Re: dhw--Epistemological Framework (Order of Rank?) (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, February 07, 2011, 13:13 (5037 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt, for the sake of clarity, would you please identify quotes. In your latest post, you have quoted me, and then quoted yourself and responded to yourself, and although I know who said what, I'm sure other readers will find it confusing.-I'm afraid your latest post is also confusing. You wrote: "What is the value of a belief if we're trying to penetrate the nature of the cosmos? I would argue that beliefs in general should be excluded."-What is the value of an epistemological framework if we are only allowed to discuss what we already know? We can never KNOW the nature of the cosmos (e.g. whether or not it has a conscious intelligence); all we have are different possibilities. The fact that some people believe in one or other of these possibilities and provide what they consider to be evidence provides us with material for our discussions. We can then accept or reject it as we see fit. We can also point out that even if the evidence is "knowledge", the conclusions drawn from it are "belief" (often a cause of misunderstandings). This question ... the nature of the cosmos ... is "impenetrable", not because the rank of order changes with the subject, but because there can be no consensus on the possible answers. The nature of the internal combustion engine is knowable (i.e. there is a consensus on what constitutes the truth of the information), and so I would give priority to the natural sciences in such a context. The nature of love is not knowable, and the natural sciences have no greater authority than the insights of poets, psychologists and lovers.-MATT: The only divine revelation is what secrets we choose to reveal to ourselves. [...] We only learn about the world really ... from ourselves. [So you found out from yourself that the Earth went round the sun, did you?] That's why in my own personal definitions of knowledge that I was attempting to establish here previously, I attach the function of 'knowing' only upon those things that one has ultimately experienced for oneself. [...] Knowing is intrinsically personal, and each of us ultimately knows a very few things that we share with everyone else.-You are taking us back to the grim days when you were writing (and retracting): "Therefore, while knowledge, it is not something we can know. And as such can never be knowledge." This attempt to differentiate between knowing and knowledge confuses nobody more than you. Time and again you have insisted that "the only knowledge that exists is that we know nothing", whereas now the only 'knowing' is intrinsically personal (so we do know something), and yet after long discussions you accepted the common-sense definition that knowledge is "information which is accepted as being true by general consensus among those who are aware of it" (e.g. 1+1=2). On the other hand, we agreed that belief is "information which individuals accept as being true although there is no general consensus on its truth." Belief, as I have stressed over and over again, is individual. Now you are saying that knowing is individual ("intrinsically personal"). If by "knowing" you mean an inner conviction that something is true, but if that inner conviction is not accepted by general consensus, what you have is BELIEF. That distinction is a basis on which one can build an epistemological framework, i.e. by separating the subjective from the objective, or as near as one can get to the objective, adopting the common-sense approach and not the philosophical. Again we agreed to do this, because otherwise there could be no further discussion.-MATT: Any philosophy that suits oneself will necessarily be incompatible if you're trying to build a philosophy for all.-Any epistemological framework that only suits yourself will necessarily be utterly confusing if you're trying to build an epistemological framework for all.