A colossal accident?

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Soldier_Of_God said:
The problem with this statement is that it is philosophically unclear. Having knowlege means having a grasp of body of facts or concepts. It does not automatically entail awareness the factual truth of a statement is ontologically true. For example, up into the middle of the 20th century, scientists factually held firmly that proteins, not DNA, were the key to heredity.
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knowl·edge (nlj)
n.
  1. The state or fact of knowing.
  2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study.
  3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.
  4. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge.
  5. Specific information about something.
Standard terminology makes these discussions so much more fruitful.
 
Soldier_Of_God said:
Your definition is inconsistent. You’ve equated truth to being as a “way of getting true statements” and to being “truth” itself and having an “awareness of truth” in your statement.
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No, I’m talking about methods of finding and knowing truth. Truth is a true correspondence, and knowledge is holding a true statement and knowing its truth
 
warpspeedpetey said:
knowl·edge (nlj)
n.
  1. The state or fact of knowing.
  2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study.
  3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.
  4. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge.
  5. Specific information about something.
Standard terminology makes these discussions so much more fruitful.
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I would agree.
 
Well we can agree that truth is independent of our perception. I have been saying that all along. However, when we come to having knowledge, we have to know we know!

As you like definitions, I’ll add this from dictionary.com. ‘to know’:

‘to perceive or understand as fact or truth’

dictionary.reference.com/browse/know

My argument has always been about grounding knowledge via empirical evidence, not claiming that truth is only what is evidenced. This makes the BR quote irrelevant. I still think the issue is irrelevant as both theists and atheists typically argue from evidence: experience, perception etc etc.
 
James1215 said:
My idea of knowledge is not equal to empiricism. Knowledge includes empiricism but empiricism does not include my very reasonable idea of knowledge. Like medicine (empiricism) being a drug (way of getting true statements), but not all drugs (truth) being medicinal (empirically verifiable). The difference is that to know something is a drug (awareness of truth), we have to put it in a human body (find empirical evidence).

Difficult to follow, I know, but hopefully consistent.
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…is self-refuting. For, however it may be formulated, it must involve some general proposition about the dependence of knowledge upon experience; and that any such proposition…
**
No matter how you say it, if you imply that knowledge is dependent on experience, you are making a self refuting logical contradiction, that must necessarily be false as all contradictions are. **Obviously, you want to be a rational person, isn’t that the atheist motivation? To believe what is rational and discard that which is not? To be consistent with that idea you would have to abandon these kind of epistemologies.

The only true statement that can be made about it is that knowledge does not rely on experience.
 
warpspeedpetey said:
How do you know its true? Let me guess physical evidence? Right back to the contradiction it goes.
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That is the crux of the issue. How do you know the truth that that your knowledge is true? In such a case, the only answer can be that an outside agency must convince them that such evidence is true. Empirical evidence is simply to provide information to the mind for its decisions and nothing more. It is cannot be a conclusion in of itself.
 
Or another way of saying what I think:

‘Experience/perception is the only way to verify claims made about perceptible reality’

This appears total because of the broad inclusivity of the term ‘perceptible’. (But what is not perceptible?) I think the sticking point might be my assumption that everything of relevance to these sorts of discussions is indeed perceptible, given that we’re talking about the reality we observe: human life.

The anti-empiricism argument can perhaps be boiled down to this:

‘Experience is the one and only source of information.’ Oh yeah, so what experience gives that information? This is a different position from above.

However, there is another problem that springs to mind, which is that experience and knowledge might be tautologically linked, as knowledge is experiential. This reflects what I think about knowledge anyway - it’s a human thing, humanly held and humanly informed only by what is humanly possible to comprehend. Interesting stuff.
 
James1215 said:
Well we can agree that truth is independent of our perception. I have been saying that all along. However, when we come to having knowledge, we have to know we know!
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Knowing we know is “certainty” not “knowledge”
As you like definitions, I’ll add this from dictionary.com. ‘to know’:
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‘to perceive or understand as fact or truth’
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dictionary.reference.com/browse/know
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…grounding knowledge via empirical evidence, … This makes the BR quote irrelevant. …
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BR said …dependence of knowledge upon experience…“grounding knowledge” is synonymous with “the dependence of knowledge” and “via empirical evidence” is synonymous with “experience”. As he pointed out, it does not matter how you phrase it, the problem is making knowledge dependent on experience. Its always a logical contradiction.

*How is it that the empiricism/verification/falsification schools all failed to find a non-contradictory basis for their claims after decades of feverish work, but you wish to believe anyway? That seems to be so obviously a case of cognitive dissonance that it should be clear to you that you are making claims not justified by reason.
 
Soldier_Of_God said:
Your definition is inconsistent. You’ve equated truth to being as a “way of getting true statements” and to being “truth” itself and having an “awareness of truth” in your statement.
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I think in pics mostly, did he just tri-quivicate? The tertiary of equivocate. You just invented a new subfallacy. Can I call it triquivication? lol
 
warpspeedpetey said:
No matter how you say it, if you imply that knowledge is dependent on experience, you are making a self refuting logical contradiction
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No! It doesn’t work to pretend that my position (B) is (A) and then say (A) is wrong therefore I am wrong no matter how I discuss this. It is you who keep chopping up what I am saying to make it fit the contradiction!

Philosophy turns on the meaning of single words. It’s like me saying this: you think there is a case for a Just War therefore you support war. However you phrase it “There are circumstances under which a country, if legitimately ruled, can make war”, what you are really saying is this:

“… a country … can make war”

And then I’d hit you with Thou Shalt Not Kill.

No, this is not the way to have a discussion.

I think the problem is this. You say knowledge does not rely upon experience, when only part of that is true. Saying a true statement does not depend upon experience. Knowing it is true depends upon perceiving evidence that the statement is true. If the statement can be demonstrated to be true without evidence, ie with reason alone, I think it tells us nothing about the perceptible world because it is merely elaborating a tautological system.
warpspeedpetey said:
The only true statement that can be made about it is that knowledge does not rely on experience.
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warpspeedpetey said:
I think in pics mostly, did he just tri-quivicate? The tertiary of equivocate. You just invented a new subfallacy. Can I call it triquivication? lol
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I’ll call up Merriam-Webster and we’ll give you credit for the word. 😃
 
P.S. Read #166, there is the difference between my position and empiricism laid bare.
 
Soldier_Of_God said:
That is the crux of the issue. How do you know the truth that that your knowledge is true? In such a case, the only answer can be that an outside agency must convince them that such evidence is true. Empirical evidence is simply to provide information to the mind for its decisions and nothing more. It is cannot be a conclusion in of itself.
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Since all knowledge is at some point in the chain of reasoning axiomatic or inductive, we don’t. There is no such thing as absolutecertainty. But as long as we accept the basic laws of logic, then we are as certain as we can be of its truth statements. The senses are informative, but untrustworthy, as Descartes pointed out.
 
James1215 said:
No! It doesn’t work to pretend that my position (B) is (A) and then say (A) is wrong therefore I am wrong no matter how I discuss this. It is you who keep chopping up what I am saying to make it fit the contradiction!
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I am chopping it up because it fits the contradiction. The removal of the extraneous features features makes it obvious.
I think the problem is this.
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The problem is that any time you try to make knowledge dependent on experience it self refutes. You don’t seem to be able to admit this very obvious and well known fact.
 
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