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To: cloud8
What an excellent post, cloud8! I consider you a philosopher!

So while we are all slightly askew from reality, each perceiving it in an individual way, we have--besides our native intelligence--religion, tradition, education and the law to guide us in interpreting reality. "Knowledge" is the total of all this--our awareness of the world around us plus our intellectual skills that enable us to deal with it.

So very true. And it appears that understanding more of "where the other guy is coming from" will help us - either in accepting our differences or perhaps in making a more persuasive argument.

26 posted on 04/06/2005 12:22:42 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl (Please donate monthly to Free Republic!)
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To: Alamo-Girl
"So very true. And it appears that understanding more of "where the other guy is coming from" will help us - either in accepting our differences or perhaps in making a more persuasive argument. "

Not to belabor the obvious, but isn't that the purpose behind these discussions? If we don't recognize differences and take pains to work around them all we end up doing is talking past one another.

I haven't noticed a definition of 'knowledge' put forward and agreed upon in any of the earlier posts. You separate the terms 'knowledge' and 'certainty' in your original post but are they not inextricably linked? If we simply accept any input into our consciousness without first calculating its inherent level of certainty we can not call it knowledge as opposed to say, 'rumour'.

We can categorize any number of informational inputs with arbitrarily chosen divisions without statistical limits imposed but if we do are they relevant? Should we not rather first set the statistical lower boundary of certainty in the definition of knowledge and then instead of trying to specify each category's level of certainty, specify each category's relevance to our world view?

Unless of course we are just trying to compose a list of informational inputs.

And yes I know, I tend to babble. But it makes me endearing, just like a puppy.

55 posted on 04/06/2005 2:21:43 PM PDT by b_sharp (Science adjusts theories to fit evidence, creationism distorts evidence to fit the Bible.)
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