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

by dhw, Friday, March 04, 2011, 14:08 (4821 days ago) @ dhw

For Matt:-When I posted my response to you last night, I had a niggly feeling that something wasn't quite right. On rereading the two posts, I'm still not sure, though, what you're looking for. However, there are points to which I haven't responded, so maybe a scattergun approach will hit the target!-You say that your aim was to get everybody to delineate their own epistemology, and yours is that you "lean materialistic", which you equate with being objective (see last night's post). My own position is that I can't have faith in anything that demands what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief", which makes many of my arguments horribly negative. But perhaps because of this I may be more conscious than some folk of the degree of subjectivity involved in most views, and when you opened this thread, my own aim was not to elicit personal statements but to set up a framework that would help us all to distinguish between knowledge (as near objective as we can get) and belief (always underpinned by subjectivity). -It's interesting that you felt the problem of rank was a side track. I think it goes to the very heart of many misunderstandings. Over and over again, contributors have revealed their priorities, in some cases unconsciously, and I'd hoped that by breaking down such subjective hierarchies we might all become more aware of what it was that influenced our thinking. I also think it's valuable to distinguish between levels: if you start flying up into the clouds of philosophy, in which everything becomes obscure, the discussion tends to turn into an intellectual game (often just of language). We need to keep at least one foot on the ground.