It is not all that infrequent here at TSZ that some opponent of theism or ID makes a statement that makes me scratch my head and wonder how it is possible that they could make such a statement. This OP explores a recent example.
Cartesian scepticism, more impressed with Descartes’ argument for scepticism than his own reply, holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects which we normally think affect our senses.
– A Companion to Epistemology, p. 457
Imagine my surprise when I found keiths (a self-identified “Cartesian Skeptic”) appealing to the senses.
The big difference between moral and factual judgments is that the former funnel down to a single “point of failure” — the conscience — while the latter do not. That doesn’t mean that the latter can’t be wrong, of course, but it does raise the bar for error.
…
Of course, even if you do all the things I listed in order to confirm that your monitor is there, you still don’t know (without the asterisk) that it’s there. The Cartesian demon might be fooling you, or you might be an envatted brain.
But at least your judgment depends on multiple sensory channels rather than on a single faculty like the conscience.
Is keiths assuming there’s only one demon and that demon can only stimulate one of his senses at a time?
Of course, noting the inconsistency of keiths, I felt compelled to speak up.
…what makes you think that multiple sensory channels is better than one, or better than a conscience?
While we still await a response from keiths (who always defends his claims) a good buddy of keiths, Richardthughes, took up the challenge.
consilience (The same reason science is better than the bible)
Wikipedia article on Consilience
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer.
[Patrick, if you need help with those links let me know. Don’t just claim that they do not exist.]
For a “Cartesian Skeptic”, how is it that multiple sensory channels is better than “a single faculty like the conscience”?
How does “consilience” come to the rescue of the Cartesian Skeptic? Consilience is based upon the unity of knowledge, and it would seem to me that there must be something that bring about this unity. How is the “consilience” of the senses brought about? Perhaps Richardthughes is just confused. Maybe keiths will come to the rescue of his wingman.
walto,
Absolute certainty is impossible. It’s a red herring.
The issue is whether we can know — without being certain, of course — that our senses are veridical.
The answer is no. To assume that they are veridical, as you and KN would like to do, is to make the same mistake as the Sentinel Islander.
It’s bad reasoning.
I think that was the spider. I believe Betsy was the cow. But what do I know, I could be in a VR-world-without-representations.
Said with the absolute conviction of a zealot.
Why would he need to do that, unless you are conflating sense and perception?
Again.
I remind you again that your “argument” is about whether we can know our senses are veridical, not our perceptions.
Our senses could be completely untrustworthy, yet our perceptions could still be utterly infallible. Unless you think the two are the same. Do you?
Yes, it was. You appear to have no answer and resort to trying to shift the burden of proof. That’s dodging.
He wrote one once, while sipping virtual milk milked by a milky white maiden from a milky white cow in a virtual machine.
And your argument is that we cannot know that our senses are veridical because we cannot know that our perceptions are veridical?
And you have demonstrated this how?
By positing the existince of beings who are not us, who do not have our senses nor our perceptions, and claiming we cannot know we are not them?
Therefore we cannot know our perceptions and out senses are reliable?
Seriously, is that your argument?
keiths, can you tell us how you managed to stuff a real, actual cow into your computer program? Did it go willingly?
Flossie, I think.
It’s definitely not a red herring, Tim–the claim is completely apposite in this context. Furthermore, whether or not it’s impossible (which it seems to me is something that on your view you can’t know), you absolutely ARE requiring it (though you seem not to be able to grasp that).
In sum, there are at least two, and likely three errors in your last post. Now go and admit them in your psychopath thread.
walto,
Got an argument to go with those assertions?
keiths,
Asked and answered, several dozen times. Gloria.
What’s missing has been a single iota of support from you that it follows from the fact that one might be wrong about P that one doesn’t know P. You’ve been asked for that about 100 times. The silence has been deafening.
walto,
Okay, then link to one of the “several dozen.”
Or find an excuse not to.
My excuses not to are (i) that I’ve explained this matter to you several dozen times already and you either can’t or won’t understand or pretend you haven’t seen them, so there’s obviously no point; and (ii) Since I’ve done this for you so many times they’re easy to find. The site is riddled with my explanations of how knowledge actually works–both to you and to FMM.
So, Now Glen, what is YOUR excuse for failing to EVER support your view at all?
How very brave of you, walto.
Still waiting, Dustin.
It’s true that — as a friend of mine pointed out earlier today — if one insists that one doesn’t have knowledge unless one has eliminated the possibility of being wrong, then no one knows anything. If all claims to knowledge are understood as fully accurate and non-perspectival claims about the world, then all knowledge claims are false. (The ancient Skeptics held that kind of view, and so did Nietzsche. Rorty came close to it, too.)
That said, I do think that when we’re fortunate enough to robust-enough convergence across multiple assumptions and multiple perspectives, we’re warranted in believing that we are tracking a real and robust regularity. (The Sentinel Islander in keiths’s thought experiment can’t satisfy those epistemic conditions. We can, at least sometimes.)
I think that most of what we would like to know is closely tied to our practical projects, and to deeper assumptions about how things really are. Locally, I think we do really well in picking out regularities that are useful for us (where the “us” can construed flexibly, in terms of both of human-specific interests as well as far more parochial ones). And the social structure of knowledge makes it true that we’ll settle on practices of expression and uptake that shape a local space of locally-useful knowledge. But we make a mistake, I think, when we infer a global pattern from these local regularities. There may be a global pattern there, and it might be one that we’d all hit on if we all talked to one another about things. But maybe not (that’s the fallibilist claim, I guess).
The problem is that we’re really bad at distinguishing between locally salient patterns and globally significant real patterns, which is another way of saying that good science is difficult and rare. Any strategy we develop for doing so is itself going to be a locally useful one, which is to say that we can never be fully warranted in asserting, sans caveats, that what we know satisfies the Platonic epistemic standard.
What keiths doesn’t seem to appreciate is that one can say all the fallibilist stuff that he seems to want to say without going all the way into Humean skepticism and saying that I can’t know that there’s a coffee-cup in front of me because I can’t eliminate the possibility that my sense-data are being caused by an evil genius.
I haven’t gotten the sense that keiths acts against the appearance of reality, the stone kick.
But there are areas of experimental psychology, of neuroscience, and of physics, that require that we question what we perceive and ask whether there is some other level of knowledge that might be useful.
We certainly couldn’t build computers without using non-intuitive understandings of materials.
Sure, “other [read: higher] levels of knowledge” would be great. The particular level that Karla is looking for is one that is inconsistent with her being deceived [read: wrong], i.e., one that requires absolute certainty. Unfortunately human beings don’t get that. We make do with plain old fallible KNOWLEDGE.
Knowledge is what science grubs around in the dirt for.
But I think 20th century physics and neuroscience make that knowledge less complete than thought by previous centuries, and less certain. I’m not trying to push woo, but I also don’t like having the right to imagine alternate views of reality.
In my clumsy hands it’s entertainment. In the hands of mathematicians and physicists, it’s occasionally enlightening and useful.
KN,
I don’t insist on certainty. I think absolute certainty is a myth, so insisting on it would be pointless.
We’ve been over this before, of course:
KN:
keiths:
walto,
Don’t forget to answer this:
walto:
keiths:
KN,
Yesterday you wrote:
I asked:
How do you respond? What procedure can you follow to establish that there really is a cow or a coffee cup in front of you, and that you are not being systematically fooled?
Sheila, don’t forget to answer…ANYTHING.
In Keitha’s hands, it’s gibberish.
Clearly there no such procedures to guarantee against logically possible deceptions. That much we agree on. But why should there be?
If you want to say that the difference between knowledge and knowledge* is that the former is guaranteed against logically possible deceptions and the latter is not, then it seems to me that you are asking for what we can call “epistemically ideal conditions.”
Epistemically ideal conditions are conditions that eliminate the possibility of error: knowledge under epistemically ideal conditions is ideally justified (no further reasons could possibly be given for rejecting this belief) and ideally true (the content of the cognitive act is isomorphic with the ultimate structure of reality).
If I believe that I am seeing a cow, and my conditions are epistemically ideal, then even God Himself (or any omniscient being) believes that I am seeing a cow, because I really am in direct cognitive contact with the cow qua constituent of ultimate reality.
The question is, however, this: why should we believe that knowledge that is not epistemically ideal fails to count as genuine knowledge? What’s the point of introducing “knowledge*” to indicate epistemically non-ideal conditions?
As I see it, since no finite being could possibly satisfy epistemically ideal conditions, the asterisk does not add anything. The function of the asterisk would be to distinguish the kind of knowledge that actually matters to finite and fallible cognitive agents — to us or beings like us — from the kind of knowledge that only an omniscient being could have, if there are any.
But I fail to see the purpose of making that distinction, let alone insisting on it, let alone that introducing an asterisk into our use of the word “knowledge” helpful for making that distinction. It’s sufficient to note that we’re fallible cognitive agents, and that we’re unable to satisfy the Platonic standard.
What makes a difference to us is that our knowledge-claims satisfy “humanly actualizable epistemically ideal conditions”, e.g. that we’ve considered multiple lines of evidence, detected convergence and consilience, have inquired into actual and potential sources of evidence, applied the canons of induction where relevant, taken into account marginalized perspectives, and so on.
Fulfilling our epistemic duties — as reasonable and rational animals that comprise a community of finite inquirers in an uncertain world — that our knowledge claims are not mere opinion, unreflective tradition, or self-serving ideology does not require that we also satisfy the epistemic conditions that only omniscient beings could satisfy.
keiths always supports his claims. Always*. Except when he doesn’t.
Fixed that.
It isn’t about what we perceive, it’s about our senses.
KN,
For fuck’s sake, KN. This isn’t about certainty, or guarantees, or “epistemically ideal conditions.” Knowledge doesn’t require those. I’ve been telling you this for months, and I told you again today.
Why are you ignoring what I write?
Suppose you perceive a cow in front of you. To know that the cow is really there, you need to know that your perception is veridical in this case. You don’t have to be certain of it, and absolute certainty is impossible anyway. You don’t need a guarantee, because you don’t need certainty. You don’t need “epistemically ideal conditions”, either — you just need to know that your perception is veridical in this case.
The problem is that you don’t know that, and there is no way to establish it.
It isn’t just that you aren’t absolutely certain, or that you don’t have a guarantee, or that conditions aren’t “epistemically ideal”. It’s that you don’t know that your perception is veridical in this instance.
If you disagree — that is, if you think that you can determine that your perception of the cow is veridical, with enough likelihood to justify a knowledge claim — then tell us how.
First, keiths hasn’t given an argument for Cartesian Skepticism that isn’t a non sequitur.
Second, he conflates sense and perception.
Third, virtual cows* are not cows. If you see something on your screen that looks like a cow, trust me, it is not a cow. Even Gateway got that part right.
A series of ‘1’s and ‘0’s in a computer is not a cow. Ever.
Converting them to pixels on a monitor doesn’t turn them into a cow. Ever.
Moo.
keiths has yet to defended this claim, which was the point of the OP.
A Cartesian Skeptic appealing to multiple sensory channels. Who woulda thunk it.
We can’t prevent keiths from declaring his Cartesian Skepticism, but we can sure question whether it’s even coherent.
It most certainly is!
Sorry. It just tickles the hell out of me every time keiths says this.
And each time with increasing conviction!
Revelation, 😉
You can know your perception of the cow is veridical if this particular perception is a gift from a being who is all knowing, all powerful and all good.
Before you ask the inevitable followup question
You can know a particular perception is a gift from God if he reveals that information to you. etc….. etc…… etc
world with out end amen
peace
There you go again with the “we”s and “us”es. Who the hell else wants to know? Who the hell else cares? Consequences??? What’s the point? (Apart from film plots!)
Descartes mistake was in beginning in the wrong place. You can’t get epistemic certainty when your foundation is human
peace
Alan,
Same answer as before:
Alan:
keiths:
Now run along and play with cousin Mung.
Who then? Be honest, now.
It’s ok Alan, I have some really cool toys. 🙂
fifth,
And the inevitable followup to your followup to the inevitable followup is that you can’t know that it’s a genuine revelation versus a fifthmonarchyman brain fart.
The dialogue certainly seems to repeat endlessly, anyway.
So many mistakes in here that it’s hard to know where to begin. First, if you are “perceiving a cow in front of you” then there IS a cow in front of you. So you didn’t actually mean that, but something like “seem to be perceiving a cow in front of you.”
Secondly, the claim that we don’t know that our perception is veridical either requires that absolute certainty is necessary for knowledge (which you deny), or it begs the question against fallibalistic knowledge being present. We have asked you countless times why you think that you can’t know P just because not-P is possible, and you don’t/can’t answer it. You either beg the question, or simply assume that which you explicitly deny, which is that knowledge requires certainty. Here you’re allowing us to pick between whether you are begging the question or contradicting yourself.
I’ll take the curtain, Joshua!
walto, you can come and play with Alan and I, even if you aren’t my cousin.
No WAY! You two are TOXIC. You’ll never admit your mistakes!!!
Crap. And I KNEW it was a mistake to invite you!
ETA: I won’t make that mistake again!
And the inevitable answer is “Sure you can if God reveals it to you.”
quote:
Let all the house of Israel therefore…………. know for certain………… that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
(Act 2:36)
and
Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
(Joh 8:47)
end quote:
peace
I’m not ignoring anything you write. I think that what you write does not make sense.
I shall attempt to illustrate for you the contradiction in which you have found yourself.
Think about it this way.
Suppose I take myself to be perceiving a cow. Maybe there are grounds for real doubt. Maybe I’m too far away, and I can’t make it out clearly enough. Maybe my eyes aren’t good. Maybe I’m in a part of the world where I’ve been told that cows look different than what I’m used to.
These are all grounds for real doubt.
Now, can I resolve that doubt — which is to say, can I inquire? Maybe I can walk over to where the cow is, and once I’m close enough, I can not only see the cow’s features clearly, but also hear it and smell it. Maybe I can walk up to it and touch it, if I know how to interact with cows.
If I’m with another person, we can talk about the cow that we’re perceiving. (And if my friend says that she doesn’t see any cows about, whereas I do, then there’s going to be a new inquiry into what’s gone wrong!)
All of these are perfectly sane, normal, ordinary ways in which we establish that the sensory modalities of our perceptual capacities are disclosing a world that we have discovered and not made.
Multimodal sensory integration allows for what Steven Horst calls ‘epistemic triangulation’ on objects; sensorimotor integration allows for a more robust way of reliably tracking local salient patterns; and in human beings, linguistic communication allows for an intersubjective grasp of a shared objective world, because differently embodied and embedded perspectives can be cognitively integrated in shared mental models.
Consider the following (non-exhaustive, but strongly suggestive) list of humanly achievable epistemically ideal conditions — conditions that are known to be conducive to resolving doubt and which are achievable by most human beings or beings with cognitive power similar to ours.
– I am with someone whose sensory capacities are well within the human norm and with whom I share a language, plus I have a reasonable expectation of truthfulness from her;
– both my friend and I have good eyesight, hearing, and smell;
– we’re both in a good physical proximity to the cow in order to perceive given our sensory modalities and we know that we are in favorable conditions for making the correct observations (it’s not that we have poor eyesight and don’t know it, or that we don’t know that someone with our kind of eyesight cannot clearly make out a cow at this distance, etc.)
– we both have good-enough multimodal sensory integration and sensorimotor integration — we can both see and hear the animal, etc.; as we move towards, around, or away from the animal, our sensory flows are correlated in lawlike ways that are consistent with our sensorimotor transactions with other physical objects;
– we both know how to use the word “cow” correctly (or its equivalent in whatever language we’re speaking or signing);
– neither of us is suffering from any mental illness or drug-induced disturbances to bottom-up sensory information flow or top-down conceptual integration;
– and we agree that what we are perceiving is a cow;
– and we also know that cyborg or robotic cows are beyond the reach of current technology, have no reason to believe that there are aliens living on earth disguised as cows, etc.
then, if you want to say that even under these humanly actualizable epistemically ideal conditions, where all ground for real doubt has been eliminated and there is nothing to motivate further inquiry, it’s still the case that I can’t know that my senses are veridical because I might be deceived by an evil demon, might be in the Matrix, might be living in a computer simulation, etc. —
— then it seems glaringly obvious to me that you are indeed insisting that one is entitled to assert that the senses are veridical only under epistemically ideal conditions that no human being could ever possibly satisfy.
And since you flatly deny that you are doing so, I think that your entire view is hopelessly contradictory.
As I have said before you are not far from the Kingdom, 😉
All that is missing from your understanding is a sense of objectivity that comes from “linguistic communication” ie communion with the divine.
peace
walto,
We’ve been over this already:
walto:
keiths:
walto,
That’s not my position. It astonishes me that you’re still confused about this after months of discussion.
“I know that P” isn’t undermined by the mere possibility of not-P. It’s undermined by the fact that we have no idea of the likelihood of P or not-P.
Here’s that dialogue again:
fifth,
keiths:
fifth:
And the answer to that is “You don’t know that God is revealing it to you. You may think that he is, but you don’t know it.”
If you disagree, then explain how you can distinguish between the following:
1. God revealed something to you.
2. You think God revealed something to you, but he didn’t.