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To: Stultis
Oh, of course not. I defined my terms very carefully.

Okay, then as far as you are concerned that the Earth goes round the sun is proven. Definitions and semantics are not interesting to me.

2,469 posted on 08/11/2003 7:22:27 PM PDT by gore3000 (Intelligent people do not believe in evolution.)
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To: gore3000
Okay, then as far as you are concerned that the Earth goes round the sun is proven.

This is exactly the opposite of what I've said. This claim cannot be "proven" because it is a proposition about the natural world. Such propositions cannot, in their nature (because of the limitations of our knowledge) be demonstrated with certainty.

Look at it this way. The claim that "the Earth goes round the sun" is not an atomic and isolated proposition. It is embeded in a mass of theories, laws and conventions: for instance the laws of gravity, theories of optics, and conventions of geomety and of simplicity. To "prove" heliocentrism (establish it with certainty, as necessarily true) you would have to first "prove" all these other things, and to do that you'd have to first "prove" all the theories, laws and conventions that they in turn are dependent on or emeshed with.

What you end up with, then, it you take this notions of certifying the truth of empirically base claims with certainty, is a pointless morass of justifications, indeed a fetish of justificationism. Of course nobody actually does this (and all attempts to create such edifices of certainty, from scholasticism to logical positivism, were failures). What we actually do is adopt theories that are useful, illuminative, and that work for us, and we accept them and use them so long as they work, or until somebody thinks up better ones.

Definitions and semantics are not interesting to me.

This is equivalent (IMHO) to saying, "I doesn't interest me to be understood, or to understand others, and I don't mind wasting by time on confusions and misunderstanding." The point is to understand each other, and what we mean by our words, to avoid merely semantical debates.

2,487 posted on 08/11/2003 11:01:52 PM PDT by Stultis
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