Er, were you addressing your comments to me, Triskadecamus? Or to erislover? Or to everyone?
I would say that your analogy is apropos and confirms my position, and argues for the fact that empiricism is the only viable epistemology.
Contrary to the emotional prejudices of poets, truth is not beauty, nor beauty truth.
And I have never denied this undeniable fact. I have only challenged your claim that there is a necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a given worldview and one specific epistemology. But I do not find the matter worth spending more time on, for I have already openly embraced empiricism.
Forgive me, but you are extending the term “epistemology” outside its actual scope. All a given epistemological view does is identify what knowledge is and its limits according to that view. It most certainly does NOT identify how truth or Truth is to be separated from falsehood, even though endeavors to distinguish true from false claims are necessarily constrained by that method’s epistemological underpinnings.
Here’s the proper definition:
Thus we see that epistemology is not about how one distinguishes truth from non-truth.
Let’s look again at your comment from the quotation above:
I very strongly disagree. Epistemology does not “allow” one to know anything! It merely sets limits on what can be considered “knowledge”. To remain philosophically sound, we can only say that a claim must be true before it can be considered real knowledge. Epistemology does NOT allow us to distinguish true claims from false claims in and of itself; we need a philosophically external system for that.
The same misunderstanding resides in your later comment:
I don’t see this at all. Why do you think this may be the case? Analytical logic is identical in both main branches of epistemology! Thus, it clearly cannot derive from any particular epistemology, nor from epistemology itself. Like mathematics, analytic logic is but a formal system that consists of nothing but deliberate human definitions and rules and axioms. It is “derived” from the delightful verbal games the ancient Greeks used to play, not from any epistemology.
But let’s cut through all these abstractions, shall we? You asked me: “Perhaps if you explained where truth comes from if not the study of knoweldge.” Allow me to provide my answer. My main tool for distinguishing likely truth from likely untruth is the admittedly imperfect tool known as science. However, as an empiricist and agnostic, it follows that I can make NO claim about absolute Truth.
Science, according to my own personal definition, is the only systematic tool we have for reducing the error in our understanding of the universe. Science (like epistemology) does not provide a means by which we can “know” truth or Truth directly, of course. The Problem of Induction, brought to light by David Hume, remains unsolved.
Yet Popper showed us that science does not rely on induction after all! Rather, we create hypotheses and then subject them to extensive efforts to prove them false. It is falsification – not validation – that is the true hallmark of science. It is that which separates scientific findings from unjustified belief. Science is how we distinguish truth from falsehood.
Are the claims of science true? Provisionally. Thus, our knowledge that comes from science is but provisional knowledge. We may hold many beliefs that do not technically constitute knowledge because they are – however unknown and perhaps even unknowable to us – False.
Your penultimate paragraph, I respectfully submit, strikes me as involving an extraordinarily dubious claim, a claim I cannot possibly accept. It is not the case that either “truth” or “Truth” can be legitimately redefined arbitrarily by anyone who wishes to have their own private definition of truth. Or if they do, it should be of no account at all to anyone else and it cannot be binding. The mere claim of a particular individual that they have there own private criteria for truth is no more meaningful than any other spurious or unsubstantiated (or unsubstantiatable) claim they may make.
As a materialist, I don’t think there can be much of any substance in denying what is by FAR the most prevalent understanding of truth, which is the correspondence theory of truth (see, for example, What is truth? from Oxford.) I suspect that you very much agree with this view, considering your scientific acumen.
Thus, neither truth nor Truth can possibly be relative. The correspondence theory of truth forbids that. Do you really want to debate the meaning of truth? Not only could that take months, no subjective view of truth can ever hope to rend a hole in materialism, which denies any such concept!
It seems to me any successful attack on materialism probably needs to take the form of establishing (or at least claiming with reasonable justification) the reality of a phenomenon that demonstrates that there is more to the universe than material entities. Can you provide any such examples?
So tell me, Libertarian: Do you consider your responses to me here to demonstrate intellectual honesty? For I frankly have seen no evidence for it here. Words games and cheap shots don’t constitute reasoned debate.
That you possess a powerful intellect is beyond dispute. However, what you have not yet demonstrated here is that you can employ it without disingenuousness and bullying.
Your remarks evince an emotional frustration that I failed to give you your cookbook’s required entry point for introducing God into the question. I see little else but this frustration.
Libertarian has written: “Oh, yes! Yes indeed, I do believe in the miracles. I have seen in my own life so many miracles, not the least of which is my own faith, given particularly the intellectual skepticism with which I approached the whole matter of Christianity. It seems to me quite reasonable that God, as the creator of the universe, through nothing more than His will, is eminently capable of reforming matter and energy, though toward what purpose is the paramount consideration.”
He also began a passage by writing: “As God told me directly, …”.
In no way am I challenging your religious beliefs (or metaphysical beliefs, if you prefer). I am merely illustrating your bias.
Look, my friends, upon Lib’s specious attacks on me. When we take his biases into account, we can, on fairly reasonable grounds, suspect that Libertarian had little interest in an honest debate on materialism, but rather was pursuing a religious agenda: An agenda to try merely to make materialists and agnostics and others look absurd by employing his plainly didactic strategy he himself admitted he’d routinely employed. A not very intellectually honest strategy he attempted to unleash upon me but failed.
But perhaps we will simply have to differ about that.
What delightful rhetoricals! I suppose I’ll have to settle for those rather than for answers to my questions.
Well, Friends, Romans, and Countrymen, behold the essence of this debate. I am in the intellectually dishonest corner, smeared from head to toe with bias, quibbling over words, mentioning God, proffering my hirsute philosophy without cite. In the other corner is my adversary who is bound to defeat me because he is intellectually honest, facing and answering questions head-on, without bias, using the words he himself intended to use, not mentioning God, and pulling together his argument from sound principles of reason.
Okay, Tris, I throw in the towel.
To any Materialist who might care to respond to the point:
Even after the descension of Ambushed, I’m still perplexed as to any substantive difference between strict materialism and strict mysticism. One of them says that there is something out there that is real despite all perception, apprehension, or cognition. The other says the same.
I’m not gonna chime in as a champion of materialism, mysticism, objectivism or any other philosophy. I’m not really qualified to debate in this league, but I would like to ask a couple questions.
Is pure empiricism an essential element of materialism? If so, how can we judge whether our “truths” are “Truths?” In other words, how can we evaluate our epistemology without access to the “privileged reference frame?”
Maybe erislover was saying the same thing when he said:
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Triskadecamus, as for your “symphony for Guasopheme No. 1”, I’m a little confused about the ground rules you are setting forth. The machine is designed, built and programmed according to your “personal reasons” and “desires.” This could mean that you are trying to make a music box that plays a certain tune and you’re not sure that you’ve succeeded. Or you could have just designed a mechanism that plays pitches indeterminately, and are asking whether the result is beautiful music. Is this anything more than Schrodinger’s box with the element of aesthetics added? [sub]Eigenbeauty?[/sub] I suspect I’m missing the point.
But I would say that the music could be beautiful, but is neither beautiful nor non-beautiful until it is perceived by a listener.
What do you call someone who believes that reality depends on perception?
Ordinarilly, an Idealist, c.f., Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, et al.
Hi Lib!
I’m mainly a luker here in Great Debates as most of the posters here have unbelievably well honed opinions and fiercely good debating skills. This is why I love Great Debates (and the SDMB in general.) I’ve not stopped learning since I got here and have had to change my opinions more than once due to a solid line of reasoning; it’s nice to get kicked out of a comfortable way of thinking sometimes. 
And it is out of respect for you guys and gals that I’ve been trying to hone my opinions a little before diving in (and more often than not someone is debating my opinion anyway (and usually much more eloquently than I could.))
So, it is with a little trepidation that I’m going to disagree a heavyweight.
Assuming Materialism is correct I disagree that a man’s opinion cannot be seen. I can’t remember who it was but someone in Great Debates once said:
and in this case I think it’s quite appropriate. Surely a man’s opinion can be seen, it’s all there in the brain. All a man’s opinion (or emotion) is is just a collection of atoms doing a certain dance. It’s just a case of decoding the dance.
Well, I’m afraid that we have found ourselves in a bit of a pickle here, ambushed. I cannot see what meaning “truth” has outside of an epistemology, but that is because I look at truth as “what we know” which, of course, begs the question of its relativity. I have an issue or two with the link you sent, but I’ll get to that it a minute.
Goodness, did I say that any particular worldview demands a specific epistemology? I think you just got that impression. If I did say it then I certainly retract it.
Ok, here is where I will quibble even if I were to reject my personal definition. Why would we say such a thing, and how would that provide any measure of soundness when we cannot verify the truth outside {wherever you get your truth from}?
Nor can you make a claim about truth in general, except that it stood up to the scientific community’s battery of tests. This is still relative, don’t you think?
I mean, consider the way we could understand truth. (1)One, we can find out whether any particular thing we know to be true is absolutely True (sticking with my wording convention); (2)two, we cannot have a method for defining which elements we hold to be true are absolutely True.
And so we are left with two styles of truth: one where we can know with absolute confidence that something is true, and one where we cannot have absolute confidence. I am not certain how one could claim to not have absolute truth, and yet to also say that truth is not relative to the system it is evaluated in (and hence the worldview one adopts).
Reread your post where you mention how you define science, and then bring up Hume’s problem of induction, and then demonstrate a subtle redefinition brought on by Popper.
And here we find some of my personal issues with the link you provided. Allow me to quote.
This is so relative I cannot even stand it. Truth is relative to both the person who will accept a personally satisfying level of precision in the correspondence and the two things which we are trying to correspond. Consider the case of an analogy used to drive home, or introduce, a point.
I still do not understand the grounds by which materialism requires the abandonment of relative truth, even if the above do not amply demonstrate why I think materialism must accept it if materialism accepts that (1) cannot be true. Even with Poppers addition, we could say that anything is true until it is proven false! Certianly truth is then relative to the tests performed on its falsification.
Come on, think about that. You offer a paradox. “Show me something that can’t be shown.” Materialism could probably fail if determinism were rendered false, which I think only hard determinism can be, if we can demonstrate that perception of reality can change reality, or if any particular diety in existence, if any, proceeds to pop down and make it a personal mission to rid the world of materialist thought by demonstrating its own existence.
Of course that should read “…disagree with a heavyweight”.
Sigh! Why is it that no matter how many times I press preview and proof read (and even if I purposely take a long break between my penultimate proof read and the final proof read and post (to empty my short term memory :))) I always, always spot a mistake on the first read through for real.
I think this should be ObiWan’s law (unless someone else has claimed it :)).
In response to this I am not going to re-read this post once it goes live!
Saying that you can see a man’s opinion by looking at graphs of his brain waves is like saying that you can see the meaning of a poem by studying its rhyme and meter.
Welcome to Straight Dope Great Debates. We can always use another good contributor like you.
Not so. Materialism ultimately bases its truth on apprehending the existence of the forces and objects behind its theories. Like tachyons, for example. They may make sense in a theoretical physical model, but the tests to determine their existence may show something else entirely. Which means theoretical physics will have to adjust itself to correspond to the new facet of reality that has been exposed. According to materialism, everything that is real must ultimately prove perceptible by material means.
Mysticism doesn’t look to those methods to establish its truth. There will always be something outside reality that cannot be measured by any means of perception whatsoever, in their view.
And ambushed’s assertion that materialists are by definition determinists is complete and total trash. Determinism is the view that things were meant to happen as they did and that the driving force behind the events is beyond human control - a view more suited to idealism and mysticism than it is to materialism. Materialism, in denying any sort of “outside force” beyond the human capacity to act and affect one’s surroundings, is eminently suited for the philosophical doctrine of free will.
Opinions, like thoughts, cannot be seen, it is true. But that in no way disproves materialism. Opinions and thoughts govern actions, and as such have material consequences.
Additionally, opinions and thoughts do not come into one’s head from outside of reality, but are the results of previous experiences and situations. Materialism does not say that opinions and thoughts can be seen (though the brain activity behind them certainly can be), but that they have material origins.
Wow, this is what I get for temporarily not having internet at home. The thread I wanted to be a part of gets totally out of hand. hmmm…
Well, I’m having trouble finding the site with the history of Materialism, but the part I wanted to quote was about how Materialists have split into several different groups some of which include hard atheism, an a priori belief. I’d be in that group, which seems different from most of the materialists posting here. Feel free to question me on it.
I’ll try to find the link I wanted, I might have it saved on the home puter, but that puter is getting a total rebuild and I don’t know if I can save it. As a matter of fact, some of my book is in danger. ARGH.
There are bits and pieces of ambushed’s comments that I would stand up for and others that I would not. It’s tough to get it all separated. If someone would like to question me individually to get my take on things, I would welcome it. I think I made a good start back in my post on friday. I’ll comment on a few things I’ve read in the thread.
Early on in the thread [Lib] wanted to question ambushed about who did the explaining. In some ways I think that [b[ambushed** is right to complain about the question, but I think Lib was really just asking for a clarification of what it means to be explicable. Have you ever seen mathematical proofs of something’s provability? Or at least can you conceive that someone could prove that something was provable even if they were unable to discover the final proof? Think about the ‘explicable’ in that way. If something is explicable, then it could be explained by some finite intellect at some time.
Re: Mysticism and ghosts as a reality.
Visible ghosts would be at least partially material, but they have not been shown to exist. A Materialist learns about his environment building upon previous knowledge and proceding logically. Where Mysiticists get their ideas of reality I couldn’t tell you, but can only guess that dreams, drugs, and myth may play a part. Myth is something I am very interested in. I have some theories that the fact that people have had some similar ideas of “right” and “wrong” for all of history means that there must be some good ideas in those concepts. I am trying to write chapter one as an explanation of why we should all be on the same page (or at least in the same book) as far as “right” and “wrong” go. I want to use mythology and the history of storytelling as a basis for this. Not the entire basis, but a big part of it.
To bring this back to the discussion, and the real reason I let myself go on about this a bit, let me address the (false) idea that theories and concepts are non-material things. They are instead relationships between material things. While thinking about or remembering a concept it is, in addition to that relationship, also a pattern of substances and forces in someone’s body (mostly in the brain).
Well, I gotta get some work done and I still want to check a few other threads. I’ll check in again tomorrow.
Thanks Lib.
One down, and a few more to go.
Ambushed,
I was not addressing a particular post, person, or even a particular point of contention. (We mystics tend to approach things a bit differently, go figure.) So, my remarks are for everyone, but I would appreciate answers from anyone.
I will try to make my illustration more concrete. Yesterday, I wrote a concerto for an instrument of my own invention. Is the piece it plays music? Well, not in the definition that hearing people have come to expect when they hear the word music. Is it art? That is my question, or at least that question is subsumed in my question. I merely ask “Could it be it beautiful?” And then, I ask, “If it could be, is it?”
Now, keep in mind that this imaginary concerto already has one fan, who appreciates the beauty of “Concerto for Gausopheme No. 1” for its own sake, despite the fact that he cannot ever perceive it. (But then, Lib has the outlook on things essential for Gausopheme audiences.) So now my question is, would it be more beautiful if I spend the day today actually building a Gausopheme and then turn it on? (As an artist, I must tell you, my gut level feeling is that it would have the opposite effect, overwhelming the pure inextant subtone, and leaving a crass commercial product in its place.)
But for the purposes of philosophy, can someone tell me if an actual Gausopheme, playing my concerto would be more beautiful or less beautiful than the same concerto played on the imaginary Gausopheme we now have?
" There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero ~
You appear to be headed for St. Anselm’s ontology, Tris.:
“We can conceive of a God which is perfect in every way. But this hypothetical God lacks one perfection: it does not exist. Therefore a more perfect* God can be conceived, one which does exist. Therefore, God exists.”
If I read Gaudere’s posts (in this thread and elsewhere) accurately, she is quite willing to allow the immaterial to exist – as constructs, not as self-supporting entities. Art exists, independently of the artist or the observer, or of the materials from which it is composed. She is merely not willing to extrapolate from this to a spiritual realm in which angels know more in the morning than at evening, whether or not they are conducting censuses on pinheads (or of them).
Over in the “dragon” thread I noted that we do share a common conception of “dragon” that permits intelligent discourse about whether dragons do or do not exist. That idea is “real” in one valid sense: it represents a conceptualization held in common. That it does not refer to an extant external entity as our conceptualization of “horse” does is not relevant to the reality of the common concept itself.
As nucleons are composed of quarks, atoms of nucleons and electrons, molecules of atoms, and physical objects of molecules, so a hierarchy of abstraction can be established, where physical objects such as ourselves may create mental structures, like Christianity, dragons, and Materialism. They are no less real for being ontologically posterior to the brains in which they are created.
Can you see where I am going with this?
*[sub]Hey, Tom Jefferson could use it; I claim his authority! [/sub]
In rereading my most recent post I think I know exactly what Lib is trying to get at (and I am now beginning to feel a certain desperation to avoid any further explicit conflict between you two!).
If we accept that we can never perceive Truth, how do we know it exists?
If no one is perceiving it then beauty, I think, has no meaning. Are you trying to assert that “beauty” has real existence?
Poly I think I see where you’re going, but, unlike what Gaudere may think, I don’t accept that concepts are non-physical entities. The concept of dragons exists in our brains. Recorded as a series of remembered descriptions, as well as some physical reactions to the stories about dragons and other stuff that our brains record some of which may very well be random noise, that accompanied past mentions of dragons. That many, if not most, people have similar feelings and memories only means that dragons are pervasive in our storytelling.
This brings us back to my being very interested in myth. Was it this thread or another I was talking about that. Getting confused. Too many similar threads at once.
Anyway, concepts are not non-physical objects. Many concepts are relationships between physical objects. Some are just brain and body activity. And I DO think that it would be possible to extract someone’s thoughts from physical mapping of their brain activity. Not with current technology, and maybe it’ll never happen, but I it IS in the material world.
Sorry, Poly, but I must not have been clear. Art does not exist unless someone is there to perceive it; it is not independent of the perceiver.
Mea culpa, Gaudere. I must have misunderstood. However, you used art as an example of something non-physical which you considered to have “real” existence.
This thread has gotten past metaphysics into some unfortunate epistemological excursi. I think I, Lib., Vile Orb, and other participants would welcome your input as to exactly what you’d consider “real” and where you draw lines in this material/mystical spectrum – and particularly why.
This thread may answer a cavil I’ve had ever since David B. and I exchanged initial shots on the question of God. Because the lines of what is provable, what is concludable, and what is speculative, and how one arrives at the same, seem unclearly drawn, to me at least.