All I can do once again is appeal to others:
Mo seems convinced he has dealt my point of view here a…blow? How so? Is there a way to reconfigure his words so that this might be clearer to me?
Is the key to it all the phrase, “with exactly as much certainty as…”?
I know for certain I am not presently the King of France. Why? Because, among other things, there has not in fact been an actual king of France for over 150 years. Now, can I demonstrate this with an absolute certainty? Well, what does that mean, I suppose. After all, someone other than myself might be genuinely convinced – in his head – that in fact he is the current king of France.
In fact, is he?
It seems that, one way or the other, we have to agree on what constitutes a fact here.
On the other hand, I do not hate dogs and I have never kicked one. But, again, how can I demonstrate this with an absolute certainty?
Instead, I make the distinction between a capacity to demonstrate that John kicked Rex – if in fact he did – and the capacity to demonstrate to another that if he did so then he ought not to have done so because – in fact – kicking Rex is necessarily immoral.
When is it reasonable to broach a point of view regarding what is “in fact” true “out in the world” of behaviors that come into conflict over contradictory value judgments?
Sure, epistemologists might well argue endlessly about what we can really know here; or about what we can really know here.
And, technically, more power to them.
But sooner or later – existentially, subjunctively – our Kierkegaardian leaps must be made.