Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by whitecraw, Thursday, March 27, 2008, 19:50 (6083 days ago) @ David Turell

'What bothers me about these assertions is they make existence dependent upon human sensory organs. But there are many men who are color blind, and all of us color our observations with our own internal personal prejudices and experiences.' - Well, it makes the existence of a sound dependent on its being perceived. In old fashioned Aristotelian terms, this is a sound's 'mode of existence'; it requires to be heard before it is 'realised'; in the absence of a hearer it is only potentially a sound. In the Aristotelian scheme of things, there are lots of different modes of existence, lots of different senses in which things can be said to exist. Pegasus exists as a fictional character; numbers exist as abstract mathematical units; my late father exists as an absence in my life-world. And the same thing can exist in several different modes. The chair on which I sit exists as a perceptible object (something I feel against my bottom), a physical object (something spatially extended) and as a serviceable object (something on which I sit). In science, the physical is considered the primary mode of something's existence; but in real life this is often further down the pecking order, far below (for example) its human significance and its serviceability. In real life, a chair is principally something you can sit on rather than an arrangement of matter, and one's late father is principally a loss rather than a body mouldering in a grave. The point is that different things exist in different ways; so I wouldn't be overly concerned that a sound (or any other sense datum) exists in such a way that it is dependent for that existence on its being perceived. That's just another way of saying that a sound's existence as a sense datum is dependent on its being a sense datum. It doesn't commit us to the view that everything is nothing more than a figment of one's imagination. - 'Why are so many objects in existence described in the same way by so many people under these circumstances?' - Because they are described in a language, and language is a social institution governed by rules and conventions that make it and (through it) the world intelligible to its users. The fact that so many things are described in the same way by so many people indicates only that they share a common language (e.g. American English, Japanese, Ulster Scots) or inhabit a common 'universe of discourse' (e.g. the scientific world or any of its various regions and districts, Roman Catholicism, the world of games programming), not that those people (and the particular language community to which they belong) have some sort of privileged access in their descriptions to the way things 'really' are; that is, knowledge of the way things are quite apart from and independent of how they represent those things to themselves and to one another.