Philosophy Now Forum

I'm trying to formulate an idea of epistemology and I would like to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Imagine you have three sources of authority in your model of epistemology, A, B and C. Sometimes those sources disagree or contradict each other, so you use another source, which we'll call D, to adjudicate the disagreement and decide which one is correct. Given that type of scenario, would it be logically sound to say D has a higher tier of authority than A, B, and C?

Assuming that's true, a simplified secular epistemology might look like this:

1. Reason

2. Intuition, sense data, outcomes, authority figures (doctors, scientists, etc.)

And a simplified religious epistemology might look like this:

1. The Bible

2. Intuition, outcomes, authority figures (pastor, theologian), sense data

Regardless of what you put in the #1 slot, there must be only one authority source in that slot because it there were two authorities there, they might disagree, which would require another higher authority to adjudicate the disagreement.

Does that make sense?

Octagenarian lady wrote:Am I going up or am I coming down?

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not sure what you're trying to say. i get the idea tho; if two or more generally conflicting theoretical approaches have some particular points in agreement, and u don't wanna get rid of either of them, you try to come up with a D theory alternative... one which incorporates the particular points of agreement between A, B and C.

if that's what u mean, I'd say the comparison is unfair as we wouldn't take anything supported by the bible seriously enough to call it a competing theory in a comparison to empiricism. plus one wouldn't be able to select which particular points one wants to keep in the theoretical approach of Christianity/Judaism. it's one of those 'either it's completely and totally false or it's completely and totally true' situations. u can't cherry pick claims from the bible.... while u can cherry pick elements from a wide assortment of empirical theories to create a D empiricism theory.

if there's any importance to the bible it would be some superfluous historical fact(s) that are already accounted for by the subject of general history. that is, u don't need a bible to date a particular civilization or anything of relevance that's reported by it. or, its importance would be purely ethical... but as such, it belongs to a different kind of language game than empiricism, positivism, verificationism and the like. i mean there are true and meaningful statements in religious literature but they are not available to be broken down into a series of elementary atomic facts and propositions about the world. general guidelines for morality can't be subject to rigorous analytical criticism, anyway, but they need not be to be meaningful.

it's basically like this. all post-aristotlean metaphysics is fideism. either it can't be talked clearly about (because its nonsense) or it far exceeds the limitations put on rationalism by the OGs hume and kant.... so it's back again to being nonsensical flights of intellectual fancy.