Neurathian bootstrap
Encyclopedia
The Neurathian bootstrap is based on a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist...

 used to describe a philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...

. The metaphor is based on a quote from Quine's
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...

 writings in Word and Object
Word and Object
Word and Object is a 1960 book of epistemology by Willard Van Orman Quine. In it, Quine develops his thesis of the Indeterminacy of translation....

:
"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction."


Stanovich
Keith Stanovich
Keith E. Stanovich is the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. His research areas are the psychology of reasoning and the psychology of reading...

, in his book The Robot's Rebellion, uses this metaphor as an analogy to the recursive
Recursion
Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...

 nature of revising one's beliefs. A "rotten plank" on the ship, for instance, might refer to a meme virus or a junk meme (i.e., a meme that is either maladaptive to the individual, or serves no beneficial purpose for the realization of an individual's life goals). It may be impossible to bring the ship to shore for repairs, therefore one may stand on planks that are not rotten in order to repair or replace the ones that are. At a later time, the planks previously used for support may be tested by standing on other planks that are not rotten:
"We can conduct certain tests assuming that certain memeplexes (e.g., science, logic, rationality) are foundational, but at a later time we might want to bring these latter memeplexes into question too. The more comprehensively we have tested our interlocking memeplexes, the more confident we can be that we have not let a meme virus enter into our mindware..." (pp. 181)


In this way, one might proceed to examine and revise their beliefs so as to become more rational.
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