4 ms·

I don't know the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Do you? How do you know it? If I was to sit next to you, would you be able to walk me through all the steps wh

I don't know the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Do you? How do you know it? If I was to sit next to you, would you be able to walk me through all the steps whereby I would be able to say that I know it too? What does 'know' mean to you? Is it like believe, or like a hypothesis? What is the difference? If you don't verify something for yourself, can you know it? If someone says that something is true, does that make it true, even if you haven't confirmed it for yourself? If so, who do you trust? Should you trust teachers? Do they mean well? If they mean well, is it possible that they have made a mistake and are relaying wrong information that they haven't verified for themselves? If they are relaying unverfied information as knowledge, are they liars? Are you lying if you do the same? Who has the authority on truth? Is it the schools, as funded by the government? Is it the government? I know that is a wall of questions, but this is what I think when I hear this sort of thing. What assumptions have I made about things I think I know, where the reality is that I have beliefs of things I think I know. PS accept my apologies if this post takes a while to appear - HN says I am posting too fast, and won't allow me to reply in my usual, more timely way. If you do want to reply to this, no problem - it just may take a while for me to respond. Cheers.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent. Your epistemology leads you to not "know" all of science. Even logical positivism accepted the results of repeatable experiments, and logical positivism is itself too narrow of an epistemology (which is why it was rejected in the end). I also profoundly mistrust any philosophy that says "the only way we know is X", where that rule (about the only way we know) is not something that is knowable via X. That leaves adherents using a rule (which by their own statements they do not know is valid) to decide what they do and do not know. That's... not something I can accept. It seems self-contradictory to me. I'm not going to wade through your wall of questions. That's a much lower level of conversation than I am willing to get bogged down in.
- feralimal 6y ago
  "The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent." Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. It really comes down to you. The individual. All ideas are therein. Are you prepared to kid yourself, or do you want the truth? Often people say 'we' know to get around this. What does this usage of 'we' mean? It is trust that someone else has done the verifying, that they are trustworthy, that they are relaying the results faithfully, etc. If you are trusting though, you are not knowing. Now, it is fine to have beliefs, and to accept other people's ideas and hypotheses. But it is another thing to say you know them to be true!
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. Marcuse and Gettier have some things to day about this (paraphrasing): "The world is too complicated for people to verify everything themselves" -Marcuse "Its not clear what (if anything) constitutes justified true belief" -Gettier > I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. Per Quine, individual hypotheses can't be verified, only bundles of hypotheses.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent. Your epistemology leads you to not "know" all of science. Even logical positivism accepted the results of repeatable experiments, and logical positivism is itself too narrow of an epistemology (which is why it was rejected in the end). I also profoundly mistrust any philosophy that says "the only way we know is X", where that rule (about the only way we know) is not something that is knowable via X. That leaves adherents using a rule (which by their own statements they do not know is valid) to decide what they do and do not know. That's... not something I can accept. It seems self-contradictory to me. I'm not going to wade through your wall of questions. That's a much lower level of conversation than I am willing to get bogged down in.

feralimal 6y ago
"The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent." Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. It really comes down to you. The individual. All ideas are therein. Are you prepared to kid yourself, or do you want the truth? Often people say 'we' know to get around this. What does this usage of 'we' mean? It is trust that someone else has done the verifying, that they are trustworthy, that they are relaying the results faithfully, etc. If you are trusting though, you are not knowing. Now, it is fine to have beliefs, and to accept other people's ideas and hypotheses. But it is another thing to say you know them to be true!
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. Marcuse and Gettier have some things to day about this (paraphrasing): "The world is too complicated for people to verify everything themselves" -Marcuse "Its not clear what (if anything) constitutes justified true belief" -Gettier > I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them. Per Quine, individual hypotheses can't be verified, only bundles of hypotheses.