epistemology: or what have you done for me lately

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

the source of our information…how do we know what we know?

I see a dog… how do I know that it is a dog… the genus is the dog is called
Canis… how do I know that… can I tell that just from looking at a dog?
I can now see a dog and tell you its a dog and what its genus is, but
how did I come about that information?

I didn’t just see a dog and know what a dog is and what Genus it is…
someone told me… when I was young… and all our information
comes to us this way… someone told us…
in other words, all our information comes to us second hand…
I see a tree and I cannot by just looking at the tree know what it is
or what a tree means…someone told me… most likely in school,
hence the point of education… to know what things are and what is
there, if any, relation between various things are…
for I cannot know that by just looking at things…

so let us think about this… every bit of information I/we hold
is second hand information…as a parent, I can tell you that
a baby/child has to be told everything to know what it is, a child
is really a blank slate… waiting to be written on…

so it isn’t really relevant what information we know as much
as it is the quality of the information we are taught…
who teaches us that information and its quality…
is it information that is correct and accurate information…

hence when people and I shall pick one at random due to her incredible
lack of knowledge, Wendy… she claims to have knowledge of, say what
communism is… but clearly she has no clue…she hasn’t done the research to
see if the knowledge she was indoctrinated with, is actually correct knowledge…

and that is because she believed the indoctrinations of school, the state,
the church that she was given as a child…as we receive all our knowledge
second hand, it is critical that we receive honest and reliable information
as children…

but if we understand that all information is second hand, then we
can see the reason for there being bias, superstitious, prejudice
information… children are taught to be prejudiced by their
families, the state, the church, the society…that bias people
have has to come from somewhere… and all information is
given to us, it is safe to assume that even prejudice and superstition
is taught to us…thus we can undue that bias and prejudicial
“education” we receive as children with an reexamination of our values,
our teachings, our indoctrinations…I too was taught that communism
is wrong… but I overcame my indoctrinations by an reexamination
of what I was taught/indoctrinated with… I hold that
Marxism/communism is wrong for far different reasons then
what is taught/indoctrinated with… I overcame my education/indoctrinations…
with an reevaluation of my values…

a conservative is one who is unable or unwilling to have an reexamination
of values/ of education… it is easier to hold what we were taught,
which is everything, instead of examining the values we were taught and
to see if those values are really my values or the values indoctrinated into me
as education…

our values are directly tied to what we are taught…
if you can overcome those taught values/indoctrinations,
then you can become an autonomous person…
for that is what an autonomous person means,
one who is freed of the indoctrinations/education
of their childhood…

so remember, every single value or belief or information you have,
has been taught to you by someone else…so, what are you
going to do about that?

Kropotkin

2

Most epistemology questions revolves around this,
what can we know and how do we know it? becomes one
of the basic questions of the modern age…
I know that capitalism is indeed a failure but
how do I know this???

If I have been indoctrinated with values and beliefs like, capitalism is
the greatest economic system ever, how would I be able to know if that is true?

we cannot, as the conservative does, begin with the statement,
capitalism is the greatest system ever and present evidence that shows
that fact… in other words, we don’t present only the evidence that
supports our current bias… we seek confirmation of our bias…
and any evidence that fails to support our current bias is rejected,
as fake news or being “liberal”… the evidence must be examined
without any bias… and if done so, we would clearly see the failure
of capitalism…if the majority of workers are one or two paychecks
from being on the street, then capitalism has failed…

I engage with the reality or failure of a system not by how successful the
few are, but how the vast majority of people are doing…the old argument goes
like this, but people have the highest standard of living then people have ever had,
isn’t an argument for the success of capitalism…the average person living in say,
1750 still lived better then the average person in the Roman age… simple because
of advances made since then… which has nothing to do with capitalism…
one example of this is the improvement in water mills over the centuries…
for example the Greeks invented the two main components of the water mill,
and then over the middle ages, the water mill made progress in the creation of
new types of water mills… for example the sawmill created in France circa 1300 A.D…
and this was before capitalism… which can be said to be rolling in England by 1780…
and France by 1825…and the improvements that the water mills brought about
help raise the standard of living… again, without any influence from capitalism…

so how we go about seeking the nature of knowledge is just as important
as the knowledge itself…what is knowledge and how do we know its true?
what are the limits and range of knowledge? the Christian claims that
the bible has been “vindicated” by the finding of scientist and yet,
we also know how the bible has been dismissed by science too…
the various “miracles” of the bible… the stopping of the sun and moon,
in Joshua…wasn’t recorded in any other written source, and yet we
have hundreds of written records of many civilizations including
the Chinese and the Babylonian…who say nothing about the sun and moon
stopping…it has been said the flood of Noah has been “proven”
there does seem to be evidence of a flood in the middle-east that
made an impact on many cultures and yet, that doesn’t “prove”
that was the flood of Noah… it shows that there was a flood,
nothing more…to suggest that it was somehow the flood of Noah,
is to suggest evidence that simply isn’t there…much of the bible
evidence, is just like that… because this event occurred, it doesn’t
mean it is connected to an event in the bible…it just means this
event occurred… nothing more…there has to be some connection
between two events to make us consider that it might be true…
we have evidence of a flood and the bible believes in Noah…
so what is the evidence connecting the two?

and that is a good deal of the problem with conservatives,
the connecting of events to make a coherent story…

for example, the conservatives makes the argument that
tax cuts grow the economy… and yet, there is no evidence
that this is true…indeed, there is clear evidence that
tax cuts hurts the economy…there are studies that say that for
every one dollar given in a tax cut, the state receives only .82 cents back…
in other words for every dollar in a tax cut, the state loses 18 cents…
hence we can offer up evidence that any tax cut in fact substantially increases
the deficit of the government…and other studies suggest that for ever dollar
spent on building something like a bridge, brings in $2.42 cents
so, if you want to increase government income or reduce the deficit,
you build bridges, roads, waste facilities…and for every dollar you spend,
you get $2.42. back…so what is the knowledge being sought, which
is what is the best way to bring in tax dollars and pare down the deficit,
we can see from the studies that it is by building things, not by tax cuts…
the evidence is quite clear…and with this knowledge, we can begin the task
of working out what programs and actions are needed by the government…

this is why Keynesian economic works and why supply side economics doesn’t work…
every single tax cut cost the taxpayer .18 cents over every single dollar given in
a tax cut…so over a billion dollar tax cut, that .18 cents become millions of dollars…
but if we put that billion dollars toward building a bridge, then for every dollar,
we get $2.42 back… hence our spending one billion dollars, will get us 2.42 billion
dollars back…that sounds like a much better return on our money spent…

and this is the point of getting knowledge and understanding the limits
of that knowledge… we can make better decisions when we have
all the facts, all the evidence given by the knowledge…

this search for knowledge and the correct nature of knowledge isn’t just
a pedantic search for knowledge… it is the path to discovering what
paths we can or cannot take going into the future of human existence…

so the correct use of or understanding of the knowledge of capitalism leads us to
see that capitalism is a failure… and the next step becomes, now what?

Kropotkin

3

Everything in the US is welfare and socialism.

The major point is where it goes.

Currently most of it goes to billionaires …

Two of the richest companies today if we didn’t allow patent theft would be xerox and bell laboratories.

The internet was made by the government, so that doesn’t count.

4

You aren’t saying anything that isn’t familiar to the other side (the conservative one.) Putting aside your examples (involving dogs and trees), which are rather bad, everyone understands that most people are non-thinking beings with beliefs programmed into them from without. The question is who belongs to this heap and who doesn’t. Convservatives will tell you it’s the liberals and liberals will tell you it’s the conservatives. You are doing nothing but asserting over and over and over again that conservatives are bad, that Wendy is clueless, that communism doesn’t mean what conservatives think it means, that Wendy and other conservatives don’t do research, that they are indoctrinated, that people should regularly engage in re-examination of their beliefs, that conservatives are incapable of self-examination, that they succumb to confirmation bias and so on. Your lack of willingness to interact with other people, your fondness for tireless and endless repetion of your beliefs (which are in many cases pretty banal), your tendency to start numerous threads within a short period of time and your inclination to berate other forum members and people you don’t like in general all suggest that you’re here to propagandize and proselytize and not to be taken seriously.

According to its title, this thread is supposedly about epistemology. In reality, however, it’s yet another thread where you berate conservatives.