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Yes, correct. Humans are not capable of having access to indisputable truth. However, indisputable truth is not necessary for forming useful foundations for oth
by philipov 10y ago
Yes, correct. Humans are not capable of having access to indisputable truth. However, indisputable truth is not necessary for forming useful foundations for other knowledge. Humans exist in the space of the "probably good enough."
What becomes a fact for you depends on how tolerant you are for uncertainty. You're probably going to die. That's almost 100%. A solipsistic universe is likewise very unlikely. Those are pretty good bases for facts, but they're not indisputable.
Facts are not a simple structure. They are a conclusion of a series of comparisons after which we have considered many things and at the end decided that the evidence satisfies our threshold for uncertainty. People regularly make assumptions on which facts are predicated, and so we can say that we only have access to contingent facts, because they will always lead back to some assumption sooner or later.
If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
- balabaster 10y ago> If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics. I was just watching The Man Who Knew Infinity the other night and I would dispute that even Maths won't change after 15 years. Once in a generation, someone like Ramanujan comes along and manages to change something even as fundamental as Mathematics.
- mcguire 10y agoHell, Hilbert's program, Godël, and Turing.
- philipov 10y agoI think a lot of mathematicians distinguish zealously between Mathematics per se, as opposed to mathematical logic/philosophy.
- mcguire 10y agoTrue, but Hilbert was a mathematician and was expressing the general thought, that mathematics could be formalized and when that was done, it would be complete, consistent, firm, round, and fully-packed. When that was demonstrated to be false, it had no great effect on day-to-day mathematics. But still,....
- philipov 10y agoRight, there are game-changing advances in mathematical logic and sea changes in mathematical philosophy. The discovery of non-euclidean geometry did not mean euclidean geometry was false, and real analysis is the same whether you found it on sets or categories, by definition. Incompleteness doesn't eliminate the possibility of consistency. Mathematics changes by becoming more expressive and growing outwards and inwards. Sometimes, a theorem is proven to be inconsistent and thrown out. My point was this happens a lot less often with mathematical theorems than it does with scientific facts because facts are based on our inductive study of the universe, whereas mathematics only makes statements about syllogisms. Unlike the real world, math is an area of study where incontrovertible facts are at least possible, because we make everything up, and just have to make sure we're consistent about it. We do not have access to such a priori knowledge about reality.
- pcmaffey 10y agoYes, all facts should contain a probability property.
- FabHK 10y ago> If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics. It's true, of course, in a sense, but a great book to get some perspective on the development and "historicity" of mathematical fact is Imre Lakatosh's great Proofs and Refutations. It's a great read, as a fictional dialogue of students and teacher on Euler's "simple" formula V - E + F = 2 about the numbers of vertices (corners), edges and faces. They go and prove it, and oops, someone comes up with a counterexample, and they realise they have to refine things. Very instructive book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations