Well, that’s not necessarily knowledge, that behavior. But more important, no you can’t. You still have to trust that your senses are registering correctly external reality to compare error with success, and your memories of what has gone before. There are still assumptions all over that.
And assumptions about the repeatability of experience, your memory of it, perception, your ability to evaluate, and more.
And we can remember it with some accuracy, and we can perceive it with some accuracy -plus attendant assumptions about agency and ability to evaluate.
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No. We would have no reason to get out of bed, or start anything without a mass of assumptions.
WE can build a machine that puts together things and over millions of years might make accidental useful things. But 1) that is not something with knowledge and 2) that’s not what we do.
And you need intuition for all your movements, for all your choices of, for example, the angles at which you choose to look at what you made when evaluating it. You need intuition to have the ‘I have evaulated it enough and correctly’ quale, when you decide it works, or that you can move on to working on part B. And more.
There are no, none, purely empirical ways to accomplish anything. This is a myth. One must include non-rational cognitive processes. Not irrational ones, but non-rational ones. One must assume a lot of things.
Actually the critical criteria in the following order;
[list]1. A sound Framework and System [scientific method, peer pressure] with high confidence levels.
2. intersubjective consensus among peers
3. repeatable testing and confirmation of results
4. Confidence of the majority
5. falsifiability
6. humility of no 100% certainty
7. Others
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Exist [essence of existence] is merely a copula between a subject and its predicate.
A thing [subject] exists as a state of being as represented by its predicate.
The term ‘exist’ [and existence] is not the critical element here.
What is critical is the thing and its state of being.
E.g. one cannot state ‘an apple exists [period].’
An apple [subject/object] exists as a fruit within an environment [state of being].
Therefore if you want to demonstrate the existence of the apple, then one must produce evidence and justification of its predicate, i.e. its qualities, properties, concepts, evidences etc.
Ecmandu,
‘Existence’ [essence exists] is a copped out word for what is reality.
Yes. There is an average, and we all fall within that average.
It’s like a cup of coffee.
People often tell me that there is no such thing as perfection… however, when I order coffee, I always ask them to fill it 3/4ths full. I’ve never had that same pour twice, but, it’s been perfect every time. The function is don’t fill it so that I burn my hands by walking with it, and don’t rip me off. It’s never been exactly 3/4ths full, but it’s still perfect every time.
It’s in this way, that people are objectively perfect as an average in their slice of the perceptual acuity pie.
C’mon dude, you were so close.
You got it right the first time… there is in fact no “knowledge” claimed in that, it’s just a process… or behavior as you put it.
And I don’t have to “trust” my senses or memory or even assume that there IS an external reality in order to behave that way.
You keep confusing the suppositions we make every day with presuppositions… those two concepts are very different.
What I’m arguing is that we can do without any a-priori assumptions or presuppositions.
I don’t have to PRE-suppose I can trust my memory… I can just suppose it normally then test it. As a consequence I now suppose my memory is mostly accurate but also quite capable of being wrong, my senses can mostly be trusted, except when I’m less than sober, then they get a bit dicey… if my senses or memory being trustworthy were PRE-suppositions, I’d be incapable of coming to the conclusion that they sometimes cannot be trusted.
I’m not saying we can do without suppositions, which is what you seem to think… I’m saying we can do without PREsuppositions, because we have a process by which we can generate and improve our suppositions.
And all it takes for that process to work is qualitative experience…
We don’t do without them. And I do not put citation marks around my assumptions all the time. Once in a while when waxing philosophical I, unlike most people, may question them. But that is clearly challenging axioms.
I’m not arguing against YOU… I don’t think I even disagree with you.
I’m arguing against epistemic rationalism, I’m pointing out that we check our suppositions against empirical evidence and if there is conflict, the empirical evidence wins… that’s all it means to be an empiricists.
Yes, wins the battle, but not necessarily the war. Empiricism doesn’t obliterate basic assumptions, they merely put them on hold.
The most elemental support for this lays in the purpose of retaining of conflict, for delayed resolution, while waiting for the situation to change.
Or even a better description, with God dead or dying , follows even optics, then all through a dead philosophy, only a set of facts remain on a computer, then when that becomes beyond understanding, man himself disappears.
And then negative ontology begins all over again, with a time consuming struggle through conflict, or the other way around.
There are a lot of logical fallacies with fancy old names both formal and informal… evidently because we are not entirely rational beings.
The war is not with reason… we’re all at war with our own nature, trying desperately to work around the limitations of the tools we were given, to grow smarter, stronger and wiser so we can live better lives.