Buffalo wrote:Evidence of the external world's existence is consistent, rational, predictable, reasonable and actionable.
Ditto idealistic accounts that everything is mental, the matrix, a demon tricking you, so on and so forth. There is nothing in your response that precludes the legion of counter examples.
You are going to have to amend your statement about justification with something else.
mikwut wrote:I like William James famous reply to it as not so narrow minded.
mikwut
But at what point should one let go of a belief as evidence of its falsity becomes available?
"And the human knew the source of life, the woman of him, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, 'I have procreated a man with Yahweh.'" Gen. 4:1, interior quote translated by D. Bokovoy.
Buffalo wrote:Evidence of the external world's existence is consistent, rational, predictable, reasonable and actionable.
Ditto idealistic accounts that everything is mental, the matrix, a demon tricking you, so on and so forth. There is nothing in your response that precludes the legion of counter examples.
You are going to have to amend your statement about justification with something else.
actionable=idealistic?
MrStakhanovite wrote:(at least, important ones)
Isn't that scaling?
Last edited by Guest on Sat Apr 14, 2012 4:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"And the human knew the source of life, the woman of him, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, 'I have procreated a man with Yahweh.'" Gen. 4:1, interior quote translated by D. Bokovoy.
When skeptic types say things like this they usually mean something like "sufficient reason" by the term "evidence." I think that's an acceptable use of the term, actually. If you get into technical distinctions, you can sometimes trip them up, as you did in this case, but at the same time the theist doesn't gain anything by pointing to the reliability of senses when you turn that on what the atheist really means in this case. Something like that might be justified on the grounds that it is necessary to presuppose it make rational sense of the world. That kind of transcendental argument doesn't work in the case of the gods.
EAllusion wrote:you can sometimes trip them up, as you did in this case
I see neither a trip nor a fall.
Buffalo said "actionable."
Stak ignores that and trots out the old idealistic canard.
"And the human knew the source of life, the woman of him, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, 'I have procreated a man with Yahweh.'" Gen. 4:1, interior quote translated by D. Bokovoy.
But at what point should one let go of a belief as evidence of its falsity becomes available?
When its available. Our minds form beliefs based on evidence almost automatically. You can't choose them most of the time. What is in our control are other psychological factors that affect our minds belief forming mechanism. These basic trigger beliefs (i.e. belief in God or not, belief in purpose or meaning etc.) drive to a great deal what evidence we allow our belief forming mechanisms to consider.
mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell. -Michael Polanyi
"Why are you afraid, have you still no faith?" Mark 4:40
It may not have been intentional but the opening proposition sounds as if belief is a simple on off switch. I think instead it is better to recognize that there are all sorts of degrees of and colorations of believing. In that sense belief is related to the evidence. Any thinking person recognizes the aspect of possible error when they believe things, or they should. Believing in God clearly has the logical possibililty of error. I think people who beleve in God should recognize that. It is belief of a different color and context than my belief that the sun will rise tomarrow.
EAllusion wrote:you can sometimes trip them up, as you did in this case
I see neither a trip nor a fall.
Buffalo said "actionable."
Stak ignores that and trots out the old idealistic canard.
Actionable isn't even a coherent criterion that sentence. The problem is that you can't provide observational evidence that your perceptions are fundamentally a reliable guide to reality without begging the question. Evidence, in that sense, already presumes that perceptions are, at some base level, reliable. That kind of assertion, which is necessary to make evidence itself coherent, has to be justified on other grounds.
Are you asking me if the two words mean the same thing? No.
lulu wrote:Isn't that scaling?
what
lulu wrote:Buffalo said "actionable."
Stak ignores that and trots out the old idealistic canard.
Huh? Look at what I said:
MrStakhanovite wrote:Ditto idealistic accounts that everything is mental
George Berkeley’s Idealism is just as actionable, he reduces everything to immaterial thought and his metaphysics allows him to make plenty of “actionable” theories, that include sophisticated accounts of how vision and optical illusions work.
How is that a canard and not a simple fact of intellectual history?
EAllusion wrote:When skeptic types say things like this they usually mean something like "sufficient reason" by the term "evidence." I think that's an acceptable use of the term, actually.
I agree, but even then it’s still hard to come up with good justifications for these things.
EAllusion wrote:Something like that might be justified on the grounds that it is necessary to presuppose it make rational sense of the world. That kind of transcendental argument doesn't work in the case of the gods.
I didn’t really have transcendental arguments in mind as much as I had rival theories of justification, like Proper Function.
I’m not trying to trip Buffalo up, I favor evidentialism as a theory of justification, but he needs to refine his ideas some more.