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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?

Yes? If only what is scientifically demonstrable is knowable, then we have no way of knowing that science is a valid source of knowledge, because a scientific demonstration of the validity of scientific knowledge would be circular.

That means we can't be sure that they ARE actual constraints of reality. Not that we can be sure they are not. Those are not the same thing.

It means that if we have any knowledge of anything, then we can be sure those are not the actual constraints of reality. Either our item of knowledge K is not scientifically verifiable, in which case the point is proved, or it is scientifically verifiable, in which case in order to count as knowledge, the scientific method must be known to be reliable, which cannot happen by scientific verification.

Well, we don't have any knowledge of anything if you use such a demanding definition of knowledge.

Actually I'm not sure if I've been interpreting this argument correctly up to this point. My objection is to a kind of methodological materialism or ruling out a priori the possibility of knowledge from philosophical methods. I'm not sure that's coherent because of the obvious issue with stating that one knows this. Perhaps one could deny that one knows it but say it is possibly true, but I don't think that makes any sense, because advancing that proposition (p = "I don't know if the scientific method is the only way to knowledge, but it could be true") is effectively asserting knowledge of p, and one does not know p scientifically.

If what @SSCReader or you mean is just that metaphysical materialism may be true - that it may turn out to be the case that materialism is right and we can make philosophical arguments for and against that and evaluate them according to philosophical methods to arrive at knowledge - then I have no objection.

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