Epistemology. Logic. Data. Inference. Knowledge. Have you ever wondered how it all fits together? I have. A lot. Here's a start at my take. I hope you give these thoughts your brief attention.
Interesting topic, but I would say as they said for millennium “belief precedes knowledge” because if you don’t believe you will never understand. Isn’t there a leap of faith in every knowledge pursuit.
Hi James - thanks for this and I agree that we need to go right back to basics if we are going to avoid disaster. I too have spent my adult life considering these problems, when I was not obliged to waste effort and energy on working for a living. In that spirit may I respectfully mention the Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, 1933, and this passage from the preface to the second edition. I also warmly recommend all his works.
Will Durant wrote: No apology is offered for the neglect of epistemology. That dismal science received its due in the chapter on Kant, where for forty pages the reader was invited to consider the puzzles of perception. This chapter should have pleased the young pundit,for it came very near to obscurity. (However, one professor of philosophy,in a Midwest university, sent in the information that he had been teaching Kant for fifteen years, and had never understood Kant's meaning until he read this elementary chapter.) For the rest, the book suggested unamiably that the nature of the knowledge process was but one of the many problems of philosophy;that this single problem was unfit to absorb the attention which the savants and the Germans had lavished upon it; and that its weary exploitation was largely responsible for the decadence of philosophy. The French have never yielded to this craze for epistemology to the exclusion of moral and political, historical and religious philosophy; and today even the Germans are recovering from it. Hear Keyserling: "Philosophy is essentially the completion of science in the synthesis of wisdom. . . . Epistemology, phenomenology,logic, etc., certainly are important branches of science." (Precisely;they are branches of science, like chemistry or anatomy.) "But it was an unmitigated evil that as the result of this, the sense for the living synthesis should have disappeared." (Creative Understanding, New York, 1929, p. 125.) This from a German a Daniel come to judgment. And Spengler describes the earlier Chinese philosophers, downl The first volume of The Story of Civilization will attempt to atone for this omission.xxiv Preface to the Second Edition to Confucius, as "statesmen, regents, lawgivers,like Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz They were sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology was the knowledge of the important relations of actual life." (Decline of the West, vol. i, p. 42.) Doubtless now that epistemology is dying in Germany,it will be exported to America, as a fit return for the gift of democracy.The Chinese philosophers were not only averse to epistemology,they had an almost Gallic disdain for prolonged metaphysics. No young metaphysician could admit that Confucius is a philosopher,for he says nothing about metaphysics, and less about epistemology; he is as positivistic as Spencer or Comte; his concern is always for morals and the state. Worse than that, he is disreputable intelligible; and nothing could be so damaging to a philosopher. But we ''moderns"have become so accustomed to windy verbiage in philosophy that when philosophy is presented without the verbiage we can with difficulty recognize it. One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other. But this appears to have displeased the pundits; nothing so hurt the book with them as its smiles.A reputation for humor is disastrous to statesmen and philosophers:Germany could not forgive Schopenhauer his story of Unzelmann,and only France has recognized the depth behind the wit and brilliance of Voltaire.I trust that the book never misled its readers into supposing that by reading it they would become philosophers overnight,or that they would be saved the trouble, or pleasure,of reading the philosophers themselves. God knows there is no short-cut to knowledge;after forty years of seeking her one finds "Truth" still veiled, and what she shows of herself most disconcerting. Instead of aiming to be a substitute for philosophers, the Story explicitly offered itself as an introduction and an invitation; it quoted the philosophers lavishly, so that the taste for them might linger when the book was closed; time and again it prodded the reader to the original texts (e. g.,on pp. 22, 67, 121, 289,33 J> 425> 438)
In the course, we'll review my "Levels of Comprehension" - people fail to compartmentalize opinion, observation, evidence, knowledge, (feeling, belief), thinking, and truth all the time. For want of full measure of where we stand on a pathway toward understanding and comprehension, people can be easily mislead and they can also easily mislead themselves (and others) without realizing it. A fully aware map of the landscape of where you stand is not just useful to have; it is necessary, Popper almost had it but refused to include the observer as an essential part of the inferential dynamic (formally), yet there they were, main actors on the stage. I'm not dictating a way of thinking about epistemology but rather providing the tools with which humanity can use reason, empirical science and logic in a profitable manner. The currency is knowledge. Never the truth.
John 14:6: Put it, Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." [IF] you can't handle that Truth? from "Our Creator" [as our founding fathers put it, [at risk of life!] That will make a big difference in where you'll spend your eternity! Remember, this short life is only a test, and most will sadly fail it!
How parasitic Toxoplasma gondii works on cats, fits together with Godless parasitic postmodernism's, "No absolute truths." (Except for postmodernism's, "absolute truths"!) It works on Godless, mindless dumb-down educated suckers and fools! (it's how fools can watch Men beating up Women, in the Satanic Olympics, and feel nothing! (Nothing psychotic there! Right?)
Yes, I have wondered. And I have wondered why so many of my former associates are now traveling down a path that is adversely affecting us. They are in the zone of confirmation bias which is negatively impacting us. I have tried to analyze this and it seems like they are all in uniform lock step following the democratic party. Why would they? People from the peace group, people from the pollinator group, people from the trans group, are all locked in and working toward one thing: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS AGAINST DONALD TRUMP. They attack RFK jr because they fear anyone voting from him will take away from voting against Trump. If they used logic and knowledge and reason then they would be working for RFK jr. They do not even give a thought as to how much pain and sorrow this will cause. It is pure idiocy. The only thing I can even conjecture is that they are in shock from the covid disaster and they need comforted by their own echo chamber.
Possibly ban for-profit medicine, depending on the definition of "profit": https://www.dictionary.com/browse/profit It's as misleading a word as "gain", "mandate", or "income". So as not to lose everyone who must relearn legal definitions, how about abolishing intellectual property other than trademark?
Excellent commentary!
Interesting topic, but I would say as they said for millennium “belief precedes knowledge” because if you don’t believe you will never understand. Isn’t there a leap of faith in every knowledge pursuit.
Only if you confuse knowledge with truth.
Fauci wrote the book on perverting 'science.'
I hope you will include a book by Thomas Nagel, "The Last Word". It went a long way for me in answering such questions.
Can we reason our way to certainty? Nagel provides some argument that we can. But Xenophanes thinks not:
The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.
—Xenophanes
Hi James - thanks for this and I agree that we need to go right back to basics if we are going to avoid disaster. I too have spent my adult life considering these problems, when I was not obliged to waste effort and energy on working for a living. In that spirit may I respectfully mention the Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, 1933, and this passage from the preface to the second edition. I also warmly recommend all his works.
Will Durant wrote: No apology is offered for the neglect of epistemology. That dismal science received its due in the chapter on Kant, where for forty pages the reader was invited to consider the puzzles of perception. This chapter should have pleased the young pundit,for it came very near to obscurity. (However, one professor of philosophy,in a Midwest university, sent in the information that he had been teaching Kant for fifteen years, and had never understood Kant's meaning until he read this elementary chapter.) For the rest, the book suggested unamiably that the nature of the knowledge process was but one of the many problems of philosophy;that this single problem was unfit to absorb the attention which the savants and the Germans had lavished upon it; and that its weary exploitation was largely responsible for the decadence of philosophy. The French have never yielded to this craze for epistemology to the exclusion of moral and political, historical and religious philosophy; and today even the Germans are recovering from it. Hear Keyserling: "Philosophy is essentially the completion of science in the synthesis of wisdom. . . . Epistemology, phenomenology,logic, etc., certainly are important branches of science." (Precisely;they are branches of science, like chemistry or anatomy.) "But it was an unmitigated evil that as the result of this, the sense for the living synthesis should have disappeared." (Creative Understanding, New York, 1929, p. 125.) This from a German a Daniel come to judgment. And Spengler describes the earlier Chinese philosophers, downl The first volume of The Story of Civilization will attempt to atone for this omission.xxiv Preface to the Second Edition to Confucius, as "statesmen, regents, lawgivers,like Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz They were sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology was the knowledge of the important relations of actual life." (Decline of the West, vol. i, p. 42.) Doubtless now that epistemology is dying in Germany,it will be exported to America, as a fit return for the gift of democracy.The Chinese philosophers were not only averse to epistemology,they had an almost Gallic disdain for prolonged metaphysics. No young metaphysician could admit that Confucius is a philosopher,for he says nothing about metaphysics, and less about epistemology; he is as positivistic as Spencer or Comte; his concern is always for morals and the state. Worse than that, he is disreputable intelligible; and nothing could be so damaging to a philosopher. But we ''moderns"have become so accustomed to windy verbiage in philosophy that when philosophy is presented without the verbiage we can with difficulty recognize it. One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other. But this appears to have displeased the pundits; nothing so hurt the book with them as its smiles.A reputation for humor is disastrous to statesmen and philosophers:Germany could not forgive Schopenhauer his story of Unzelmann,and only France has recognized the depth behind the wit and brilliance of Voltaire.I trust that the book never misled its readers into supposing that by reading it they would become philosophers overnight,or that they would be saved the trouble, or pleasure,of reading the philosophers themselves. God knows there is no short-cut to knowledge;after forty years of seeking her one finds "Truth" still veiled, and what she shows of herself most disconcerting. Instead of aiming to be a substitute for philosophers, the Story explicitly offered itself as an introduction and an invitation; it quoted the philosophers lavishly, so that the taste for them might linger when the book was closed; time and again it prodded the reader to the original texts (e. g.,on pp. 22, 67, 121, 289,33 J> 425> 438)
In the course, we'll review my "Levels of Comprehension" - people fail to compartmentalize opinion, observation, evidence, knowledge, (feeling, belief), thinking, and truth all the time. For want of full measure of where we stand on a pathway toward understanding and comprehension, people can be easily mislead and they can also easily mislead themselves (and others) without realizing it. A fully aware map of the landscape of where you stand is not just useful to have; it is necessary, Popper almost had it but refused to include the observer as an essential part of the inferential dynamic (formally), yet there they were, main actors on the stage. I'm not dictating a way of thinking about epistemology but rather providing the tools with which humanity can use reason, empirical science and logic in a profitable manner. The currency is knowledge. Never the truth.
John 14:6: Put it, Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." [IF] you can't handle that Truth? from "Our Creator" [as our founding fathers put it, [at risk of life!] That will make a big difference in where you'll spend your eternity! Remember, this short life is only a test, and most will sadly fail it!
How parasitic Toxoplasma gondii works on cats, fits together with Godless parasitic postmodernism's, "No absolute truths." (Except for postmodernism's, "absolute truths"!) It works on Godless, mindless dumb-down educated suckers and fools! (it's how fools can watch Men beating up Women, in the Satanic Olympics, and feel nothing! (Nothing psychotic there! Right?)
Yes, I have wondered. And I have wondered why so many of my former associates are now traveling down a path that is adversely affecting us. They are in the zone of confirmation bias which is negatively impacting us. I have tried to analyze this and it seems like they are all in uniform lock step following the democratic party. Why would they? People from the peace group, people from the pollinator group, people from the trans group, are all locked in and working toward one thing: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS AGAINST DONALD TRUMP. They attack RFK jr because they fear anyone voting from him will take away from voting against Trump. If they used logic and knowledge and reason then they would be working for RFK jr. They do not even give a thought as to how much pain and sorrow this will cause. It is pure idiocy. The only thing I can even conjecture is that they are in shock from the covid disaster and they need comforted by their own echo chamber.
"We must recruit or develop an army of citizen scientists"
Right there with ya, brother!
Possibly ban for-profit medicine, depending on the definition of "profit": https://www.dictionary.com/browse/profit It's as misleading a word as "gain", "mandate", or "income". So as not to lose everyone who must relearn legal definitions, how about abolishing intellectual property other than trademark?