really is something unusually reliable about this as a way of reasoning.

It's not just like any other way of reasoning about the world. It really is something special about it. But at the same time, it's not magic either. No. And, you know, it's only as good as, you know, lots of smart people repeatedly failing, but maybe failing a bit better could be. And that's about right. And so I hope that actually by,

sort of in some sense, democratizing science, by bringing more people in, by giving more people an experience of the practice of scientific research, much more calibrated to how it's actually done, rather than the sort of quasi-authoritarian vision, where it's just like there are some laws we've discovered and you want to believe these laws,

and the test consists of you repeating these laws to me. Rather than that way of, you give more proof of sense of, like, what this enterprise actually involves, that would actually really help. That would create those calibrated systems. So I think there are some people who have it now, and I kind of, I'm optimistic that there's a reasonably exportable method of creating more people who are calibrated in that kind of way. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support.

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Medical advice, eligibility required, C-Sight for details. It is, I would like to be optimistic also. But before I become optimistic, I do want to emphasize there's even more ways to be pessimistic. I think that when it comes to biases, like gender biases and racial biases that exist in science just as much as in society, sure. But then there's these softer biases, which probably also exist in society, where, you know, people who have idiosyncratic ideas will find that they just don't get paid attention to or they don't get jobs or they don't get grants. And it's not like anyone is banning them, but they're just choosing not to pay attention to them. And their ideas can whither on the vine or not get paid attention to for that reason. And of course, they will say it's because the system is biased against them.

maybe they're right or maybe their idea this isn't very good, right? And do we have any objective way of telling these things? No, I mean, I think that one of the things a well-categorated agent with regard to their trust in science just has to kind of learn is that, you know, and this is a thing which I do think which Popper, even if he wouldn't have put it exactly as I would put it, was he really had like the fundamentals of this idea

and to be quite a way. Science is, so to speak, a quasi-evolutionary process. there are lots of people throwing up lots of ideas, lots of the time. Most of those ideas don't survive. A lot of them for good reason. Occasionally, we'll miss one, which we should have paid more attention to. But certainly we haven't got anything better than just having lots of people try their best and throw themselves at a problem, come up with the ideas they come up with.

And as long as there are incentives to pay some attention to new ideas, which they usually are in science. We can talk about that in a second. like we can reasonably hope that eventually we will catch good valuable new ideas and we will actually have something we will eventually be able to build on them. And I think those incentives to take new ideas seriously do exist in science because if a new idea really does work out, then I can use it to bolster my ideas. The thought being that if I have access to some new experimental technique, which actually works, some new mathematical theory, which allows me to make inferences I couldn't otherwise have

made or whatever, then suddenly I can do a thing to bolster support for my ideas. I at least have some incentive to be trying to searching the field and looking out for things which other people have missed, which might give me an advantage in the kind of the race to get my ideas taken seriously. And so the incentive structure of science does provide at least some like push towards taking those ideas seriously. I, you know, I'm not polyanarish. Like actually a lot of my work is about how I think we could try and do this better. But these are features of the present system and it just needs to be built upon and strengthened rather than be not start. starting from nothing here.

You did propose the radical sounding idea of getting rid of pre-publication peer review. Is that right? Yes, I did. It's funny. I am someone who spends too much of my life on Twitter, and I'm always getting into, you know, political arguments about the hot button issues of the day on Twitter.com. And yet nothing I have said has drawn me as much controversy as the claim we should get rid of pre-publication peer review.

So this was in co-offered work with my friend and colleague, I'm co-heisen. And the pair of us have this paper, which was kind of, in some ways, a summary of the last few years of both of our research. We realized that we were both coming to a similar conclusion as we put our Paul Heys together and co-authored this piece. And what we argue in there is that most of the things which pre-publication peer review is meant to do for us, there's either no evidence that it does it or some evidence that it fails to do it. And so... So just be clear, the words pre-publication are important here. So tell the audience how you're defining the thing that you want to get rid of.

So, you know, right now, how do many fields, not in all fields, actually. It's already changing in some fields, but in many fields, the way new ideas get taken up is sort of not privately, but in relatively small groups, a scientist or group of scientists produce a manuscript. They maybe share it with some of their friends, get feedback, and then eventually they will submit it to a journal. The journal will have an editorial board, and some editors, that is to say, and reviewers.

And the editor will send to reviewers, the reviews will decide whether or not they think it's a good paper. In light of the review's advice, the editor will publish or not publish. So up to that point, the people who sort of decided whether or not this idea is worthy of more attention from the scientific community are whatever the scientist's immediate peer group, the editor, and whatever the reviewers think. This then decides what claims are put out there to try and garner more attention or not. Our point about this process is very labor-intensive. It takes a lot of time from a lot of scientists. It's actually also, this is not really relevant

to our point, but it's a fairly extortionate business. Like the scientific publication houses are like the most profit-making entities. I know. It's a bit crazy. Yeah, because they just get a bunch of free labor from PhDs. Yeah, so a small group of people have put in a lot of effort to decide whether or not an idea is worth sharing. It then gets out there and gets whatever uptake it takes once it's in a journal. More or less, our question is,

all of that labor in deciding whether or not something is worth putting out to the broader community and having them assess it, what does that achieve? Is there anything, is there any first, evidence that that's doing something good for us, rather than just directly having, putting it out on some kind of like archive, which is actually increasing the case in physics and maths, that this is how things done. Actually, economics is kind of moving this way. Some fields are going this way, but just putting up on some kind of publicly accessible space and having, going directly to the stage where the community are able to assess it as a whole. Philosophers often have this idea

of a working paper where, like, there's a draft that for years, right, will be on their website and people comment on it before they submit it to a journal. Yeah, like in some sense, kind of, we want to make all of science work, operate more like work. More like philosophy, yeah. I often think that it would be better if it was more like how I think it was.

How I'm familiar and comfortable with it. Yeah. So, yes, what people claim in defense of peer review are a number of things, and sort of the paper really consists in us going through the various rationales that have been offered for it,

and trying to assess the importance. empirical evidence for it. Now, the paper is called, is pre-publication peer review a good idea, question mark? And that's partly to reflect the fact that right now we think the evidence isn't always as strong as we'd like it to be before making a clear assessment. So we are trying, we are clear that to some extent what we want to do here is just prompt people, like, the tradition has given us this expensive, very large bureaucracy we all of our time on. Like, don't just inherit it and pass it on. Like, do we want to have it? And what's it doing for us?

And you're not even necessarily questioning peer review, but the idea of not letting anyone read the paper until it has been peer review. Exactly, right? Like, we're questioning pre-publication peer review. You know, in some sense, you mean, we say this in the paper, there's a sense which we want more peer review, right? We want more people to be able to access and evaluate the paper and for the opinions of the scientific community about the merits of a paper to affect the judgments of more scientists, right? So that's in some way what we want. So we kind of link it to the open science movement is a sense we should want like open open peer review. In fact, open peer review though is a word for a different kind of thing but related to what a person. Whereas, you know,

the claims that, for instance, peer review helps us sort the good ideas from the bad ideas or sort false claims from true claims. There's really not much evidence that peer review is achieving that. And in some sense, it's because, you know, science is hard, right? And two people, I don't think it's that hard. Yeah. Okay. It's actually very hard. Yeah.

Just kidding. Two or three people decide. No, Sean Carroll is actually winking at me now. He tells me he's not kidding. He means it. He just thinks you're incompetent. But like... Irony.

Irony is everywhere here. You never know whether I'm serious or not. Like, in some sense, the judgments of a couple of people who just happened to have got it first, they're not necessarily going to be great. deciding whether or not this really is an idea which was worth further. We all have examples of bad papers that have gotten through peer review and good papers that have been stopped. Yeah, and there's a kind of, you know, you don't want to lean too much on this kind of fashy but one-time experiment. But illustrative, there's this kind of famous experiment where people like anonymized and sort of lightly changed non-essential identifying details of classic papers that are incredibly high-sighted.

we submit them for review, and I think it was like half were rejected on grounds of serious technical flaws. Well, in fact, there's another study. I think that most highly cited papers were rejected in one part in the real world, because the super highly cited papers are going to be a bit more daring, right? A bit more, it's way easier as a practicing physicist, I can promise. And I should say, parenthetically, I love refereeing and peer review. Like, I appreciate the effort that goes in making papers better.

both from referees and from editors. I do not, and I want future editors assessing my work to know, I don't value you. I don't value what you do. Having said that, if you write a paper that is boring but true, it's way easier to get it published than if you write a paper that is interesting and daring. Right, no, and that is one of the things we address in the paper. There's a real reason to think that there's a kind of small C conservative bias in peer review. precisely because, and this is, so to speak, inevitable.

Like, whenever we assess a new idea, we're assessing it in light of what we already know, what we already believe. That's inevitable. But the problem is, is you're preventing other people from being able to engage in that practice unless a relatively small number of people decide it meets their standards. And, you know, I think that on net, this is just a disingenuous procedure. As I said, like, we are clear, and I wish to be clear on this podcast that, like, when I'm not being cheeky, my real opinion is, like, there are plenty of times in the paper where we say, like,

what needs to happen here is rather than assessing things according to people's intuition about what this is doing, there needs to be, like, proper sociological work on what's actually happening. And very often, people don't do that. Like, they just have a sense that, you know, well, surely this is the sort of thing which peer review must do. It must be selecting for high quality work, right? Otherwise, why would we do it?

And, you know, no, look at the evidence. It's not clear it is. Yeah, look at the evidence. Like, it's just like the teaching of the scientific method. I mean, there is this idea that we can just think our way into the truth, but sometimes you have to look at whether it worked. Right, no, exactly. And peer review is something which I think is intuitive to many people that, you know, it surely can't hurt and yet. And yet. It does filter out a lot of truly bad stuff, right?

That is a true fact. It's the edge cases that are, that we could improve. Yeah, I mean, even that is kind of complicated, right? Because what's the importance of filtering out truly bad stuff? Because people put truly bad stuff on the internet. Yeah. Anyway. I've heard.

So I hear if you go to the wrong bit of the opinions, wrong bit of the internet, there are people with false opinions, just putting them up there. They allow that? Yeah, who knows, the government ought to do something. But in the meantime, please don't. In the meantime, you know, the only different, the reason it's kind of important, so just scare quotes to filter things out, is the sense that being put in in a journal kind of is in some sense a stamp of approval.

It's a validation of that opinion. In a world without journals, what does it matter that one more person puts up a wacky, not very well validated opinion on the internet? What we say, the one of the points where we acknowledge most problems for our work is, you know, we don't, we think if you really think about

the world about journals, this is that thinking through the hypothesis, the possibility kind of thing. If you really think about that world, precisely because there's no, apparent authority figures saying this is worth taking seriously. A lot of the things which peer review is meant to do, we don't lose anything by not having it.

That said, there is something valuable about having a means by which non-scientists who might be interested in science can know where to look for the decent ideas. Now, again, that peer review... Or different scientists in a different field? Yes, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. Or people who just not expert on top of matter. Now, of course, that peer review is a good way of doing that.

kind of depends on you thinking it's selecting for good ideas, which we previously argued against. But even if peer review isn't doing that, it's probably a good idea for something to be doing that. And so to speak, right now peer review is de facto how we're doing it. Maybe a good thing to invest time and mental effort into doing, be thinking about how to do that in a better way. Okay. So that's one example of the bomb throwing. Maybe to wrap things up, we should talk about standpoint epistemology. I was definitely one example of the bomb throwing.

What's the other? Oh, oh. You know, I think that, look, I think the case that has been made indubitably over the course of this podcast is gaining true knowledge of the world, whatever that means is hard, right? It is sticky and it's not quite as algorithmic as our high school educations might have led us to believe. And once you admit that, it opens up, you know, a whole bunch of things like who decides and how do we decide where the truth is. is once we found it. I mean, is this kind of consideration? Maybe you'll tell us what standpoint epistemology is, but how serious is the connection between this sort of social-sciencey or even philosophical-sounding idea and the real practice of science?

Right, well, this is a big one. So standpoint epistemology is a sort of idea which comes out of, actually comes out of Marxist theory, but sort of gets more famously taken up in feminist theory in late 20th century. And which nowadays in the early 21st century, for future listeners, is, I know not been missed at heart. I think climate change. Like 23rd century listeners are going to be like, oh, thank you. I just think, you know, climate change isn't going to kill us quick enough for that to be irrelevant to people. So, which nowadays has kind of like become sort of a heated topic of dispute outside of just academic circles where it began.

The broad idea stated very generally and very loosely of standpoint epistemology is something like who you are, what social position you occupy, makes a difference to who, like what you can know

and how reliable you are going to be at certain kinds of reasoning tasks. So it's really what you can know or how you know it or both? Depending on formulation can be I've robbed. Okay. Because how,

what you can know, that's a really radical point. Well, fine enough, I was going to say that what you can know is the easier one to defend. I mean,

so I have, you know, insofar as I've waded into this debate at all, it's from an old blog post where I argued that if you look at

kind of some of the precise formulations or the more detailed formulations of standpoint epistemology, which exist in kind of internet philosophy excitopedes or places

where people are trying to define it clearly for public audience, then it looks more or less just like the, it looks to be, so long as you believe that what kind of experiences you've had in your life make a difference to what kind of things you'll be a reliable informant about, then some kind of standpoint epistemology is going to be true, right? So if you assume that in a very segregated town, but where the, say, in this 1950s America, the black people are going to be the janitorial and the maid stuff, the white people,

then the black people are going to know both about the black quarter and the white quarter, but the white people aren't going to go into the black bit of town. And so if you're asking people about this town, this layout where things are, and you've got limited time and resources, concentrate on the black people. They're more likely to know, especially the black working class people, they're more likely to know about the time and layout of this, the structural layout of this town, just because they experience more of it.

And that's a kind of, you know, that's a very basic example. I'm not saying that that would be the most efficient way of finding about this town, but there is some reason to think that if you are picking an informant in that kind of way, a reasonable correlate for you to look out for is the demographics of who they are, what kind of social position you occupy. I mean, it's kind of inarguable that there are correlations between one's identity markers and one's knowledge. Right, exactly.

And so in some forms like standpoint epistemology can more or less just be trying to think through the implications of that fact. And so, okay, in that case, that might make a difference if you're doing certain kinds of ethnography or certain kinds of anthropology or sociology of this town. And so already, while the kind of, at a high level, it's a sort of obvious point, like in practice, it might make a difference to how you carry your research design, who you want to ask things. And so even that apparently trivial point can have implications. And most more implications, which are sometimes forgot. There are classic examples, which I'm not going to remember quite right, but I'm going to

get you the broad structure of, for early 20th century anthropology, where you'll find that anthropologists was like literally only like interviewing the men in town because they had some sense it wasn't just their own biases they did have some sense that like the men were the important ones who knows what's up um I think it's you've gotten rid of that yeah yeah so party based on their biases but also party bett or so on what informants were telling them about the town except there were time you know the mayor than formance but there were times in some of the rituals they were interested in when the men and women would go into different places. And then, of course, if you only interview the men,

you literally just can't find out about some of what's going on here. And so it sounds trivial, but there have been times when people, even that simple correlational point, has been forgot. And it has been forgot in ways which attract people tending to trust more of those at the top of social hierarchies, and that just doesn't always work like that.

And so I think even its very simple form, standpoint epistemology can be contentful and important. I actually think another more, controversial, but I would defend it as the same instance, is actually the Me Too movement. A lot of the like the slogan, believe women, I think there's a very reasonable explanation of it. Well, there are lots of reasonable explanations here, but one reasonable thing it's picking up on is like, if you are going to a workplace and you want to know who's going to like reliably say who's a sexual predator, who's dangerous here, then you have to think of who has the authority to get away of

things and what's the distribution of hetero versus other kinds of sexuality. And it's going to be like just many heterosexual men have power in office places. And so it's mainly going to be women who are going to be the ones of the relevant knowledge. And so there's some strong reason to believe them, to trust them, they're the ones who know. And so again, that seems to me to fall out, that's a very contentful point, but it falls out of the quite basic thing. Now, let me say, that's the, like, you know, that's the point where I think standpoint of epistemology is non-trivial, has implications for scientific and social life, and which we could afford to take more seriously. There are other versions of standpoint of epistemology, which apparently do want to be saying a stronger thing. and so often the slogan would be a standpoint and is an achievement.

And this is, again, goes back to the original Marxist formulation, but has some of the other more modern formulations also have this future, wherein the idea, like, the idea of your social position gives you access to certain kinds of knowledge isn't just meant to be sort of an empirical fact that, well, these kinds of people tend to have these kind of experiences or have so at a high rate chance or something like that. But rather, there's something which is a more substantial thing,

which is like the proletariat standard, which is seeing things from the perspective of like a worldview properly attuned to those people's interests or something like that. And seeing things from that worldview will tend to be producing more accurate or more informed worldview. I think with that one, spelling out the content of that standpoint in that sense, the achievement, the property, proletariat or women's or whatever standpoint, I think that becomes philosophically much more difficult. because, like, you know, you can just imagine, right? Like, what is the true woman's standpoint? And it becomes a little normative also in a different way than simply epistemologically? Well, I mean, it's meant to be, in some sense, you know, epistemology just tends to be normative, right?

Like, we're trying to say, when we say what knowledge is, usually knowledge is taken to be a good thing. And so if I tell you what knowledge is, I'm in some sense saying you'd have to succeed by way of belief. And this is only, it's kind of trying to do that as well. Like, I'm just people who sort of have this stronger version will say, like, the proletariat standpoint or, the standpoint of oppressed women or something like that. That standpoint is more successful at knowledge gathering and knowledge producer. So there's an empirical claim that could be tested. Well, I mean, I'm not a good spokesperson for this for you because I don't believe it.

But they might not want to agree with that, right? Because it depends what you mean by empirically test it. Because if these standpoints can come apart, what kind of things are going to count as methods of validating knowledge, then it might look. you might worry that any test you do is going to potentially, yes, be relative to the thing, and it'll either be circular or biased against it. Okay.

And so. Well, then it becomes less interesting to me. I mean, I'm, you know, if it's, if it's just true by construction or irrefutable, I guess. Um,

oh, my part's got to me. Um, so, um, but just to, just to make it super duper clear, none of this is going to claim that, whether you're black or white or male or female or cis or trans,

affects whether the universe is expanding. Oh, no, right. Or whether you know the universe is expanding, right? It's not like who your identity is affects the truth about the world. That's just not. No, right? So I guess, you know, some brave soul might wish to argue as much,

but typically the kind of claims people are concerned over the sort of things I spoke about. So it's going to be about like power relations in the workplace or human experience. Yeah, human experience. Like, where's safe to go in this town? if it's a sun downtown, you know, that kind of stuff. And so usually if you look out, this is the thing,

for all of the kind of cultural controversy around it, often, not always, but often if you look at the kind of claim standpoint of epistemologists are interested in, it's usually sort of independently plausible that like the sort of people they're saying have an advantage, an advantage of some sort in knowledge gathering, would have an advantage about knowledge gathering in that case. That, you know, I know means wish to say that's in all cases,

uncontroversial in many cases there are going to be controversies but there's a kind of sort of core set of examples which people will tend to find plausible and then it's just how far can you expand that rather than whether or not there are any people don't usually expand it all the way to like the fundamental features of the physical or the cosmos or something like that well I think that you know that I bring that up intentionally because I guess my first exposure to ideas in this universe was as an undergraduate taking philosophy courses for the first time and there's sort of two extremes that are equally silly. One extreme, silly in my view

anyway, one extreme is that super radical view, you know, where like who you are literally changes the physical truth of the world. And the other is, that's must be what you mean to be claiming if there's any relationship between who you are and what you know about the world, right?

And I think that so the lesson of all that we're saying here is that there is a difficult but good place to be, you know, in the middle of these claims. Yeah, and I know that way of phrasing things actually And I think you're quite right that that is often how the debate is carried out. And that way of phrasing things actually comes back to something we discussed right at the beginning, which is a thing which I think philosophical reflection tends to want to be more careful about

is separating out claims about how you know and claims out what's true. And so very often some of the most heated debate about, for instance, standpoint epistemology, people will attribute to standpoint epistemologists who are saying, who you are, makes a difference to what you know, the claim that Hugh R makes a difference to what's true. And those are very different claims. And one of them is like far more plausible than the other. I mean, and so to speak, standpoint of pessimologists are paying a special attention to

social positions, especially social positions in hierarchies or relationships and oppression. But in some sense, everyone's going to be a kind of standpoint of this model. It's something like presumably having received a PhD in physics puts you in a better position to understand and reasonable. I probably know something. Yeah, exactly, right. So everyone thinks that some life experiences are going to be pertinent here. The standpoint epistemologists are just drawing attention to a class of experiences of being oppressed in certain kind of ways, which they say makes some different differences in these areas. So the basic idea behind standpoint epistemology is should be sort of no more foreign to you than saying that, you know, someone says that the thumb of the physics PhD knows more than someone about the physics PhD about whether or not the universe is expanding. They're not claiming that whether or not the universe is expanding depends on whether you have a physics PhD, right?

And it's the same thing. Well, this is good because it makes it sound like I had organization in mind when we started talking. That always makes me look good, even if it's just kind of random. I believe it. All right, Liam Copey Bright, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sean. Free is great, but only if it's useful. Free credit scores from some apps can differ by as much as 100 points from your actual FICO score

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