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To: AndyTheBear
Sigh

Sorry, I haven't been following along. If you think you already addressed my point elsewhere, you can just link to it.

Alas, how were you able to confirm that there is never such a reliable method?

What do you mean "is never?" I don't understand that construction. If you mean "can never be," then I made no such claim. I only say there isn't one now.

Is the technique you used more reliable in nature then that used in philosophy?

You're joking, right? As you typed that question into your computer that converted it to electrical impulses and possibly light and sent the information hundreds or maybe thousands of miles away to another computer which then decoded and stored it as minute magnetic undulations on a disk spinning thousands of revolutions per second, you were joking about the relative reliability of scientific theories and philosophies, right?

Well, maybe not so I will answer unambiguously yes. The techniques used by scientists are reliable and produce reliable knowledge about the world. In contrast, philosophers are basically content with an intuitive internal consistency.

Realistically any doctrine in theology or idea in philosophy needs to conform to "common sense",

True, and at one time conformance to common sense might have been a good standard, But today we know that common sense is not a good guide to reliable knowledge. Common sense told men for millenia that space is Euclidean - there was no conceivable alternative, it had to be true. But we know today that's false. Today we know that memory can be very unreliable. We know that people behave irrationally, that it's just human nature. No, common sense is not an acceptable guide.

The very reliability of science is based soley on "common sense"

No, it is based on empirical results. Einstein's proposal that spacetime is curved was most certainly not common sensical. Instead it was (and is) accepted because predictions were made and verified. Quantum physics is similar. Just about every major scientitific theory we have went against the common sense of it's day.

If all of philosophy can produce nothing reliable, then we must reject science as well, for it came from philosophy.

Fallacious.

246 posted on 09/25/2007 5:37:11 PM PDT by edsheppa
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To: edsheppa
Fallacious.

Really, let me be more precise:

Premise A: everything X produces is unreliable.

Premise B: X produced Y.

Conclusion: Y is unreliable.

Where X is philosophy and Y is science.

Do you disagree with one of the two premises or with the deduction from them?

Myself I disagree with premise A, and also disagree with the conclusion -- that being my point.

249 posted on 09/25/2007 6:26:37 PM PDT by AndyTheBear (Disastrous social experimentation is the opiate of elitist snobs.)
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