Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Nov 13, 2025 5:13 pm
Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:42 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Nov 12, 2025 2:55 pmIf "nobody is supposed to deduce anything," then there is no such thing as
knowledge --
Well, when it comes to philosophical questions, that is true; that is what makes them philosophical.
Wow. That strikes me as a jaded, unduly pessimistic view of human knowledge and of philosophy. Why even be here, if there's no such thing as "knowledge"?
And how could you KNOW there's no such thing as knowledge?
If you KNOW it, it can't be true. If you don't KNOW it, then why believe it?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Nov 12, 2025 5:54 pm...and you cannot possibly be having the
knowledge that this is so, since that would undermine your own theory.
One can know that a number of deductions can be made from the same sensory data, not least because people manifestly do.
Again, if you KNOW anything, then epistemic relativism is false. So you could say, "I wish to think that any number of deductions...etc." But you can't say you KNOW. If you did, you'd disprove yourself.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Nov 12, 2025 5:54 pmIf not a single person in the world knew what "gravity" was, gravity would still kill those who step off cliffs.
I think most people are aware that stepping off a cliff isn't going to end well. What nobody knows is the mechanism that causes gravity.
And yet, it will continue to work, despite that lack of knowledge.
And that's the important point: what people know does not alter reality. It only alters
their own assumptions about reality,
their own relation to the truth, and those can be correct or incorrect. The misperceiving individual always loses, in that conflict.
As I said, quantum mechanics seriously challenges that assumption.
It doesn't, actually. All it tells us is that our earlier understandings were not complete. We really don't know what quantum mechanics is "telling" us yet. So far, all its doing is indicating in some strange directions, but none of them tells us what our definite conclusions should yet be. If it's otherwise today, it's very recent.
Again, our faulty epistemology, whether CSR or Idealism or quantum speculations, will not change reality. Reality will always win. It's up to us, and to science, to catch up with reality, and not lose our way in faulty speculations.
Secondly, I'm not convinced the leap from numbers to reality is valid.
You don't have to be. You can prove it is. Because you can do the same experiment both mathematically and empirically, with as many tries as you like, and you'll get identical results in both. You can do as many trials as you need to convince yourself, and the same results will issue every time.
You don't understand that idealism is an argument based on the same evidence as your own argument for common sense realism.
No, I don't
agree that it is. I
understand what you're saying, I just find it to be premised on a fallacy. For it is not the case that evidence is ever "the same" for any two propositions, and certainly not for Idealism and CSR, except where a) two theories are so tightly close to each other as to be indistinguishable, in which case they don't present significant alternatives, or b) data taken is so limited that it applies to everything equally...and thus is uninformative of any theory at all.
Meanwhile, Common Sense Realism has the default going for it, as it's the way everybody lives and operates. Idealism has...
what going for it? Nothing, you say. Everything, you say. Nothing different from CSR, you say. And I do think that Idealism has
some arguments particularly going for it, and I know what some of them are
supposed to be. I don't find them conclusive, or even close to conclusive. But I know of them.
Interestingly, you don't seem to know what they are. If you do, you won't say which ones you think work. So, based on that data, whom should we guess doesn't "understand"?