On Mar 28, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Peter Benson wrote:
> All:
> Perhaps I should put my comment on the concept of "truth" into
> context.
> There are many that consider truth and reality to be very relative and
> tenuous concepts, I include myself in this group (having been
> educated by
> the Jesuits in France only to spend the best part of forty years
> working
> with the Tibetans you can probably forgive me). I consider myself to
> be a
> logical scientist at heart and I know that physical and mathematical
> "laws"
> are critical to predicting outcomes but I draw the line at asserting
> that I
> or anyone else can ever be sure of what is the "truth"; (01)
You are confusing truth with certainty -- in more high-falutin' lingo,
metaphysics with epistemology. Just to make sense of your claim here,
you have to presuppose that there is something -- the truth -- about
which no one can ever be certain. And *of course* it is conceivable
that we might all be wrong about the truth. As Descartes first noted,
we cannot know with absolute certainty that we aren't all under the
spell of an evil demon, or that we're not simply brains in a vat
somewhere whose neurons are being stimulated a remarkably co-ordinated
manner. But there is still a reality in even those cases of radical
deception about which we are all *wrong*. If we're all brains in a
vat, it is *true* that we are and, although we believe ourselves, say,
to have complete human bodies, that belief is in fact *not true*. The
fact that we can't know much with absolute certainty provides no
grounds whatsoever for doubting that there is in fact an objective
world about which we can be right or wrong. (Though, as Descartes
also observed, even in cases of radical deception like those above
there are still some contingent things that we know with certainty,
e.g., that something exists.) (02)
It seems to me that you are also confusing knowledge with certainty --
knowledge doesn't typically require absolute certainty, just truth
plus adequate justification. We cannot decisively refute the brains-
in-a-vat hypothesis, but if in fact I am not living a life of
complete, systematic deception, then it is true that I am in fact
typing at my computer at this moment. And since my belief that I am
typing at my computer seems very well justified by my perceptions, I
can quite rightly be said to *know* that I am typing at my computer at
this moment, albeit perhaps not with absolute, logical certainty. If
you want to deny that I do, then you are putting far greater
conditions on what it is to know something than are warranted by our
ordinary use of the word. (03)
> hey we may all just be a figment of each others imagination. (04)
That of course isn't even coherent. We can't *all* be figments of
*each other's* imaginations; there has to be at least one person who
is doing some imagining. (05)
Chris Menzel (06)
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