ace52387 said: If someone thinks the sun rises every day because a god is pulling it across, a conclusion he came to from the experience of seeing the sun rise daily, would that belief still be valid if he personally saw the earth rotating around the sun from space? Or lets say he's the only human in the world who hasn't seen the earth revolve around the sun. You could justify his faith with ignorance, but I can't see how that makes his belief valid.
The belief would be valid, but upon seeing the earth rotate from space, that idea (god pulling it across) would no longer correlate with phenomenal experience, and thus it is no longer justified in that way. Certainly they can continue believing it, but given their experience it might make more sense to construct a new truth based around this phenomena.
An analogy is this: Until the discovery of quarks, leptons (etc), electrons, neutrons, and protons were thought to be the smallest particles that exist. Thus, people had truth-constructs whereby they assumed everything was ultimately only reducible to those things. However, with new phenomenal experience (i.e., scientific inquiry), they constructed new truths to correlate with new data. However, before this experience, the previous theory correlated perfectly with the existing data and thus was, for all intents and purposes, "true".
Baman said: But real objective truths are objective, and don't need to be validated on a subjective level in order for them to stay true.
How do you, from a subjective point of view, capable of ONLY experiencing the phenomenal, make definitive statements regarding objective noumena? Any statement you make regarding noumena must have, by necessity, originated in phenomenal experience. Furthermore, the truths that we construct to explain objective noumena are only "true" insofar as they correlate with that phenomenal experience. Is a banana "yellow" in objective noumena, or is that a truth-construct formed from phenomenal experience? The statement "the banana is yellow" is false, objectively, because "yellow" is an abstraction of the human mind. Similarly, even the most dense material is actually mostly empty space--yet we say: "this desk is hard", "this sponge is soft", etc.
It makes no sense to say that reality might not be objective. If we had not evolved to be able to perceive reality, our species would likely have died out long ago, killed by predators that we could not perceive. And anything that can not be empirically proven and does not appear in our objective reality is in the end merely fantasy.
But being killed and eaten is a phenomenal experience. If I said something exists, but that it is invisible, undetectable, and did not interact in any way, shape, or form at any time for any reason with any thing (or vice versa), what would the statement "it exists" really mean?
If we do not assert the existence of a objective reality, everything would collapse into chaos.
I'm not saying that objective reality does not exist. I'm saying that our knowledge of it originates in phenomenal experience (which is inherently subjective). And like Quine, that we construct myths to explain this phenomenal experience--some simply correlate better with phenomenal experience than others.
Luckily, with the rise of empirical science, we have been able to combat many beliefs that was seen as real before, and force them out of the objective reality. Only by casting away as many subjective beliefs and ideas that do not correlate with objective reality will we be able to reach the true objective reality.
Read the quote from Quine again, as it explains this. In a nutshell, empiricism only allows us to construct truths about objective noumena in that those truths are meant to correlate with phenomenal experience. Thus, knowledge gained through empiricism is actually contingent on subjective experience. The only difference between an "empirical scientific proof" and a "myth" is that the former takes into account more phenomenal experience, and explains it better than the latter. Thus, the former may be regarded as merely a better myth. They differ in degrees, not in nature. |