Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
There is a very significant difference between "I don't like your conclusions, so what even is truth, tee hee", and "you are claiming that evidence works in a way that I know, for a certainty, that it does not". I agree with you that there is evidence that is 99.99...% certain. I agree that reality intrudes, sooner or later, no matter how subtly humans may attempt to wall it out.
Where we disagree:
you appear to believe that 99.999...% certainty is the norm for questions of significance, especially questions centering on humans and the things they do. It is not, and evidence that it is not is one of those 99.999...% bits of evidence that we do in fact actually have.
You appear to think that it is easier to tell the truth than to maintain lies. This is true, if we're talking about truths we have ready access to. It is not true for things no one involved actually has comprehensive knowledge about. For those things, lies are easier, because they allow you to skip the laborious process of actually figuring out what the truth is. The truth will catch up, eventually, but we have historical accounts of how this can take generations to occur.
an axiom is an assumption about the nature of reality that is taken to be self-evident, and then used to evaluate and interpret evidence. That is, it does not rely solely on evidence or proofs for its adoption, but allows one to reason about evidence and proofs without resorting to infinite regression or dishonesty. It is a directly-observable and entirely-unavoidable process of human reason in all times and in all places, and this fact can be ascertained to a very, very high degree of certainty.
How does this connect to "conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses"?
No, it doesn't. I take Truth and Beauty, Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice as axioms, as hard foundations from which I reason. I've chosen these as axioms not because I was forced to by a deterministic process of accumulated evidence, but because when faced with mixed evidence for all of them, I chose a specific interpretation out of a range of plausible options. I chose that option because it seemed better to me than the alternatives. It seemed better in part because of evidence, but the evidence was not remotely decisive; rather, I had a choice of theories to pursue, and that choice was made for reasons other than pure rational calculation, reasons like intuition and values-resonance. Having made that choice, I then made many subsequent choices that have served to cement me into it quite firmly, perhaps irrevocably, and a large part of that could be described as accumulating evidence: a big part of the reason I chose what I did is because I thought it would lead to a better life, and it has in fact led to a better life, beyond what I'd imagined possible at the time. Postmodern deconstruction has no appeal to me because it has nothing I want, and never will.
In the sense that when I drive to church and a jihadist drives into a crowd of people, we are both "driving". The problem with what they do isn't that they choose what to believe, it's that they choose badly, and for bad motives.
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