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.
Agreed. But yours is the first post about this since mine.
Some forty years ago (or so, I can't remember that far back), Anthony Flew gave three criteria for knowledge.
1: One must believe something to be true. (That some woman was a witch for example.)
2: One must have some evidence for such. (Perhaps another person's cow had mange and hers didn't.)
3: The belief must be "true" (or at least in conformance with reality.) This is the hard part; more test may be required; weighing against a duck, for example.
These criteria don't solve problems about how to evaluate claims of knowledge, but they do distinguish knowledge from feelings or guesses (lucky or not.)
Historically, such conflicting visions exist (otherwise we wouldn't have a multitude of religions). I don't know how to resolve such conflicts where each of the recipients claims to have received the truth. But I never get such visions, so I wouldn't be expected to know.
And so every philsopher is that political animal to say what exactly is real.
But if anybody wants to be a philosopher, all you really need to say is "real is real," or "it is what it is" or "reality is never incorrect", or R is R, for short.
The electrons in every iodine atom in every molecule of thyroxine in your body?
Even more relevantly, magnetism is in fact the relativistic effect of moving charges.
More significantly, the insinuation in the original that relativity is unimportant (or worse, inapplicable) for subluminal objects ignores the profound implications of relativity to all levels of existence. The fact--just for example--that simultaneity does not exist in the Cartesian sense makes the prospect of constructing a self-consistent concept of "an instant of time" impossible. This places severe constraints on the spatial extent of intelligences, to take just one nontrivial consequence that seems quite far afield to someone who thinks the special theory obtains only near light speeds.
This is also a criticism of the first part of your own post: quantum mechanics is applicable to an enormous number of macroscopic phenomena. Metals, for example. Transistors. Superconductivity. Superfluidity. Phonons. The large structure of the universe. Fluctuations in the vacuum state that made creation of the universe ex nihilio possible. Bell's Theorem. And so on... and so on... The fact that quantum mechanics is "always applicable, but not always useful," is far too overstated in elementary physics texts. The truth is, we really don't know how far into the macroscopic world quantum mechanics "usefully" applies, not only because we haven't exhausted all the possibilities, but also because we really don't completely know how to carry this program out. If we did, things like quantum decoherence wouldn't be so philosophically difficult, and the process of associating Hermitean operators with physical quantities would not be so ad-hoc.
That would be very difficult; very few if any can objectively apply a set of rules to themselves, simply because it is virtually impossible to have full and unquestionable knowledge of oneself.
"Sorry for not providing a more responsive reply, b_sharp. But I've got to call it a day and get some sleep....
"See you tomorrow!
How the heck do you keep up with these threads? I miss one day and I have no idea of where I am.
Knowledge was whatever it took to arouse women to pay attention to me in exactly the manner I liked. I learned a great deal. All other information was supportive detail in that aim, but there it is ... I had a one track mind. A great many conclusions were reached as a result of this, and I know alot ... I thought.
Knowledge post-conversion?
That 'fearing' God is just about impossible to describe - but is nonetheless the real starting point for getting that blissful "aaaaasaHA!!!!!" sensation of really knowing something. I don't 'fear' God in the sense I am deeply afraid of what he might do to me .... I am fearful of him in the same sense that one feels when you visit the Tiger cage of a zoo ... and witness the feeder leave the cage door open a crack by accident. It is a kind of respectful fear ...
Since then, knowledge has changed as an idea for me, basically from what P. Henry defines to what you defined...
I will just say that the shapes of the links are possibly interesting in a graphologist way. It is our language, it was already there, we just use it. When the links are traced to the end, the final meaning, often as not it is a body part or body function at the root.
It did, though. It just didn't get taken to the body parts level.
I had an immature idea that dictionary word definitions would reference each other in a circular way, truth being verity and verity being truth, back and forth like that never leading anywhere. But I find there is little of that. There is some self-reference, but there is also the larger part of linking chains that actually go somewhere. Where do they go? That's easy. They go to prepositional relations, to body parts, to voluntary things we may do with simple hand tools such as were available 6000 years ago, to primitive activites such as hunting and agriculture and a few other things that any functional human would have as experience. At the heart of our language we have only a few hundred basic ideas and the rest is superstructure made of divisions of the basic ideas. Thus, truth is not a basic idea, but dressing a game animal is since the action does not require words. That is one sense of truth at the end of the chain: gathering berries or carving the dinner venison. Dinner, you have it or you don't--truth and verity.
Superconductivity and superfluidity are phenomena occuring well below ambient, and surely aren't relevant to auto crashes. Most properties of metals don't have to be treated quantum mechanically. Ditto phonons; the heat capacity of a lattice, at ambient temperatures, is quite adequately described by classical mechanics.
I saw nothing bigoted about Ichneumon's post. Criticising basic incompatibilities between Christian theology and reality isn't bigotry; or do you want a pass we don't give to purveyors of UFOs, auras, and other supernatural phenomena?
Personally, I think you should be ashamed of engaging in victim politics, and argue the substance.
"Thank you so much for bumping by! I look forward to your comments!"
That is so kind of you. :)
I hardly feel worthy to comment on this thread, given that there are so many, many smart people here.
This is a really fascinating topic and as a matter of fact, I'm now printing out the original body of your thread so I can think about this while I read before bed.
Thanks!
And may I say, having read so many of your posts,
"You go, (Alamo) Girl!" LOL!
And that was the high point of the post.
The rest is a large lump of content-free ordure; one is surprised only at the honesty of his FReepername.
Loser
Why should an empiricist be totally skeptical?
The older versions of the "New Collegiate" dictionary did have an Indo-European Roots section. A good description of what is known about proto-Indo-European and some vocabulary.
Either the Oxford English or Merriam-Webster's second should be a good place to chase these things too.
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