Let’s have a new topic, preferably one that is not Christian apologetics.
This is mostly intended as a response to a comment by KN, but I think it deserves its own thread.
There’s a recent blog post elsewhere that is related:
- Knowledge and Reality (by Dan Kaufman)
Personally, I think of myself as a realist. But I agree with some of Dan Kaufman’s criticisms of traditional views of reality.
Now my response to KN. The quotes will all be from KN’s comment (linked above).
I think I’m more inclined towards realism about objects than you are. I find this curious because you and I both appreciate Gibson’s work on affordances, and I am a realist about affordances — affordances are real features of the organism-environment relationship But perhaps you are more inclined to think of affordances as “projections” from the organism onto the environment?
I’m not sure I am understanding the point there. Affordances are not objects. Moreover, what counts as an affordance will depend on the knowledge and interests of the person (the perceiver).
“Objects” are that which pushes back against us, thwarts us, offers resistance to our actions.
I’m not sure that’s completely satisfactory. But, ignoring that for the moment, even that conception of objects makes them pragmatic things rather than logical things. And it makes what counts as an object depend on our interactions with the world.
If Nature had no joints at which to be carved, then any criteria for successful action would be equally arbitrary as all other criteria.
I’m not sure that makes sense. The world is not homogeneous, so even arbitrary choices are not equally arbitrary.
I live in Illinois. The border of Illinois and Iowa is the Mississippi river. That could perhaps be considered a seam. But if I look at the border of Illinois and Wisconsin, part of the border is a river, and part of it isn’t (the river was not followed as far as it could be). The part that is not along a river doesn’t seem to fit the idea of seam. Even if there are seams, we are not bound to follow them and often don’t. And where there are no seams, we still carve up the world. So whether or not there are seams isn’t all that important (in my opinion).
If we were trying to define the boundary of Illinois and Iowa today, we would probably do that in terms of GPS coordinates, rather than using the river. The way that we divide the world depends on our abilities.
And here’s where I largely disagree:
So while we should always be on guard against the assumption that any theory correctly describes the structure of reality, we really cannot do away with the assumption that reality does indeed have an intelligible structure, and indeed one that is knowable by us because our cognitive capacities are a part of that structure and informed by its history.
If I climb a rock, I look for footholds. I don’t doubt that the footholds are real enough to support my weight. But the footholds are not part of the structure of the rock, they are just accidental inhomogeneities. That they are footholds derives from my pragmatic choices, from my temporizing. If the rock were completely smooth, I would not be able to climb it (or maybe I could find some glue pads, and then climb with those).
I see nature as like that, in that it is not homogeneous. So we can find something like footholds that we can use to anchor our descriptions. But that does not make those anchor points part of the structure of reality.
Here’s where I disagree with Gibson. According to Gibson, we pickup information from the immediate environment. I used to think that way, but it doesn’t work. The better view is that the environment is devoid of information. We create information. Part of what the brain does is creating information. We (or our perceptual systems) use whatever “footholds” or “anchor points” that we can find to anchor some sort of practical coordinate system to reality. And then the mathematics that we see in science comes from the very mathematical way that we have used those coordinate systems to systematically divide up the world.
When I look at scientific laws, a large part of these laws have to do with anchoring our coordinate systems and using those anchored systems to allow us to make measurements (making a measurement creates Shannon information).
When I look at Maxwell’s equations, they allow one to derive the wave equation. From that, we can conclude that our measurements of electromagnetic phenomena satisfy the wave equation. I don’t think it means anything to say that light itself satisfies the wave equation.
So now think of water waves. If I’m right about information, then perception works by virtue of our brains doing something similar to measurement. So when we see water waves, we are really seeing waves in our measurements. And, indeed, it is known that the water molecules just go up and down, or in small approximately circular motions. The molecules don’t advance in the wave (except when the wave is breaking near the shore). So perception is really looking at something like measurements that our brain is making.
So here’s my objection to phenomenology. As I see it, the phenomena are created by the brain (I think some folk would agree with that), and so it isn’t that we are seeing phenomena. Rather, it is that we (or our brains) are creating phenomena as part of what seeing is. The basic underlying idea of measurement (which is really a kind of categorization) is something that can be studied when it is done publicly by scientists. So, at least in principle, we can understand how phenomena arise, and need not just take phenomena as a starting point.
When I go through all of that, I cannot find a standard whereby we can judge the correctness (or truth) of a scientific theory. We can judge how well it works, but pragmatism is a guide, not a standard. That’s why I disagree with talk about whether theories are correct. We should limit ourselves to talk about how well they work. We can then talk of the truth of the data, if it conforms to the standards set by the theory.
I don’t see it that way. For example, in physics, theoretical physicists build theories all the time without worrying about details of experimentation.
Of course, theory testing is partly about finding ways to measure data. But also finding ways to analyse data and to present data for critique.
Spoken like a true anti-realist!
On the first point, that’s just conceding the entire game to anti-realism — but you know that!
On the second point, they actually come right out as neo-Pythagoreans — they think that fundamental physics shows us that reality is essentially mathematical! In short, they use scientific realism to justify mathematical realism.
Of course I’m too much of a nominalist to have any sympathy with that view, but quite honestly I’ve come to regard my nominalist proclivities as a symptom of my innumeracy. It’s a personal cognitive deficit rather than a considered metaphysical position.
I read him as theorizing about data. He considered using a portable clock rather than a universal time standard. His thought experiment compared what you would measure in a falling elevator and out in space in a gravity free region.
Okay. But then your earlier post was question begging. We had to already know the meaning of “content” in order to understand your explanation of the meaning of “content.”
I don’t think that could work.
QM describes a discrete world, not a continuous world. Yet theoretical physics uses differential equations for theorizing about QM. Patently, differential equations require continuity, so have no applicability to a discrete world.
I see the mathematics as applied to the methods (coping methods, if you like) used by the physicists, rather than to the world itself. And because the methods are highly systematic, they can be idealized as continuous in a way that allows differential equations to be relevant. And, by the way, nominalism seems adequate to account for mathematics being used this way.
I think string theorists are also trying to build models to accommodate data. I don’t see that as being different from Einstein’s approach.
What’s different is that Einstein’s work had entailments that could be tested in his lifetime.
But a slightly different solar system might have made it difficult to test general relativity.
To me it looks like Newtonian physics describe a discrete (atomistic) world, while QM describes a continuous world. How did you get a different impression?
Just guessing, but Newton invented calculus to describe continuous change, and quanta are discrete.
How so? As I understood things, you said maps were not representations. I said they could be if we understood representations as an entity which had aspects of content (what it was about), vehicle (the physical implementation), and manner of presentation (eg symbol versus icon).
Maybe because QM still breahs down at the Planck scale?
I don’t think anyone knows what QM reality is and whether adjectives like discrete or continuous apply to whatever it is.
Depending on the observable and the measuring device we use to cope with the quantum system, we can see continuous (eg position) or discrete (eg spin) outcomes of measurement. But observables and measurements are not QM reality.
That is a difference from the state space of Newtonian mechanics, where variables like position and momentum and energy and time are taken as real and simultaneous knowable properties of the state of the system.
At least we’ll have a map to nowhere.
Which distro(s)?
And the more I read you the less I think you are a scientific realist.
Are you a fan of Larry Laudan?
Energy is quantized but AFAIK position is not.
That’s very helpful, thanks.
Is it too simple to characterize the differences among internal, pragmatic and L&R scientific realism by how one justifies calling something “real”? I understand this attempt is at best a caricature, but I’m trying to see the essential point.
Internal realism: Entities can be called real by appearing as terms in successful models/theories of a framework, but any talk of real is limited to talk within that framework.
Pragmatic realism: Entities can be called real if they are part of a framework that enables successful embodied coping with the world. That successful coping takes precedence in explaining a claim on reality over any theories/models (I’ve replaced your “propositions”, perhaps inappropriately) that we may subsequently develop and endorse based on the coping. I am not sure if talk of reality is still limited to the framework, assuming there will be many successful frameworks for coping.
(L&R) scientific realism: entities are real if they can be captured by real patterns. I vaguely recall L&R defining real patterns by formalizing some ideas from Dennett on incompressibility of real patterns, as in the bit map (uncompressed) example in your paper, as I understand it. The key difference here is the the theory providing the real pattern is the key point to claiming reality, with any embodied coping being done in experiments a secondary concern. That is the reverse of pragmatic. I think their rain-forest realism recognizes a framework-based justification for different, equal claims on reality, as long as real patterns are uncovered in the framework.
According to Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview we have the following two categories with respect to scientific realism:
scientific realism
antirealism
antirealism is further subdivided:
rational nonrealism (instrumentalism)
nonrational nonrealism (Thomas Kuhn)
Instrumentalism is further divided:
Phenomenalism
Operationalism (P.W. Bridgman)
Pragmatism (Larry Laudan)
Constructive empiricism (Bas C. van Fraassen)
But what do they know.
I think there a two different questions mixed here.
1. Is part of the body of scientific knowledge preserved and grown as science changes? Or does science just get better at predicting phenomena with no conservation? This is an epistemic question.
2. Is the ongoing growth in the success of prediction telling us something about reality? This is a metaphysical question.
Possible answers to the first question: is any knowledge preserved?
a. Nothing is preserved. There is nothing in today’s scientific body of knowledge that could not be discarded by some better theory. This is pure instrumentalism.
b. Some of the entities in scientific theories will be preserved in future scientific knowledge, perhaps quarks for example.
c. only the relations between entities will be preserved (in the form of mathematical structures), not the entities themselves. This idea goes back to Poincare (at least). Russell’s claim that science tells us nothing about fundamental entities, only how they are related, is in a similar vein, I believe.
Possible answers to the second question: Is anything in science real?
a. Science tells us nothing about reality beyond what we can in principle observe without science (ie ordinary objects). In particular, we should not make not claims about the reality of unobservables in scientific theories (van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism is completely fleshed out version of this rough idea).
b. The entities in sufficiently advanced scientific theories, including unobservables like quarks, are real (and hence preserved).
c. The relations among entities in a sufficiently advanced science are what is real (and hence preserved). This is Ontic Structural Realism (as opposed to Epistemic Structural Realism, which is only making claims about what form of knowledge is preserved as science progresses).
Which definition of knowledge?
If knowledge = propositional knowledge, then there’s no guarantee that anything is preserved or grows.
If knowledge is abilities to interact with the world, then yes, knowledge grows, and a Kuhnian paradigm shift is part of that growth (our abilities improve).
At a basic level, we carve up the world. The growth of knowledge can be seen as our carving the world ever more finely.
It is mainly telling us something about ourselves. As we carve up the world ever more finely, we are able to gain more and more detailed information about the world. The improvement in prediction is a consequence of the higher resolution of the information we are able to collect.
I don’t think your suggested possible answers actually fit very well.
I’m really not, though I found it a fascinating position. I’m a pragmatic realist about perceptible objects, moral values, and the unobserved posits of scientific theories. With a bit of prodding you could probably get me to confess to pragmatic realism about God and mathematical objects, too.
I’ve not read Laudan. All I know of him is that he showed that the demarcation between science and pseudo-science was spurious, and that he has some arguments against convergent realism to which Jay Rosenberg responded.
4. Every time the idealist calls on us to reply to the questions raised by thought, one can be sure that he is speaking in terms of the Mind. For him, Mind is what thinks, just as for us the intellect is what knows. One should therefore, insofar as one can, have as little as possible to do with the term. This is not always easy, because it has a legitimate meaning, but we are living at a time when it has become absolutely necessary to retranslate into realist language all the terms which idealism has borrowed from us and corrupted. An idealist term is generally a realist term denoting one of the spiritual antecedents to knowledge, now considered as generating its own content.
– Etienne Gilson
What do these long quotations mean to you, Mung?
For me, they read as vague abstractions.
What do you think I am missing? More than a sentence or two would be great if you have time.
I think he was a strong proponent of the pessimistic induction:, roughly, that science theories have been wrong in the past so what justifies us thinking they are right now.
If past theories are wrong, then their terms cannot refer to anything real (standard example: phlogiston). So why should we think the terms in today’s theories, eg quarks, refer to anything real?
I think structural realists accept this part of the argument but claim that mathematical structures/relations are preserved by theories. They then argue for the reality of these structures by the unreasonable success of science.
I understand your separation of propositional and skill-based knowledge as the separation of knowing-that from knowing-how.
But I don’t think that separation is possible for the complex web of knowledge in science. A simple example involves the calculations of position and velocity using GR: it requires knowledge-that knowledge of the equations and where they apply and knowledge-how of how to calculate (or more likely use computer programs). And that knowledge-how in turn involves other knowledge-that in the web of knowledge.
For a more real-life example, consider the mix of knowledge-how and knowledge- that needed to build, use, and interpret the results of the instruments in the LHC.
I see this linking of how/that knowledge as an implication of the realization that measurement and observation are theory-laden.
I’d also make a secondary point that scientific knowledge-that is not propositional. That was the view of the logical positivists but it is no longer the mainstream view. Instead, theories are models, and models can be expressed by mathematics, by algorithms, by mechanisms (in the Bechtel, Craver, et al sense), by diagrams, and so on. The scientific community pragmatically chooses the best way to express the models of a theory as that theory develops.
I agree that we carve up the world.
The argument for reality is that the way we have carved it up works so well that it must be telling us something about how the world actually is carved up. You can extend that “works-so-well” to an evolutionary time frame for ordinary objects and how they carve up the world.
According to a recent survey (scroll down to science reality question near end), philosophers of science split roughly 75-25 between realists and non-realists. But the realists split between object-realists and structural-realists.
Further to my other post, even if we just concentrate on how we interact with world, then scientific skills-knowledge is not preserved. Calculating gravity with GR is not the same as calculating it with Newton’s formulas. Operating and measuring with a cloud chamber is not the knowledge-how needed to use the measurement devices in the LHC.
Further, new theories like QM or GR are not finer ways of carving up the world than the theories they replace. They have fundamentally different ways of carving up the world, eg position under QM is not the same concept/carving as position under classical mechanics.
BruceS,
You’re absolutely right to point out that general relativity and quantum mechanics rely on constitutive rules and operational definitions that cannot be identified with those of classical mechanics. In that sense the pessimistic meta-induction looks quite good, because what is being preserved across paradigm shifts?
However, I think that Paul Churchland is very much on the right track when he suggests that there are good grounds for an ‘optimistic meta-induction’, if we shift consideration from the constitutive rules and operational definitions of theories — a basically “linguistic” account of what theories are — to the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms and their technological augmentations. Doing so allows us to reconstruct the history of science in terms of replacing partially correct maps with more explanatory, more predictive maps. In those terms we can expect future theories to consist maps that are ever more accurate than those partially-correct ones we use today.
In other words, vindication of scientific realism is going to come from cognitive neuroscience, not from epistemology.
I would add only that Churchland’s version of scientific realism is basically pragmatic realism updated with contemporary neuroscience, rather than traditional scientific realism which is grounded in a strictly personal-level account of what knowledge is.
On the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, I would add that some philosophers have argued that the distinction itself is deeply problematic — not least of which because it reinforces a conception of knowledge that originated in ancient Greek city-states with a rigid line between the ‘merely’ practical activity of women and slaves and the genuinely contemplative activity of free men. (It was, of course, only free men who were genuinely rational.)
That this distinction has its origins in an odious social practice is not an argument against it, but it should give one pause.
On my version of pragmatism, we should opt for a “knowing-how” all the way up account — that even philosophy and science are forms of knowing-how, and what we call “knowing-that” is basically just one of the techniques we use in conveying knowing-how.
I pretty much see that as “knowing how”, with any “knowing that” coming from how we communicate that “knowing how”.
I normally don’t memorize equations. If I don’t remember it, but have to look it up each time, I’m not sure why that would even count as knowledge. For those equations that I do remember, that’s usually because I know how to derive them.
By contrast, I see it as trivially obvious that data is theory laden, and I wonder why philosophers of science don’t see this.
As I see it, a theory is primarily a matter of “knowing how” and the linguistic expression of that theory is only an incomplete articulation of what is involved in that “knowing how”. Science students learn their theories in the laboratory, not from reading a science textbook.
I can’t see a non-theistic meaning for “how the world actually is carved up.”
It seems likely that no two people carve up the world in the same way. We don’t notice this, because we are social beings who tend to try to align what we do with what we see others as doing.
I’m not sure how to make sense of that. As I see it, ordinary things are part of what we get as a result of our carving up the world.
There’s obviously some serious miscommunication here.
As I see it, carving up the world is what we do when we make measurements.
As a minor aside, that’s precisely what Rorty thought. He thought that the very idea of “how the world really is” is what Nietzsche called “a shadow of God” — it’s one of the attitudes that only made sense in a theistic world-view, and one that we should abandon in light of the socio-political fact of “the death of God”. (Relevant texts: Nietzsche, The Gay Science section 109; Rorty, “The World Well Lost”.)
I understand carving-up as what a framework says about the entities of the world, eg whole rabbits versus rabbit parts.
I think there must be an initial framework for any measurement to decide what to measure. The framework might be changed by the result of the measurement. On example might be the Michelson-Morley measurements and the role of their results in getting rid of the aether. (I realize the history was more complicated).
Thanks for your replies Neil. I think I understand your thoughts a bit better.
I see science as a specialized, more precise social process to aligning with each other and (possibly) with reality. That such alignment is possible in science and that it can be used to successfully predict novel results is an argument for realism. Not knock-down argument, of course.
Science realism: how can science work so well unless its framework is a correct description of external reality?
Ordinary object framework: how can species survive unless their sensimotor and cognitve (if existing) machinery successful copes with the ordinary objects of the world of external reality. This is a variation on the argument RB made early in the thread.
I believe you’ve said in the past that you are a realist. But I am not sure what that term means to you.
In his paper detailing his answers to the concerns in the blog essay you link, Kaufman separates two views of reality:
1. Quietism which says there is an external reality outside of us, but which is inaccessible or indescribable.
2. A view he attributes to Goodman, which says we create worlds by our conceptual schemes. So unlike quietism, this view says we can speak of an external world but we make it, we do not discover it.
Is your view similar to either of those?
I don’t see any meaning for “correct”. A theist can claim that truth comes from God, but he still has no access to what that truth is.
Under reasonable meanings of “correct”, an aerial photograph is a more correct description than is a roadmap. However, it is the road map that works well, at least if our purpose is traveling or finding locations. The reason science works so well, is because it is pragmatic. I see “pragmatic” and “correct” as related, but the relation is not direct.
Maybe checkout Nancy Cartwright: “How the laws of physics lie”.
I assume Churchland’s current views are those detailed in his latest book, and my only access to that book has been through a couple of book reviews. Based on those summaries, I’d have a couple of concerns:
1. I think explanation of the mind and brain must go beyond neural maps and vector encoding to include a computational level, such as Bayesian probability/prediction (eg as summarized by Clark) or models based on engineering control theory (eg as suggested by Eliassmith). It is not that connectionism is wrong. But I see restricting oneself solely to connectionist explanations as analogous to trying to use the low-level explanations and theories of cell biochemistry alone to formulate a cogent explanation of evolution.
2. I agree with Clark that “technical augmentations”, which he calls “cognitive technology”, are critical to understanding how humans deal with the world. I understand Churchland concentrates on natural language use as the embodiment of these technologies and that he sees language solely as a means of communicating and aligning people’s neural maps. I think such a narrow view is wrong.
First, I think that scientific models are richer than natural language (math, algorithms, diagrams, mechanisms, etc). Second, we should understand how the types of neural maps we possess are influenced by our use of these tools.
Finally, and most importantly, these tools represent knowledge in a linear, structured way which is different from and complements the pattern-matching representations of neural maps. To understand scientific knowledge, we must understand knowledge as captured and structured by these cognitive tools. I’d see the neuroscience more as explaining how we can create and use these tools, and not as an explanation of how scientific knowledge is structured (or at least not a complete one).
As an extension of this concern, I’d say any optimistic meta-induction must also involve the cognitive tools and explain if and how knowledge accumulates in them. It is one thing to say we can predict better. It is another to say that our improvements in prediction are require preserving some structure or entities from older theories.
Hi Neil:
I agree that scientific realism is far from a proved case. Your view has a lot of merit.
As I’ve think I’ve said before, to me the arguments of both sides are a toss-up, and my current preference for scientific realism (about structures) is basically based on hope.
I could be persuaded that constructive empiricism is a better view of realism and science.
But my personal motivation is simply to understand the arguments and their motivations, and it not to set a fixed set of personal conclusions.
Cartwright is on my list, although I have encountered her views many times in secondary sources.
To me, that means that we are dealing with a real world. But I don’t take our descriptions to meet any standard other than our own.
My view isn’t quite the same as either of the two that you listed.
I detect a photon of light. Then I detect another photon of light coming from a very different place. I somehow treat those as closely related. That’s probably because I am moving through space at the same high speed as the sources of those photons. So we are piecing together different things, but treating them as the same thing. That’s part of carving up the world.
We do that carving up on a pragmatic basis. I don’t have any criticism of how we do that. I suspect that our biology demands that we do it in ways similar to what we do. But it still is a matter of pragmatic decisions rather than logical truth-based decisions.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with CDMA. That’s a technology used by cell-phones. It’s called a spread-spectrum technology. Roughly speaking, a bit is sent out at one wavelength. The next bit is sent out at another wavelength. There is a code that determines which wavelength will be used next. To read the signal, you have to piece together all of those disparate parts, which requires knowing the code. That’s a particular way of carving up the electromagnetic spectrum.
Now imagine that there are some beings that do everything with a similar code-base distributed piecing together of the world. Even their energy source comes that way. Those beings would be near invisible to us. Their energy use might look like quantum wierdness.
I am not suggesting that such beings exist. It’s a thought experiment to illustrate how very different ways of carving up the world might be possible.
The changed conceptual scheme (your 2nd suggestion) seems to require the same way of carving up. So it is more like a mathematician using a change of variable. There still might be ways of translation between such conceptual schemes. But it’s harder to see how that is possible with the CDMA kind of beings and their odd way of carving things up.
When I try to understand human cognition, how we carve up the world seems to be the primary step — the first thing that an organism must do to try to make sense of the world. And I see that as driven by pragmatic requirements, with no standard for correctness being available.
Kaufman sees his view as arising from Hume’s skepticism. But I’m more of an optimist. I think the methods that we use are the only ones that could work for an evolved organism, and I’m optimistic that they can work and give us a sensible account of the world. But it leaves us unable to talk about “the way the world is”. We can only talk of the way that we say that the world is. We are unable to talk about what exists. We can only talk about what we find it useful to consider as existing.
To me, it is ontology rather than epistemology that should be questioned. We do our epistemology on a base of pragmatic choices, rather than on a determinate ontology.
A quick note. Kaufman has followed up with a video discussion. I found that useful, though lengthy. LINK
revelation perhaps
peace
I see “revelation” as a misspelling of “self-delusion”.
Oh so a flippant dismissal then
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
I think it hard not to resort to flippancy when one’s answer to the ‘how do you know the truth comes from God?’ question is ‘Revelation!’.
That is not the answer to that question
The answer is to say that God can reveal stuff in such a way that I can know it.
Surely you agree with this
peace
Thanks, Neil. And thanks for the reminder about the video.
I think that’s a fair criticism of Churchland. Connectionism isn’t the only tool in the tool-box now that it was in the 1970s.
Yes, that also seems right to me — that cognitive technologies are material and not just linguistic. Or, perhaps better put, there’s a lot more to language than just trading proposition-tokens back and forth.
I’m not entirely clear on the distinction between an explanation of how we can create and use cognitive tools and an explanation of how scientific knowledge is structured. I mean, I can sort of see the distinction here, but not completely and I’d like to hear what you had in mind before commenting further.
I wonder if there’s a subtle but important difference here between structural realism as a response to van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and convergent realism as a response to Kuhnian anti-realism.
The structural realist wants to say that vindicating realism requires that preserving some referent (even an indirect referent) from an older theory — and since objects are poor candidates for the job, since object-talk depends the theory itself (humors, phlogiston, ether), structures seem like a better choice.
By contrast, convergent realism (Jay Rosenberg’s version) doesn’t require that anything be preserved across theory-change. It concedes far more to anti-realism than structural realism does. All that convergent realism argues for is that the history of theory change should be rationally constructed in terms of asymptotic convergence on fundamental reality. Theories can be quite different in their underlying ontological commitments, as long as we can tell a compelling story about the historical progression (and one that responds to the Kuhnian Challenge).
But I freely confess that I’m not fully aware of the similarities and differences between convergent realism and structural realism.
I have a hunch (I cannot call it more than that) that convergent realism (in Jay Rosenberg’s sense) is only true for fundamental physics (in Laydman and Ross’s sense) and not for any other branch of science. But I don’t have the expertise to justify this intuition, and I don’t have the time to develop it between now and going up for tenure.
No doubt the criterion for reliably distinguishing between revelation and self-delusion is also revealed, which is why someone can be absolutely certain that what he takes to be a revelation really is a revelation.
fifthmonarchyman,
No, I don’t. I don’t know how God could reveal something that was True in a manner that was distinguishable from a delusion that God had revealed something True.
Do you think it is possible to know anything at all that is distinguishable from delusion?
For example do you know that you exist right now or is it possible you are wrong about this belief ?
peace
The possibility of being mistaken is incompatible with certainty, not with knowledge. One can know a great many things while acknowledging the possibility of being mistaken.
That said, I’m with Wittgenstein: it only makes sense to talk about certainty when it makes no sense to doubt. I am certain that I exist, because it makes no sense to doubt it.
The fact of embodied conscious experience is beyond all possible justification, criticism, request for further evidence, or logical demonstration. It is not itself a move within the game of giving and asking for reasons — a claim or assertion for which evidence or argument might be reasonable (depending on context) — but a necessary condition on there being any such game at all.
A good many folks here are averse to certainty. While this is perhaps for highly laudable political motivations and supported by intriguing epistemological arguments, I worry that the aversion to certainty has inoculated many of us against acknowledging the mere sanity of phenomenological descriptions as stressed by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and many others.