Agrippan Skepticism (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 17:46 (4563 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: Agrippan skepticism properly worded (as I did previously) is "The only thing we can be sure of is that we know nothing."

Same problem. Now apparently all scientific knowledge and every scientific theory is open to dispute. I’m not arguing with Agrippa – I don’t know enough about his ideas – but with you, since you’re using this indiscriminate form of scepticism only in order to reject serious consideration of psychic phenomena, whereas it actually rejects serious consideration of anything and everything. You’re concerned with “utility”. I would suggest that our agreed distinctions between truth, knowledge and belief will provide us with a much more useful framework for our discussion.

MATT: This COMPLETELY changes the power of the position because NOW we need to apply a series of justifications to any claim. The challenge offered by the "Agrippan Trilemma" is that we cannot claim knowledge, if the claim suffers from any one of these three challenges:

Hold on. If we are sure that we know nothing, ultimately it doesn’t matter what challenges have been met, as we still can’t acquire knowledge.

No hold here:::::>>>

You're running down the wrong rabbit hole.

You are equating truth with knowledge here.

I know this fundamental topic is probably boring to you, but I need to find a way to resolve the question "What can I do with questions dealing with the appellation 'psychic?'" My issues are clearly at the philosophical level, and these need to be dealt with satisfactorily before I will be comfortable moving on. You can consider this perhaps, a long inquiry into how YOU deal with these things, as you, apparently, can do so with ease. At this point, I cannot.

It should be clear that I do not consider knowledge an objective thing. Everything man claims he knows, he knows in relation to something else. The relationship of what we call knowledge (which I will for expedience simply refer to as knowledge) to language is something none of us here I think, can refute. I am also slowly coming to a psychological realization that everything we know is built about in relation to the self. (It makes sense... the first thing we are likely to be aware of IS ourselves.)

So lets talk about knowledge, to clear up any confusion about my thoughts about it being a post-modern and nihilistic view.

Knowledge is ultimately relative. This is imminently betrayed by the scientific method, which we are all familiar with. An hypothesis is accepted or rejected based upon some test it passes or fails. But any hypothesis might pass an experimental test and be agreed to be the answer, even though it is NOT the correct one. Newton's theory of Gravity is a good popular example. But in reality--it was not correct--and the real answer on what Gravity is has yet to be determined. Positivists like Dawkins point to this in a light that "our knowledge ever improves" but lately I'm more inclined to look at it as "relative understanding." Further, science as I have stressed--is about model building. It asks the question, "does this model fit what we have observed?" It is an activity in abstraction-building. David was amazed recently when I brought up a computer that modeled a cell with an equation several million terms long. Humans are not equipped to deal with numbers like that--and it should serve as a warning to the limits of science that we are reaching a point where it will NOT be possible to create a lay explanation for some of the things we study.

I conclude my discussion of objective knowledge by recapping: Objective knowledge is the name given for relationships man observes about those things not directly inside of himself-->science being the readily available construct.

Next we turn to "inner" knowledge. This category contains those pieces of knowledge such as answers to "How are you feeling today?"
"Are you hot or cold?"

There is no good objective measure for these things, we take a person at their word (generally). There isn't much that can be said about this category of things--they exist--but these things are personally relative.

Take David's example of the woman who had the NDE where she floated outside of her body and discovered a shoe. What's really so remarkable about this situation? If it had been seen inside of a dream instead of in a state of near death, the immediate weight of the story's power seems (at least, to me) to diminish.

The question of utility.

To what end does a psychic explanation serve the purpose of gathering knowledge? In the above example, WHAT is the floating shoe story evidence OF? What is it evidence FOR? What do we gain by including them? What do we lose by excluding them? If you can't answer those questions in a way that allows you to modify how we view the relationships of everything else (in our world of knowledge) than how can we even have a meaningful conversation about them?

I'm not saying that we forget the stories. I'm asking how we can meaningfully assimilate them.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"