Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Can we really KNOW anything? (G4;S13)

Hello everybody!  As always, I enjoyed reading this week's passages.  I feel like much of what we read are ideas that I have had, but never discussed before.  I am now reading the passages, and discussing them with others, allowing me to see that other people have thought about these things as well.  Much of what we read are things rarely discussed, but commonly thought about.  Each chapter brings with it a new concept to think about.

C.S. Pierce argues that truth could only be found by observation and practical thought and practice.  This, at first, sounds plausible.  However, if like Barry Stroud, you believed that senses may be unreliable at times, Pierce's argument could not stand correct.  I agree with C.S. Pierce in his idea that it is convenient to believe that truth is whatever we can see, but I do not believe that that would be "truth."  It would be somewhat of a "truth for measures of convenience."  Truth, I believe, is beyond human knowledge.

I did like William James' stance on truth.  He believed that truth varied from person to person.  Each person has different definitions of what may be true to them or what "works" for them.  Therefore, there are as many truths as people in existence.  Truth is, according to James, whatever benefits the individual to believe.  From a religious standpoint, I disagree with this.  A person should not believe in God, simply because it benefits them to do so.  From a realist point of view, I would agree with James in that truth varies from person to person, according to their values and perception.

I did not like reading about Nietsche's ideas.  He continuously quoted that "God is dead."  In a world that lacks any belief in God, more and more people would lose sight of right and wrong.  Nobody would care about practicing goodness, and everyone would work towards fulfilling their selfish desires.  I believe that this would be an evil world of turmoil and chaos.

Barry Stroud's ideas were ones I have thought about quite often.  I believe that humans cannot know anything for a fact.  Everything is based upon previous assumptions, that may be incorrect for all we know.  Our senses cannot raise our awareness of what IS.  Senses only portray to us what we perceive.  I liked how he mentioned that a perception is, in essence, a hallucination.  Can we trust hallucinations to give us TRUE knowledge?  For all we know, we could be in a constant state of dreaming.  What we believe is happening could be a figment of our imaginations.  Who is to say what is and what is not?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Arielle Roides (Group 4; Section 13)

4 comments:

  1. Natalie Ricketts6:50 PM CDT

    I have never thought about time to this degree before and actually I find it quite interesting now that I have. In his interview, Mellor talks about “tenses” and how really that is not an accurate term. He states how they just arise from the fact that things and events appear to move through time: beginning as future, then moving to present then past. Also, for example, the only thing that makes saying “I am writing this in the present” true is that I am sitting here right now typing it. When you, my classmates, are reading it, I will have written it in the past. He points out that it only makes sense in practice. I hadn’t before, but I now see the flaw (and trickiness) in using these terms for describing time, but I think they are necessary. It is necessary to describe to people a point in time everyday. Anyway, our society is so accustomed to correctly interpreting these descriptions of time that it is never a problem.
    --Mellor states that the problem is that while things are past or present or future, none of them stay there. (T or F) True
    --Do you think this is a problem for describing time?
    --If so, what would be a better way of communicating/describing time?

    --Natalie Ricketts

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  2. I Hope this comment is real...
    I don't believe going through life as a extreme sceptic is exactly the best why to handle things, but there are certain advantages to the scepticism philosophy, such as not worrying about some problem that is driving you insane because you just can't understand how it works. in cases as that, I believe you should take up being a sceptic.

    -discussion question- Is scepticism a help or a hindrance to you?

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  3. Natalie, great factual question about the temporary state of tenses! Caleb, I like how you said that skepticism allows people to not worry about knowing true facts, because to a skeptic, this is impossible. It is helpful to view situations that are out of your control with a skeptical mentality. This way, it is more difficult to feel uneasy about them. No one knows THE ANSWER. However, skepticism, if taken to the extreme, can block one's mentality from understanding reality in terms of what works for us, despite not knowing the TRUTH.

    It was great to hear your thoughts guys!

    Arielle Roides

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  4. Amanda Gargano1:07 PM CDT

    Wow, do we really not know anything? It is a weird concept to think about but at the same time I think that it is completely true. I also think that skepticism hinders a lot of negativity in a sense that one could easily say that we are dreaming all of the time, nothing is real, and the meaning of life does not exist because we as these so called "humans" do not exist. I believe that all humans have a misconception of the nature of knowledge and Stroud brings up a very good point by explaining how the world rests on faulty unjustified assumption. It hurts my brain to think from a skeptics point of view.... Mellor raises some very intriguing questions about time in the next chapter... What does Mellor say the problem is, talking about time in the, past, present and the future? Do you think that time is essentially tenseless?

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