Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by whitecraw, Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 16:56 (6084 days ago) @ George Jelliss

'I regret to say that this discussion seems to have deteriorated into solipsism from clayto and postmodernist waffle from whitecraw.' 

Hardly postmodernist waffle. It's waffle rooted in the 'linguistic turn' that theory of knowledge took almost a century ago in the modernist era, when epistemologists began to examine the role language plays in the constitution of knowledge and belief and the influence it has on the judgements we make, and when psychological models of thinking associated with the Cartesian concept of 'mind' were largely superseded by linguistic models wherein (for example) an 'idea' ceases to be considered as some sort of mysterious quasi-physical content of a no less mysterious quasi-physical receptacle and comes to be considered instead as nothing more occult than the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence. The point I was making is that the world we know and about which we have beliefs is, as a consequence of the crucial role language plays in our getting of knowledge, largely shaped and coloured for us by language. Postmodernist waffle actually challenges this account by exemplifying in its own literary practice a) how the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is radically indeterminable and b) how brute reality resists being 'humanised' through its conceptualisation in language, thereby declaring its independence from human activity. - 'To say that something "exists" means that it can be detected by the human senses, augmented by scientific instruments (such as telescopes, microscopes and spectrographs) and by the deductive process applied to these evidences.' - That's one definition, which functions to enable us to differentiate a world along certain lines ('esse est percipi'). But if we were to adopt a different policy, defining 'existence' as (say) Berkeley did in his famous dictum 'esse est aut percipere aut percipi' ('to exist is either to perceive or to be perceived'), we would end up with a world differentiated along a different set of lines. What is it that privileges one definition over another? On which of the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai is it inscribed that to say something 'exists' means that it can be detected by the human senses, aided or unaided, or inferred from what is evident to those senses'? - 'And a falling tree makes a noise, even if there is no-one there to hear it; what we mean is that it's fall causes sound waves in the air that would be detected by a human ear, were one there to hear it.' - That's entirely correct, on the policy assumption that 'noise' is to be defined in this particular way. (Though there is a problem with this definition: it employs the term it is intended to define and therefore 'begs the question'.) Given this definition, one may reasonably infer that a falling tree makes a noise even when there is no one around to hear it. But if we instead made the policy assumption that 'noise' is to be defined rather as a vibration in some material that is picked up via an auditory organ and registered by a brain as a particular quality of sensation, then we may infer with equal reasonableness that a falling tree does not make a noise ... but only a wave-like disturbance of the air ... in the absence of any auditory organ and connected brain to turn those waves into sound waves.