It just occurred to me that there’s one nice thing as well about that whole ‘group consensus’ stuff – it protects against the delusions of the individual. Where the sole individual would have had to take on faith that he is not deluded, the group’s consensus will drift away from every delusion provided it is not shared by the majority of the group’s members (and if it is still a delusion then is probably debatable).
Amazing how the nutjobs always avoid each other. I’ve never seen street crazies yelling at each other, or two groups of missionaries from conflicting religions proselytizing in the same place. It’s like trying to bring two north magnetic poles together.
How does one observe without perception?
You seem to be arguing with yourself. To repeat, science can’t tell you what is true; it can only tell you what is false.
Incidentally, properly executed scientific experiment will never contradict something already proved deductively. Keep in mind that falsification, the underpinning principle of scientific experimentation, is itself merely a philosophical proposition and is not itself falsifiable — meaning, it’s not scientifically testable. That is, science cannot test itself. You simply have to have fai… er, confidence in its methods.
Faith confirmed by experience = truth.
The faith I have that the sun will rise tomorrow, traffic will not suddenly drive on the opposite side, grass will be greenish, etc. is nothing like the faith a religious person has in some mythological being.
Er, not? What are you getting at? The truth of a claim is not dependent on observation, the knowledge of that truth is.
Falsification is the determination of a truth value – if your theory is experimentally contradicted, the statement ‘your theory is wrong’ is true (and known to be true).
It will, if it was deduced from false premises.
I’m not saying science can perfectly ascertain all truths about the real world – but it is, at least to my knowledge, the only framework that can at least discover some. This can be deductively proven.
Cool. Then my faith in God is true.
You don’t get to presume your conclusions (that God is a mythological being). That’s called “begging the question”, and it’s a no-no.
I got it from you: “‘there is at least one x’, when an x is observed”.
You’re equivocating. Science is not bivalent. And thankfully so. Otherwise, there would be no point in ever revisiting a theory once it has been tested to be “true”. Einstein could have just continued processing patents, and left Newtonian “truth” alone.
Yes, but it is the premises that we draw empirically. Remember that all circular arguments are valid.
I do wish people would stop treating science as though it were a religion. Science is a wonderful tool. It has a noble purpose. But it isn’t magical. It doesn’t even make statements of fact. Even the notions of truth and falsity themselves are not statements of fact, but statements of grammar. (See Wittgenstein.) Or as one of history’s greatests scientists, Arthur Eddington, put it, “What we are observing is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our type of question.”
I’d give you more credit if you’d said Jesus.
Is your experience objectifiable in the same way my experiences are?
If you say so.
Jesus. God. Same same.
So, your experiences are the objective ones? I’m not sure you know what that word means.
It seems to me that you are beating science into an unrecognizable pulp. It examines reality directly. It establishes truth. Its conclusions are right even if they’re presumed in its axioms. Seems to me there’s no difference between your science and another man’s god.
Nope. Still not getting it, sorry. Where did I say truth is dependent on observation? The way I read this, and the way I intended it to be read, is that science can determine – not define! – the truth value of a claim of the form ‘there is at least one x’, through the observation of an x. The truth of that claim, however, is completely independent of that observation – regardless of whether they’re ever seen or not, xs exist or not. I’m sorry if I was ambiguous anywhere, though I fail to see where.
I’ve never claimed that a theory in general can ever be tested to be unequivocally true. But it can certainly be tested to be unequivocally false. Falsification of a generality is the same as verification of an existential claim: verifying ‘there are black sheep’ falsifies ‘all sheep are white’.
Of course validity of an argument alone is not enough to ascertain its correctness, and that’s were science – at least in the form of empirically derived premises – comes in.
And it is thus the one framework that comes closest to making valid statements about reality – certainly much closer than religion, which can only deduce from arbitrary axioms without those being necessarily correspondent to anything real at all – thus, all religious truths can only be true (to reality!) by mere chance.
I’m stealing the quoted section, just so you know.
I’m sure it’s all clear to you, but I’m still confused. And without ivan astikov’s objective frame, we are at an impasse. 
If you could directly answer a question, it might help clear it up. Are you or are you not saying that by observing at least one X, you are establishing that “X exists” is true?
I agree with your first part, but not your second part. “All sheep are white” is not a statement of fact, but a statement of grammar. See, for example, Statements of Fact in Wittgenstein’s Logic of Language.
Can you be more specific? I’m familiar with numerous systems of logic, but none that actually leave the discipline altogether to hand off to some other discipline. I don’t want to misinterpret you again, and I fear we’re talking past each other at times.
I’m sorry, but that just comes across as gibberish. As VS Ramachandran has said, “Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way ‘inferior’ to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence – the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion – to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.” (Phantoms in the Brain, pp 184-185)
I don’t know about kanicbird but lekatt says he has been to the Spirit World. If you had been to the Spirit World you would be sure you are right too.
Not establishing, but discovering, at least in an idealized way, i.e. from the point of faultless observation. That we do not generally have such is of little consequence, since repeat observation – provided observation is not totally misleading – can easily substitute.
I am also saying that the statement ‘X exists’ has an objective truth value, regardless of observation.
You’ll have to dumb that down for me, since if there are only white sheep, I can’t see how saying ‘all sheep are white’ is not expressing a fact.
What discipline is my system of logic leaving (how does a system of logic even do that?), and which one is it then handing off to? The way I meant it is that logic is used to derive conclusions from empirically established premises, and premises are empirically established when confirmed by observation (of course, you can as well derive conclusions from empirically not contradicted premises, but those have to defer to empiricism in regards of falsification).
It’s quite easy, however: religion doesn’t root its axiomatization in reality (for instance via empiricism), and therefore all conclusions drawn from those axioms don’t necessarily correspond to reality. You may draw any conclusions you can from ‘god exists’, but that doesn’t mean that they actually mean something, despite the validity of the argument, because god might not exist.
If I understand you correctly at this point, then we agree. An existential claim does have a truth value, but its truth does not depend on our observation.
According to Wittgenstein, “all sheep are white” is tantamount to the statement, “sheep are white by definition”. (Otherwise, they wouldn’t all be white.) So if you’ve found a black sheep, you’ve redefined what a sheep is. The reason it’s a grammatical statement is that it’s not a copula. For example, “that sheep is eating grass” is a statement of fact (or fiction), and is a copula. It’s just the difference between usages of “to be”. But if white is what a sheep cannot not be, then it’s just a tautology — i.e., a definition.
I guess I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that logic takes us to a point, and then hands off to science to complete the process.
We’ll never see eye to eye on that point, so we may as well not drift there.
The only reason I butted in was because of the rather spooky reactions people were having toward Kanicbird for having made a simple statement of fact (that science is not the appropriate tool for discovering truth). And when I defend the statement, even though you disagree with me, you treat me with respect. At least, you aren’t calling me stupid. What I’m wondering is why that same respect is not accorded to Kanicbird?
While I regret opening this Pitting of kanicbird (I only did it because I was in a bad mood for other reasons, and apologized to him/her privately), I think you get more respect because of your attitude and presentation. kanic makes assertions based on his/her idiosyncratic interpretation of a particular mythological cycle and is (or at least affects to be) as impervious to logic, reason, & evidence as Clark Kent is to needles. Though I disagree with you on many issues, I have not seen you to do that.
For instance, I think this quote
demonstrates primarily that Wittgenstein was a twit who perverted the language only in the interests of tenure. Asserting the equivalence of the two sentences in question is both perverse and pointless. You, perhaps, disagree. But we can have a reasaonable discussion about it because you don’t present yourself as having access to gnosis that cannot be denied.
I appreciate the compliments, but I’m surprised you find controversy in Wittgenstein’s claim, which seems rather obvious to me. It’s a very common grammatical construct. What about this one?
“All bachelors are unmarried” versus “Bachelors are unmarried by definition”.
Because if the two statements are identical, there would be no reason to add the prepositional phase at the end of the latter. Because there is a difference between grammatical statements and assertions of fact, even though often one must cognizant of the context to be sure which is being made.
Take “all bachelors are unmarried.” To judge which sort of statement it is, it has to be clear whether you mean bachelor to mean “unmarried adult male human” or “person posessing a degree from an accredited four-year college.” If the former, it’s a grammatical statement (and a tautological); if the former, it’s an assertion of fact which can be proven or disproven. Only by knowing the context in which the statement was made (for example, by adding the prepostional phrase) can the distinction be made.
Returning, if only by implication, to kanicbird, this illustrates one of my problems with Biblical literalists. They tend to ignore context, and, moreover, to pretend that context is of no moment. I’d go on, but I have the strange and nigh-irrestible urge to eat a bagel.
Well, hold on there. Wittgenstein didn’t say (and I didn’t say he said) that the statements are identical. Obviously, they are not identical, but they have identical meanings. Just like the mathematical statement 10 = 5*2. The left side is not identical to the right, but they have the same values.
You mean hels apt to say something like: