romansh

In a pedantic way ... no.
But lets say for the moment I'm not pedantic ... OK, yes for the sake of argument

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danarch

11 pages is a bit much to read through.

i cannot speak for everyone. no one can. i do not deny knowledge. until i see proof of the existence/non-existence of any deity it will not be knowledge.

withhold belief....withhold....from what? must i believe? says who? if your belief is formed from knowledge, guess what, is not a belief. its a fact. it sounds like your not sure that you beliefs are based on facts...wait...you wouldn't have to believe anymore if they were facts. AGNOSTICFORUMS.com would not exist if your beliefs were facts. do yourself a favor and just accept that possibilities exist about god and not facts.

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Remster

Danarch

The usual starting-point philosophical definition of knowledge is 'justified true belief'. In this context, 'belief' signifies any sort of thinking-that-something-is-the-case; it doesn't imply 'faith'. You need to read my initial post with this clarification in mind.

Moreover, if you wish to be included in this discussion, you'll need to read other contributors' posts a little more carefully and not jump to conclusions about their intentions. I've no religious axe to grind. This is purely a discussion about the ambiguity of 'agnostic' and about epistemology.

Remster

Remster

Rom

What if I throw out the vases and refer to red/white walls instead?

• a white wall in red light seen through clear lenses
• a white wall in white light seen through red lenses
• a red wall in white light seen through clear lenses

Do you agree, even being pedantic, that these will all seem the same to the person seeing (assuming he has no prior beliefs about what's what colour and conducts no further investigations)?

• a hallucination of a white wall in red light seen through clear lenses
• a hallucination of a white wall in white light seen through red lenses
• a hallucination of a red wall in white light seen through clear lenses

Do you agree, even being pedantic, that these three hallucinations will be identical to each other?

If not, what distinctions would you draw? I don't want you to have to suspend disbelief for the sake of argument.

Rem

Remster

Pseudonous

Ignore the reference to phenomenalism. I was just signalling that I was in vaguely familiar territory (or so I thought).

I take it for granted that truth is a prerequisite of knowledge. Can you explain what is involved in the truth of a statement about a scientific model? Apparently the statement 'Evolution began billions of years ago' (taken as a statement about a scientific model) isn't true if and only if (using ordinary language) evolution began billions of years ago, or else it would be a description of the past. And apparently it isn't true if and only if (using ordinary language) there is and will be such-and-such a fossil record, or else it would be a description of the present and future. I'm not being awkward here: I really don't know what sort of beast a scientific model is supposed to be.

Remster

romansh

Rem .... the words 'would' and 'identical'

what in this world is truly identical perhaps with the exception isotopes of the same element and sub atomic particles, and even then I don't have hard evidence?

I agree the three experiences could be (very) similar. Rom

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There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ........... Douglas Adams

Remster

Rom

With regard to the walls, I said they'd seem the same and not that they'd be the same. What differences might there be between how they'd seem?

With regard to hallucinations, all I'm getting at is that a single hallucination could satisfy all three descriptions. No?

Rem

pseudonous

I think I see what you are saying. One way to handle this is to refer to scientific models as correct/incorrect and statements within a model as consistent/inconsistent rather than as true/false. Then you can say the statement 'Evolution began billions of years ago' is consistent even if it isn't true that evolution began billions of years ago. Likewise, we can say that the theory of evolution is correct even if it isn't true that evolution began billions of years ago. To elaborate a bit, the statement is consistent if it does not contradict other statements within that model and the model is correct if it is the best fit to all the relevant observations available for consideration.

With this language we are reserving truth to refer to matters of fact e.g. whether it is the case that evolution really began billions of years ago. That is when we say "x is true" we are saying "it is the case that x".

You might not want to take this for granted. If we do define truth as 'to be the case that' and truth was a necessary prerequisite of knowledge, then no knowledge of the natural world would be possible. Consider that every thing we refer to as scientific knowledge comes from inductive reasoning and that inductive reasoning is not truth preserving. From this we would have to discount all scientific knowledge as real knowledge. Furthermore, deductive reasoning while truth preserving can not tell us anything about the world around us. At least it can't tell us anything that we don't already know. Finally, all our direct observations about the world come to us through our senses and are also questionable. So while we may have beliefs and they may be justified we would never know if they were true and therefore could not claim anything as knowledge.

One way to avoid this problem is to use the pragmatic definition of truth; That is something is true if it is useful. With this language we can say the statement 'Evolution began billions of years ago' is true if and only if evolution began billions of years ago, since in both cases we are using a pragmatic definition of truth. Of course, with this language you can no longer refer to things as they actually are as is common in ordinary language. Then again you can consider truth a necessary part of knowledge and still use knowledge to refer to things that are commonly taken to be knowledge in ordinary language.

I'm sure there are many other ways to think about scientific models but I've probably rambled on enough and in the end it is best to just refer to scientific theories as descriptive explanations and leave the philosophies behind it to the individual.

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romansh

Rem
OK yes... (qualified) but lets move on
rom

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There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ........... Douglas Adams

Remster

Pseudonous

Everything in your last post is familiar and intelligible to me, so don't worry about having 'rambled on'. But it reminds me of the dictum (Nelson Goodman's?) that if you call chickens 'tables', it's easy to prove that tables lay eggs.

I'll get on to that in a minute, but first I want to comment on this:
Yes, and that's precisely my position – sometimes called 'agnosticism', sometimes called 'scepticism'. But if you recall where this thread started, my 'denying knowledge' doesn't entail my 'withholding belief', because I don't feel the need to align what I believe with what I know. This isn't to say I don't feel the need to justify my beliefs; but justification comes in degrees, and it's just the extreme degree required for knowledge that I think we can't generally attain.

Now, back to chickens and tables. You elicit the proposal that we define 'true' as 'useful' to avoid the agnostic/sceptical conclusion. You also hint at an alternative, namely that we redefine 'knowledge' as 'justified correct/consistent belief'. Either of these options would enable us to say that we have knowledge of the natural world. But what's the point? When you say 'One way to avoid this problem is to use the pragmatic definition of truth', I imagine someone, struggling to prove that tables lay eggs, declaring 'One way to avoid this problem is to use the ornithological definition of tables'. You earn the right to use a certain form of words but at the cost of depriving them of the meaning that made their use interesting and contentious in the first place.

Remster

PS As discussed with Romansh, religious beliefs have their own sort of 'usefulness' too, of course.