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

by dhw, Monday, March 07, 2011, 12:34 (4818 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: You went down the wrong rabbit hole here...-One of the stimulating and engaging aspects of corresponding with you, Matt, is that you take us down so many different rabbit holes. One of the frustrating aspects is that the moment we think we've caught up with you in one, you disappear down another!-MATT: This goes back to my distinction on what it means to know something. Not to just hear it. Not just repeat what someone told you, but to know. Knowing is a marriage of all the causes and all the effects that make up that object. It's a deep understanding, NOT a superficial one. Science's job is to give us workable knowledge--NOT truth. You're describing workable knowledge.-On 4 March your goal was "to get us to assign some ranks and priorities so we can discuss ... directly ... the ACTUAL problem (rank)", which you followed up on 5 March with such direct questions as: "Why do you do it? Why do we rank some property higher than others? Why do we decide to reject some arguments and not others?" And yet on 6 March you said that cause and effect are a delusion. How can such questions be answered without going into cause and effect? Now whoosh, back we go to the distinction between knowledge and truth! Earlier on in this discussion, we had already agreed that truth was unattainable, and that knowledge was "information accepted as being true by general consensus among those who are aware of it". Now suddenly you want to discuss "deep understanding", which means knowing ALL the causes and ALL the effects, which of course is totally impossible, because knowing ALL these would mean knowing the truth, which we have agreed is unattainable!
 
MATT: The real question isn't "Is there anything without a cause?" it is "Is there anything that isn't both a cause and an effect?" Chew on that for awhile. -There's nothing to chew on. It's self-evident. And it gets us nowhere. As I said in my last post, "whatever factor you are considering has a dual connection, like any link in a chain." I don't think anyone would question your statement that "there is an infinite amount of causes and effects that leads to David Turell" (read 'Tristram Shandy'!), but if you want to know why we do something, why we rank one faculty above another, why we reject/accept certain arguments, do you expect us to go back to the Big Bang? Ages ago I said we needed to decide which level we wanted to argue on. The philosophical level makes further discussion impossible. We can agree to disagree on the reality of time's "arrow" (= the SEQUENCE of cause and effect, in which cause becomes effect becomes cause becomes effect ad infinitum), but if you want to discuss rank, I see no alternative to the commonsense level. We can then delve into the factors that make us believe what we believe (inseparable from the problem of rank and from the sequence of cause and effect).-In this context, it might help if you would explain what you mean by "direct" experience, which you said was one of only two means we have to inform ourselves about the world. I pointed out that a vast amount of our information comes through indirect experience ... i.e. the experiences of others.