THE REAL epistemology thread

here we will actually talk about epistemology. i will politely request that if you are going to be DOGMATIC and UNYIELDING about your ideas, opinions, and statements, please go back to philosophy 101 and read/listen more carefully. also, look up the word “philosophy” in a dictionary of philosophy.

AND NOW, SOME ACTUAL DISCUSSION!

1. what are some limits to knowledge? are there some things we just can’t even think about knowing? what kinds of things place limits on what we can and cannot know?

i would say, first, our organs of sense-perception. take a bat, for example. there is a world of sensation open to bats (and dolphins for that matter) that is entirely inaccesible to us. there is nothing that can allow us to experience those sensations and perceptions. and so, we cannot come to know the things that those bats and dolphins know in the way that they come to know those things.

2. what do we do when we get to a point where we know we can’t know something? like, if you were talking about “the beginning of the universe” or “what goes on outside of the universe”… could you say anything meaningful?

philosophically and “officially” i have to say “no”. here i like to invoke wittgenstein, who says:

but on the other hand, i do think you can have an “intuition” or “feeling” regarding these unknowable things. and you can communicate those intuitions in some way. when i talk about these things (to anyone who will listen or care), i find myself sounding like some kind of zen master. and rightfully so! is there any other way? should i even bother?

yes indeed this IS the real epistemology thread. let’s keep it pure!

But we know them in our way. Why are we to trouble ourselves to know it as they know it. I cannot see things as slowly as a fly but I may know of such an exprience and even sort of inact this type of exprience through mediums such as television or imagination.

Must we have the actual exprience in order to claim knowledge of it?

I think the only limit is that of knowledge outside of our universe, because all of the methods with which we gain any knowledge at all require the processes that govern our universe to exist.

As far as stuff that animals know, i wouldnt jump to say that we cannot know the things they know, lets say a hundred years down the road we develop crazy brain science where we can attach areas of the brain native to other species to ours. Which i think is possible.

Hi Magus,
I just came in from the garden for my lunch so I only have a moment.

“Wittgenstein once wrote:’ 'Wherof one cannot speak, therof one must be silent.” It was, if I remember rightly, Erwin Schroedinger who replied: “But it is only here that speaking becomes worthwhile.” – Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p70

Popper corrected himself in a later edition; it actually wasn’t Schroedinger that said this, it was his friend Franz Urbach. Schroedinger later told Popper that even though he hadn’t said it, nevertheless, he liked the remark.

Likewise, I most want to think and talk about the ideas that I can’t seem to get my mind 'round. It’s the problems in philosophy that fascinate me, and my philosophical problems are “solved” once I see them as trivial and boring. On “doing” philosophy, Nelson Goodman remarked:

“…the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. An answer, once found, is dull; and the only remaining interest lies in further effort to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be interesting.” – The Structure of Appearance

Wherof I cannot speak is precisely what interests me and it’s what I most want to speak about.

Cheers,
Michael

great quotes, great comments!! i think i was hinting at those sorts of ideas a little bit in my original post, but i didn’t want to say too much and venture off into complete obscurity.

i think that’s just it though… the most interesting things are the things that are impossible to wrap your mind around. when i get to points like that… i feel the overwhelming urge to start creating metaphors and “talking nonsense” and whatnot, but i also feel the urge to just leave it alone and say nothing. or say something like “it is what it is” or some other zen-like statement (which does sort of go against my uptight western academic background!) i’m glad that there are others out there who think similar thoughts.

but still, you can’t know those things precisely as they know them. you can’t have the experience of a bat or of a dolphin. you can know about their experiences indirectly… through various methods (which inevitably involve the translation of some stimuli to a form that is accessible to your own organs of sense perception). that would take care of your television or “other medium” suggestion, i think.

how do you know black holes exist? you can’t see them or sense them. you use indirect methods to discern that they are there. you translate the phenomena into an experience that is accessible to you.

how do you know what someone else is thinking? you never truly do. you only infer what they are thinking …through body language or through what they say.

knowing something “in your own way” is not the same as knowing something “in someone else’s way”. you can’t know about echo location in the way a dolphin knows of echo location because you don’t experience it yourself. you can’t know someone else’s thoughts precisely and directly (as you know your own thoughts), even if they tell you… because you’re not experiencing them.

if we can agree that knowledge is gained purley through experience as you are alluding to then do not think that these is any limit to the knowledge we can gain.

So long as the universe is purley materialistic any process including detection of black holes, and the thought processes of other individuals can be gained through direct experience. We of course do not have the biological mechanisms incorporated in us to be able to experience these things at the present time.

Eg. A person born blind because they are missing a certain simple set of that makes their brain incapable of processing anything coming from the eyes. Then later in life due to he wonders of medical science the cells are replaced through synthetic or biological means, and would then have knowledge of the visual world. (Kinda like this)

So while we cannot know these things directly at the current time, i dont think they will be forever as science is constantly changing what we can experience directly.

frighter wrote:

but that’s just it though, everything materialist has a limit. okay, in terms of the universe, yeah, it’s a big limit. the basic materialistic/rationalistic divide is over this very fact, to accept that knowledge is infinite necessarily leads to the world not to be based on strictly material substance.

dark magus wrote:

the concept isn’t that easter; pyhorrian skepticism is based on this very concept. the analogy that is used in that case is that knowledge is like a ladder, you climb it until you reach the top, then kick it away. or, we can go with the shitter analogy, which states that knowledge is like a laxative, that cleans you of everything in your body and is itself discarded.

at the root of this conception of knowledge is the belief that the self is divorced from rationality or reason. reason is simply a tool that can get us to a better place, but is itself not an end. contrast this to aristotle or plato, who seen reason as the ultimate goal, no matter how you slice it.

personally, i see knowledge as being intrinsicly bound to not just what is, but also what will be. this ability to forecast/project is crucial in claiming to have acquired knowledge. that’s not to say the future is determined, don’t get me wrong, but there are things that are more reliable. to get knoweldge in these areas, and in as many areas as possible, to me always seems like knowledge. just an instinct i have.

You can be a monistic rationalist. Ever read Spinoza?

Also, it seems to me that contemporary scientific realists (aka Kripke, Searle and Putnam) get pretty close to certain classical rationalist ideas–and yet they remain materialists.

To bring it into the 20th century, that seems pretty consistent with what many philosophers of science have said about explanatory theories. A good scientific theory must be able to predict the explanandum. To say knowledge is “intrinsically bound to what will be” sounds like something you’d hear in from a $2-a-minute teleophone psychic, but if all it means is that an accurate prediction is a good indication that we know something about the world, I’m all for it.

oh

oh, only enough to write a 15pg term paper, thanks. but you know, for that i mostly just called that pyschic network you mentioned (f.y.i. it was $2.50 a minute, not $2) and stared really hard at the front cover to come up with some bullshit to write about. one of which is that, according to A2 and P6-7 (i believe) of the Ethics, substance is infinite. let’s review. substance is infinite. he goes through many arguements that substance, if it does exist, is infinite. infinite, in fact, in two senses: but in attributes and in the extent of each attribute.

what did i write?

okay, so spinoza holds that substance is infinite, in attributes and in the scope of attributes. man only knows 2 attributes: thought and extension. extension is matter. extension is infinite in scope, but not the only thing the world is made of. hence, spinoza believes that b/c the world is infinite, it is not just based on material substance. as i claimed.

i got it from pretty much every period of philosophy; the divide btw rationalists and empiricists is always only the greatest in the polemical sense.

predict and explain, i would say. and yes, this is what i meant.

heh, heh…that’s great trix. A little unorthodox maybe, but I hope you got a good grade.

Well here’s my problem…I know what Descartes means by “material substance”, as opposed to thinking substance. But on Spinoza’s view, Descartes is wrong. For S, thought and extension are parallel attributes of God, and God IS the only substance. Mind and matter are just two ways of conceiving the same, freaky infinite thing. And lemme say…I don’t know what Spinoza was smoking, but I want some.

Alright, but if you talk about “material” substance as being different from some other kind of substance, you are either disagreeing with Spinoza, or you are using “substance” in a different way. And if you’re using it in a different way, you need to define your terms. That’s all I’m saying.

Yeah, but how relevant is it? I mean no one actually argues for the existence of monads these days. Unless maybe you want to start…

first, substance is what is concieved in itself and through itself. all philosophers, to my knowledge, have used this definition. in other words, substance is ontologically and epistemologically independent. if substance were to be material, then it would be independent in both these senses. descartes, in spinoza (and mine) opinion’s errs when allowing to classify material substance when they are still dependent on immaterial things.

spinoza saw material objects as attributes of a substance (god). attributes, according to definition 2 of the ethics (book 1), are that which th emind concieves to be forms of substance. modes (finite and infinite) are affections of the attributes.

from this point of view, hegel’s history of philosophy lectures talk about spinoza as being an atheist in one of three ways: either he believes that attributes are the only things that exist, really, and so god doesn’t exist, either one attribute (thought) exists but everything else doesn’t, or either god/substance is the only thing that exits and no attributes exist. if i recall correctly, i think hegel believes spinoza leans on the last bit. i would agree with that.

it’s a really tripping theory. but, i will say, that it’s the best explaination/justification for god that i have ever heard, if you accept spinoza’s definitions/axioms.

how relevant are you? liebniz’s principle of identity, used to justify the characteristics of monads, was adopted by locke and inversed to come up with his theory of identity. as wacky and crazy some of the rationalists sound, theire ideas often lend themselves to empiricists justification. at last, nothing in philosophy is useless.

besides our organs of perception it is many other things I will itegrate under one label: the individual pattern of experience. it is the individual sequence of events that happen to one, exactly in that order and conditioned exactly by their environment that give rise to one’s knowledge. since we aren;t copies with the same destinies, with the same happenings of coincidental luck, we cannot have the exact knowledge. this is one of the limits.
but not everything is in my fatalist view conditioned on fate and luck and coincidental chain of events.
the limit to our knowledge can be represented also by our character properties, our psychical properties such as temper, free will, perseverance… we still have the choice in some situations to opt for certain variety of options.
another limit can be a our physical state, no only the condition of the senses, but I’d say it is the “wellbeing” of the whole body that matters. people think and see differently, they draw different conclusions when the body temperature is lowered by a few degrees, it is scientifically proved. or they tend to perceive more on more visual level when the weight of their body is below average.

so to the point when we realize we can;t know something? I think we can sense intuition, but this , in my opinion is still bound to our perception and to the previous knowledge or experience we have, about the things we have encountered before. it is “earth-bound”.
maybe it’s out of place but someone wrote lately a quotation on this site: “what you can;t have, you don;t need it now; what you don;t know, you can feel somehow.”
e can feel because we can predict. in some situations more than in other. and we call it intuition. it is perhaps not so extraordinary as it seems.

but can we have intuition of God, whom we have never encountered and know not what to imagine? or of extraterrestrial life? we can only rely on our rationalistic abilities - on theories.

besides our organs of perception it is many other things I will itegrate under one label: the individual pattern of experience. it is the individual sequence of events that happen to one, exactly in that order and conditioned exactly by their environment that give rise to one’s knowledge. since we aren;t copies with the same destinies, with the same happenings of coincidental luck, we cannot have the exact knowledge. this is one of the limits.
but not everything is in my fatalist view conditioned on fate and luck and coincidental chain of events.
the limit to our knowledge can be represented also by our character properties, our psychical properties such as temper, free will, perseverance… we still have the choice in some situations to opt for certain variety of options.
another limit can be a our physical state, no only the condition of the senses, but I’d say it is the “wellbeing” of the whole body that matters. people think and see differently, they draw different conclusions when the body temperature is lowered by a few degrees, it is scientifically proved. or they tend to perceive more on more visual level when the weight of their body is below average.

so to the point when we realize we can;t know something? I think we can sense intuition, but this , in my opinion is still bound to our perception and to the previous knowledge or experience we have, about the things we have encountered before. it is “earth-bound”.
maybe it’s out of place but someone wrote lately a quotation on this site: “what you can;t have, you don;t need it now; what you don;t know, you can feel somehow.”
e can feel because we can predict. in some situations more than in other. and we call it intuition. it is perhaps not so extraordinary as it seems.

but can we have intuition of God, whom we have never encountered and know not what to imagine? or of extraterrestrial life? we can only rely on our rationalistic abilities - on theories.

Well if your going to be an Empiricist, then how do you justify the claim everything is material? You can’t pick up everything and shove it under the microscope and say, “Aha, this is material.” By throwing it under there you assume its material. So it seems to be a good empiricist one has to remain entirely silent on the issue of epistomology, but I could be wrong.