Comments on: Do You Know Something?

By: Grondzilla

Grondzilla — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:05:29 +0000

Hey, thanks for posting these kinds of observations. I wandered over here through happenstance and thought I should give Hume some props. I suspect I’m particularly touchy to the notions of ‘knowledge’ because of the argumentative company I kept in my youth. Sure, in virtually all of our world of ‘observable’ knowledge it’s cool to allow that many repeated results grant a degree of certainty but when we get out onto the edges of the known we have to be much more circumspect about saying ‘it is so’. Newtonian physics is a darned close fit to the bigger picture but suddenly became not good enough when we want to pull off fancy stuff like Global Positioning. Because our observational capabilities are imprecise it stands to reason that our knowledge is too.

By: Diesel

Diesel — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:06:24 +0000

Happy Inappropriate Card Day, Sinisterdan and friends!

By: sinisterdan

sinisterdan — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:33:13 +0000

The underpinning of a world view that relies on external verification (through that which exists in the world) as the Aristotelian does will not promote a dogmatic result, it discourages it.

There is skepticism inherent in Aristotle when his system is properly applied.

BTW, I really appreciate your comments.

By: Grondzilla

Grondzilla — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:20:44 +0000

I guess my support for Hume is that his insistence on a lack of knowledge is a healthy way of avoiding the kind of dogma that takes over when you are convinced that you ‘know’ things. Human beings are so desperate for certainty that they happily lapse into acceptance of ‘close enough’ as the gospel truth…something that does no one any real good. You call it semantic hairsplitting, I call it insightful warning.

By: sinisterdan

sinisterdan — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:57:17 +0000

As I mention, Hume is technically correct, but in practice I think that the hair he splits is meaningless…just a “but you might not” statement — in practice, we know and can verify what we know — so Hume, again, is spelling out a distinction without a difference.

As for the sun orbiting around the earth, this is a critique made of Aristotle almost automatically. Aristotle’s planetary motion was almost universally accepted since it made sense by both induction and deduction in addition to being generally accurate when making predictions. Until relatively complex optics and mathematics were developed, there was no way of verifying the Aristotelean cosmology and thus establishing that it was wrong. As such, he was not wrong as much as he was under informed. He was wrong about a *lot* of other stuff, but not that.

The nature of his own system would have demanded that he change his view when faced with empirical evidence that contradicted it — there was none for centuries and centuries after his death.

By: Grondzilla

Grondzilla — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:07:06 +0000

I dunno. Hume’s point is still that you do not *know* and are simply in the habit of accepting the evidence so far. It wasn’t like he said you should then huddle in a corner somewhere rapidly brushing your lips with an extended digit but that you shouldn’t accept past experience as concrete proof. The Aristotlean’s after all were the same bunch of lame brains that accepted the sun spun around the world. I always thought of Hume as saying that we would have to live with the fact that we’re not privy to certainty about cause and effect and as such should always be on the lookout for the possibility things would turn out differently. I could just be overly optimistic though.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:51:35 +0000

Thanks for the links - I think. At this rate some Google Algorithm Overlord will classify this as spam and have us banned from teh internets.

But you still can’t know my cactus, split my kindling or axe my groin. Vivid as those images are…

By: Diesel

Diesel — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:21:41 +0000

I always took Hume as coming to essentially the same conclusion: We can’t know that the axe will have the same effect on my groin as it has had on 99 other groins, but we still get out of the way, because what choice do we have? In other words, I take Hume as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that every proposition that we rely on in real life has be proven. And while he kept talking like he believed that, there were points where he essentially admitted it wasn’t going to happen.

BTW, not sure if you got my email, but you’ll need to change the humor-blogs dot com to humor-blogs.com to get it to actually show up. :)

Also, have you read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? I think you’d like it.

By: ggwfung

ggwfung — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:48:43 +0000

Aristotle provides an enviable legacy. To utter words that still ring true millenia onwards … it must be a true grasp of how things are.

ggw