Kantian Naturalist: You simply have not provided any account of truth, reason, and logic. Until you do, there is no reason for me to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has anything at all to do with God.
Some initial first thoughts.
What would it mean to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic? Don’t all of us take all three of these for granted?
Can science settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about the question?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about science?
Who were the first scientists to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Who were the first philosophers to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Is the argument that because someone has not provided an account of truth, reason, and logic there is therefore no reason to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has nothing at all to do with God a non-sequitur?
What is true. What is logical. What is reasonable. Are these not all inter-twined? Which of these can we dispense with while retaining the others?
Look for the man in the raincoat on a hot summer day with no cloud in the sky.
Actually, that does not follow.
Since we are all fallible, anything we believe could be wrong. This is where skepticism leaves us. No one can know anything at all. Yet you claim to know that fifth is wrong, which is something you cannot possibly know. Why on earth are you a skeptic, Patrick?
In order for knowledge to be possible, there must be something that can be known infallibly. The only candidate for infallibility is God.
Ergo, you know that Gods exists, or you know nothing at all.
Because to withhold the truth is to be less than completely truthful.
You don’t know what is real and what isn’t. You can’t even know that the beliefs you think you hold are actually your beliefs. I would not want to be a skeptic.
Um, no. You have just contradicted yourself.
Perhaps you should expand your horizons. To be without error would be Godlike.
Patrick will be posting a rule about what atheism means here at TSZ. Atheists who do not agree with his rigorous definition of atheism will be shunned.
Yes, you have a rather narrow and provisional definition of skepticism. It doesn’t mean, “what I don’t want to believe.”
Do you have any objective empirical evidence to support this claim? There can be no religions that lack gods?
Correct. But why doesn’t Patrick know this? god is not a genera, of which “The Christian God” is a species.
According to Patrick, if you are agnostic, you are an atheist. There is no room for agnosticism in Patrickatheism.
Slow down, just because we can’t be absolutely sure doesn’t mean we can’t know anything. Being fallible doesn’t mean everything we know is false either
Fifth could be right, but he can’t be certain .People are fallible when it comes to God revealing stuff or there would be one religion. Now that would be an argument for the existence of God
That would require faith.
Ergo even if God exists you may know nothing at all ,you can’t be certain.
Does Patrick understand this? Does he deny it? Patrick, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
If Patrick can’t see it, or touch it, or smell it, or taste it, it cannot exist.
If Patrick can see it, or touch it, or smell it, or taste it, it cannot be God.
We’re waiting for you to demonstrate that you have a provable basis for your position. How do you prove doubt and lack of belief?
Do you have any objective empirical evidence to support this claim?
How do you know what is real and what is not real?
Must be the top play in the playbook.
Please provide the objective empirical evidence that supports this claim.
In principle, God is detectable. What you fail to provide is a principle under which God is not detectable.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Yet you failed to produce any of that evidence.
Can anyone else hear some sort of noise, a bit like a mosquito?
Yes, but even mosquitoes are right sometimes. Patrick is as dogmatic as any religious fanatic.
I found it. (It’s “Shklar” though).
http://philpapers.org/rec/SHKTLO
hallelujah
That sound you hear is the birth of another Presupositionalist. 😉
peace
Really? That’s a mess. What’s God supposed to be there–the infallible knower? that which is known infallibly? both? Why does any of that follow, especially for one who consistently claims that knowledge does NOT imply certainty/infallibility?
Seems like you’ll pretty much assent to anything if you like the conclusion.
Presuppositionalists must be born in irremediable sin, I’m afraid.
That is an interesting question. I’d love to discuss it but alas this is apparently not the place for those kinds of deep enjoyable discussions
peace
God is the infallable knower who can make himself known
I don’t have to be certain to know, but in order for me to know God is revealing reveal truth to me he needs to be infallable.
peace
Actually, it follows directly.
All knowledge is provisional and subject to revision in the light of new observations.
That’s a requirement for absolute knowledge. Relying as it does on a being for which there is no evidence whatsoever, the rational conclusion is that absolute knowledge is not possible. Live with it.
That response does not describe what you mean by “error” existing.
Of course there is, as I’ve already explained.
Knowledge and belief are not synonyms.
Not by the definition Kantian Naturalist is using in the context of this sub-thread.
I’m not the one making claims about gods here, despite your attempts to suggest otherwise. You, like fifthmonarchyman, are apparently simply trying to distract from the lack of substance of what is being challenged.
Robin asked:
To which fifthmonarchyman replied:
A better question: if some deity revealed something to someone, how would that someone know that the information came from that deity? Short of a face-to-face encounter, that is…
sean s.
OK. But again, short of a face-to-face encounter with your deity, how do you know the information was revealed to you by your deity?
sean s.
That’s a mess!
First, it’s just not true that “if no one knows everything, then no one knows anything.” That’s not logically correct.
[To see the error, lightly regiment: “if there does not exist a person for whom all things are known, then there does not exist a person from whom anything is known”]
Second, it trades on a conflation on fallibilism and skepticism. Fallibilism is simply the position that any item of empirical known might be overturned on the basis of new discoveries, theories, models, explanations, or — in more extreme cases — “paradigm shifts”. But also, and likewise, that any item of a priori knowledge might be overturned if we were to discover a flaw in a theorem, or develop a new branch of mathematics which led to revisions in what we thought we knew. (As indeed happened with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries in the 19th century, and the debate between logical pluralism and logical monism is at the forefront of contemporary research in logical theory.)
We can specify concepts like “true”, “justified”, and “deductively valid” to a conceptual framework perfectly well. We’ve been doing that for “true” since Carnap, for “justified” since Sellars, and for “deductively valid” since C. I. Lewis. Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom have built on those ideas in impressive ways.
The hard question is whether or not we — finite and fallible creatures as we are! — have any cognitive grip on non-anthropocentric criteria for assessing whether one conceptual framework is more adequate than another. Can we construct an explanation of what cognition is, in rerum natura, such that we can vindicate the idea that successive conceptual frameworks are increasingly adequate to the structure of reality?
Sellars, for one, thought so. As did his former student Jay Rosenberg. Rorty, on the other hand, accepts much of Sellars’s epistemology but sides with Quine against Sellars on this specific point.
I think that I am willing to accept something like “a conceptual framework wholly adequate to the structure of reality” as a regulative ideal for scientific inquiry, but there are highly compelling reasons to believe that it will be forever out of our reach.
In other words, look for a fool.
Having come late to this game I apologize if I replow this ground, but when did “knowledge” come to refer to something absolutely correct? Absolutely certain?
Knowledge is just a word: it signifies the category of beliefs that are justified by evidence or reason. Somethings we categorize as “knowledge” may be absolutely correct; some may be erroneous because of information we don’t have. We really cannot distinguish those two, we can only do our fallible best.
Knowledge is not a category of absolutely, infallibly true facts, it’s a category of beliefs justified by evidence or reason.
Knowledge, as I have presented it is obviously possible. Knowledge as Mung appears to regard it is something we can never be certain we have.
I don’t disagree, but how does Mung (or anyone) know that statement is true? Only by evidence or reason.
How do you prove doubt and lack of belief in others? You cannot.
How do you prove doubt and lack of belief in yourself? You don’t need to.
If you say you have doubt, or lack faith, and make no comments that contradict that claim, then the rest of us have no reason to disagree.
Patrick made a negative assertion. If you think there IS a reason to consider claims that, even in principle, cannot be tested, experienced, or have any impact on reality, then it’s on you to provide the argument for that reason.
You would be the one claiming to know there is such a reason.
Similarly when you say to Patrick that,
You are claiming to know something. It’s on you to share. No one can prove you don’t know except by noticing that you don’t ever substantiate your claims; which is actually a pretty good reason to doubt you.
sean s.
I believe Mung was making a joke about someone who enjoys revealing himself. He actually does demonstrate the capacity for humor on occasion.
Welcome to TSZ, by the way!
🙂
Don’t I at least get an E for effort?
Where are you in the Rosenberg book? My copy came in yesterday. I’ll probably read Chapter 1 shortly.
Do you think that’s how Patrick is using the term “fallible” when he claims that fifth is fallible? If it is, then he is making a category error.
His objection to fifth is simply not relevant because fifth’s claim has nothing to do with Patrick’s empiricism.
Not only that, he [Patrick] would also be claiming that there is only one kind of knowledge, “empirical knowledge.”
No, I think Patrick is using the term in a much broader sense, in which case it actually does become a barrier to knowing anything at all. Let’s hope that Patrick is fallible and has this one wrong. 🙂
Patrick thinks fifth is fallible. But is Patrick not equally fallible?
Patrick thinks fallibility is a defeater for justification. How does he manage to limit the damage such that it’s only a defeater for some knowledge and not all knowledge?
Who revealed this to you?
What reason is there to believe that even a face-to-face encounter would suffice? What does the face of a deity look like and how would fifth know that this face is the face of his deity? My point here, is that you are mistaken.
Face to face has nothing to do with anything and no conclusion can be drawn from the absence of a face to face meeting.
Of course, fifth can turn things around on you and claim that when God reveals something it is in essence a face to face meeting between the person and the God, and then where will you be?
Patrick,
Does this take Universal Common Descent off the table as a discussion topic?
Of course not, for the obvious reasons. You’ve been participating mostly rationally here thus far, don’t be influenced by phoodoo.
As a start, could you tell me where the first error is on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent
?
Patrick,
How can Universal Common Descent be tested?
Don’t be influenced by Patrick, Patrick.
OMagain,
Evidence is not testing. You can’t understand the difference between these two concepts?
There is evidence for a God. Whether or not YOU accept it as credible is another matter.
OMagain just provided an answer to your question two minutes before you posted it.
You did a lot better than most of my students.
I finished it a few weeks ago. These days I’m trying to read frantically before the semester picks up in earnest and I have no time to read anything anymore.
I don’t know what version of fallibilism Patrick is defending.
One point I should have made — and I’ll make now — is that the conditions of justification are the conditions of fallibility, both synchronically and diachronically.
One’s own belief that p is justified if I have adequate reasons for believing that p. But it can’t be a solipsistic affair, judging if those reasons are adequate. It has to be an intersubjective inquiry, seeing if my reasons pass muster according to my epistemic peers, contextualized to the kind of inquiry in which we are all engaged. But just as they can find my reasons acceptable, so too they can find fault in them; they can criticize me, and argue that I haven’t done my epistemic due diligence. To be exposed to the approbation of others is to be exposed to the risk of condemnation as well, and that’s as true in epistemology as it is in ethics.
My objection to FMM’s claims here has been that it is not possible for anyone to confirm them who doesn’t already share them. That means that FMM has isolated himself from the possibility of confirmation and also of criticism. That puts him in an epistemically solipsistic position — from which (he supposes) divine revelation saves him.
Put in a nutshell, FMM’s epistemic community consists of (at most) two people: him and God. My epistemic community is, proximally, my colleagues and friends, but more distally, it encompasses the whole history of humanity stretching back into our evolutionary past.
Not speaking for Patrick, I would turn the point around and say that a belief can only be justified if it is part of the process of fallibility-and-corrigibility (or, it you prefer, trial and error). Justification is just trial and error made social and linguistic — a belief is justified if it has survived enough rounds of testing that we can say that we have adequate reasons for accepting it as true.
That’s not testing Patrick. Its not testing. Testing Patrick, testing, 1,2,3. Do you know what testing means?
If you read the article carefully you will find a descriptive overview of the experiments done to generate the evidence presented. Those experiments and their results constitute a test of common descent. If different results had been observed, common descent would be falsified. That didn’t happen.
Again, what point are you trying to make?