Posted on 04/06/2005 11:36:46 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
Freepers began a most engaging dialogue at the end of another thread! It is not only a fascinating subject - it also presents us with an opportunity to clarify ourselves and hopefully help us appreciate our differences and thus relieve some of the contention on various threads (most especially science and philosophy threads).
The subject is knowledge - which, as it turns out, means different things to different people. Moreover, we each have our own style of classifying “knowledge” – and valuing the certainty of that “knowledge”. Those differences account for much of the differences in our views on all kinds of topics – and the contentiousness which may derive from them.
Below are examples. First is PatrickHenry’s offering of his classification and valuation followed by mine – so that the correspondents here can see the difference. Below mine is js1138’s offering.
Please review these and let us know how you classify and value “knowledge”! We’d appreciate very much your following the same format so it’ll be easier for us to make comparisons and understand differences.
PatrickHenry’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
1. Revelation: Spiritual understanding divinely communicated.
Alamo-Girl’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties:
js1138’s types of “knowledge” and valuation of certainties
2. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
3. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ...
4. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
5. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
Separate List for theological knowledge:
2. Faith: Belief in a revelation experienced by another.
2. Theological knowledge, indirect revelation: I believe in a revelation experienced by another, i.e. Scripture is confirmed to me by the indwelling Spirit.
4. Evidence/Historical fact, uninterpreted: I have verifiable evidence Reagan was once President.
5. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet.
6. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning.
7. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week.
8. Trust in a Mentor: I trust this particular person to always tell me the truth, therefore I know …
9. Internal emotional state: I feel I'm happy, or I have empathy, compassion or sympathy for you.
10. Evidence/Historical fact, interpreted: I conclude from the fossil evidence in the geologic record that …
11. Determined facts: I accept this as fact because of a consensus or veto determination by others, i.e. I trust that these experts or fact finders know what they are talking about.
12. Imaginings: I imagine how things ought to have been in the Schiavo case.
2. Sensory perception of something external to me: I see my dog is lying at my feet. I am aware that this has limitations, but what choices do I have? I learn the limitations and live with them.
3. Personal memory: I recall I had breakfast this morning. Same limitations apply, except that they are more frequent and serious.
4. Logical conclusion: I can prove the Pythagorean theorem is valid and true. The trueness may be unassailable, but the conclusions of axiomatic reasoning are only as true as the axioms, which may be arbitrary. Outside of pure logic and pure mathematics, axiomatic reasoning drops quickly in my estimation of usefulness. People who argue politics and religion from a "rational" perspective are low on my list of useful sources.
5. Prediction from scientific theory: I calculate there will be a partial solar eclipse this week. I am not aware of any scientific theory that I understand which has failed in a major way. Some theories, of course, make sharper predictions than others. Eclipses are pretty certain.
6. Conclusion from evidence: I conclude from the verifiable evidence that ... Oddly enough, "facts" are less certain in my view than theories.
7. Acceptance of another's opinion: I provisionally accept the opinion of X (an individual or group) as knowledge because (a) I haven't worked it out for myself; and (b) I have what I regard as good reason for confidence in X.
Change is not in the cards. I may do my analysis tonight. I call the charts froth, as in truth_froth or evil_froth or dignity_froth. They are sort of weblike and often enough can't be drawn flat or on a flat piece of paper without lines crossing. Russell's Principia can be drawn flat, for reference to the planarity of logical charts. Language charts are not planar, but they do not need a time dimension since the root meanings are still there from thousands of years ago. Additional meanings, additional applications, okay, but not change in the sense of shifts.
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are driving through Wisconsin. By the side of the road they see a Holstein with no (visible) black spots.
"Wow!" says the engineer, "I didn't know there were white cows in Wisconsin!"
The physicist, slightly more precisely notes, "Well, all you really know is that there's one white cow in Wisconsin."
The mathematician, slave to rigor, corrects them both, "Actually, all we really know is that there is at least one cow in Wisconsin which is white on at a least one side."
Do you ever not thank someone for their post? Just once I wanna see you say: &%$# you and the post you rode in on!
=)
Revelation would not be a source of knowledge, but a sufficient reason to believe the veracity of a knowledge. According to Schopenhauer.
I might just mention that so far all the froths I have built so far are joined at 'care,' which Heidegger takes as the center of Being and Time, but which is not at the center of my ur-froth but one step away from the true center which must remain unnamed for the time being. Every philosopher who has developed a center has ended up one step away from the true center. Just so you know this is going somehwere.
I believe you would agree that we Christians have a completely different worldview since we are presently alive in eternity while still in the flesh.
Can you give assurances, Ichneumon, that the insights of "party-pooper skeptics" cannot in principle be included in that vast category of "bogus knowledge"
Of course not, since it is impossible "in principle" to rule out such a scenario for *any* viewpoint, philosophy, or premise. For example, you cannot "give assurances that" the following "cannot in principle" be true as well:
1. The universe and all in it (and ourselves) was created only last Thursday, but with the appearance and hallmarks of a much longer history (prefab fossils in the ground, houses that look decades old, etc.), and we were created with "memories" of "prior" events/lives that never actually occurred.
2. "Jehovah" and "Lucifer" are just fictions created by Loki, the god of mischief, in a charade maintained for thousand of years, in order to divert mankind from following Odin, the All-Father.
3. We all live in a "Matrix" style virtual reality -- none of what we see and do is real, it's all a hoax maintained by the aliens which enslaved us several centuries ago.
And so on.
If so, will you demonstrate why the insights of skepticism must be excluded from this nasty category?
Sure -- because it works when compared against reality. QED.
The "insights of skepticism" -- i.e. that knowledge is best gained by using reliable methods of determining truth, and that people should avoid believing that which is the result of unreliable methods -- are clearly not only not "this nasty category", they are in fact its antithesis, a vaccination against it.
On what basis are we to rationally accept the skeptic position as not just another of the many "various comfortable presumptions?"
On the basis that it eschews presumptions, comfortable or otherwise, and embraces "rational acceptance" of that which can be actually demonstrated as true.
To me, skepticism is a variant of ideological thinking.
To you, of course it is.
But the only "ideology" of skepticism is that people should not believe that which is derived from unreliable methods. Your mileage may differ.
That suspicion seems justified to me, for its basic premises are hidden as is usually the case with ideologies.
There's nothing "hidden" about skepticism's premises. Those premises are that there are reliable and unreliable methods of reaching conclusions, and that the unreliable ones should be avoided, and the reliable ones should be used. A corollary is that claims and beliefs must be supportable.
If we are to penetrate the mysteries of skepticism, then it seems to me we first need to have disclosure of the hidden premise(s).
Insert conspiracy theory here.
Can you help with this?
I doubt it.
There are several ways in which this can be seen as a weak claim.
I disagree.
For example, to an evolutionist pondering the fact that you are made up of cells whose ancestors used to be freemoving, one celled cowboys, before the communist tyranny of multicellularity came along and fenced in the ranges. "You" are just a bio-chemical/bio-electical conglomeration whose ponderings are meaningless to the cells you are made of, whose existence is far more tangibly demonstrable than your maudlin arrogance about "being" because you are "thinking"--which merely amounts to a silly attempt to pretend there is meaning in a few fleeting congeries of electical impulses between cells.
This is just goofy. First, I don't know why you're foisting off this reductio ad absurdum onto "evolutionists". I don't know a single evolutionist who holds such a ridiculously reductionist view as the one you're spinning here.
Second, the fact remains that no matter how much you try to hand-wave it away, there *is* pondering going on, that pondering *is* taking place, and its substrate (whatever it may or may not be) therefore *does* exist. Decartes is vindicated yet again.
Or, consider the atoms that make up your cells--with their vast empty spaces occupied by entities whose existence at any given point or time is highly probabilistic and fleeting--and cells have the arrogance to suppose that they exist just because their happen to be an fleeting accidental conjugation of these entities in atoms whose existence is so evanescent as to be virtually non-existent.
And yet, there they are. Decartes wins again.
Or, for one more, consider the inversion of the usual way of looking at Descartes argument: Your self-detected visceral existence, however pursuasive you might find it, is a far cry from high on the heirarchy of what we commonly take for objective evidence. A proof, or a refereed scientific article about an experiment I can duplicate, if I want, or, just an ordinary chair, which more than one human can stub his toe on, and then get together to share notes with other chair-victims about. All of these things take priority over your self-awareness, as objective evidence.
Totally irrelevant to Decartes' observation.
All of which brings me around to my question: I think humans are, more than any other creatures we know about, defined by their existence as part of a community. We observe that those of us cut off from effective participation in our community go bonkers, become unhealthy, and meet untimely ends at a very high rate. I therefore suggest that, while Descartes formulation might be a very good one for, say, a muledeer, it will be rather deficient for a human: If all you do is think about what you are, you will shortly cease to be, however, if you suppress your philosophical misgivings, and you continue to work at being, as I aver you are supposed to, you may very well become something worth thinking exists.
I submit that you don't understand Decartes' point. It has nothing to do with "a life worth living" or however you'd like to sum up your alleged point in the prior paragraph. It has to do with the fundamental matter of existence or non-existence, and how much we can or can't know about it.
God has revealed to me that PatrickHenry is correct to do so.
Just a couple observations: It has only been in the recent few (post-modern) centuries that theological knowledge, a/k/a/ spiritual understanding of types (1) and (2), has been relegated to an intellectual ghetto.
...because in the recent few centuries, it has been found to be a strikingly unreliable way of acquiring reliable knowledge about the universe.
In former times, (1) and (2) were understood to be the very ground or foundation of the Patrick’s 1 through 7. It was because (1) and (2) were valid that humans had any confidence at all in the first 7. And because of that confidence, science became possible.
This is a remarkably inaccurate description of the history of science in particular, or epistemology in general.
If anything, "(1) and (2) [faith and revelation]" were obstacles to real learning for millennia (just as they continue to be in the Muslim world to this day). Furthermore, faith and evelation" led primarily not to "confidence" in the reliability of "the first 7", but to doubt in them -- both because "the first 7" sometimes led to conclusions contrary to the "accepted wisdom" arrived at via "faith and revelation", and because belief in the results of "faith and revelation" pointed towards a conclusion that the universe was *capricious* (i.e., operated at the whims of god), and was not *predictable* (i.e. mechanistic/deterministic enough for constant physical laws and processes to be discovered).
When lightning bolts are hurled weapons of god's wrath, who's going to bother to examine them for regularities and the constant laws by which they invariably behave?
Because in the pre- post-modern world, God and Truth were synonymous.
Tell that to Galileo.
And humans beings understood, or used to, that without a foundation in Truth, everything that human beings do is in vain.
They still do understand that. It's just that they've come to understand that Truth exists and can be found apart from consulting what Odin and Allah allegedly said about it. Thus began the Enlightenment.
Therein lies the rub -- how, exactly, *does* one separate knowledge from mere belief? That is, how do we determine which of our beliefs are true (actual knowledge) and which are false?
This was the point of my original post. "The lists" as presented appeared to imply that there were just various alternative methods of dancing about the reality garden, plucking truths from it, and tucking them away in our heads as acquired knowledge.
But the real situation is far more problematic: People accumulate beliefs as a result of their observations and thoughts and previous experiences (for lack of a better phrase). Some of those beliefs will be accurate, and some of them will be inaccurate.
So the fundamental question is, how best to ensure that the beliefs one acquires are most likely to be accurate, and not bogus? What methods of learning, of observing, of thinking, of experiencing, are most reliable in filtering out the sense from the nonsense? And which are less reliable? And how can our beliefs be verified?
God has revealed to me that you're mistaken.
And if you have the eyes to observe what is around you in nature, and the ears to "hear" what that means, then you can rationally, "objectively verify" the dual account we have from God Himself, revealed in the Book of Scripture (revelation by Creator), and the Book of Nature (revelation by Creation). Both accounts accord beautifully.
Uhhhh... No. The "Book of Nature", for example, does not "accord beautifully" with the Noachian Flood of the "Book of Scripture", for just one example of many.
If you think there is an ounce of "religiosity" or "sectarianism" in that view, I would think you are mistaken.
Clearly, when you speak coyly of "the Book of Scripture", you're referring to the Christian Bible. So I find your denial of even an "ounce" of "sectarianism" to be dubious at best.
There's always someone in every conversation who looks up the fifth definition of the word.
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