premiere
Well, I've finally done it. The posts that follow shall relate my various and innumerable gripes with contemporary politics -- but, of course, as Lenin observed, everything is politics, so I guess I'm leaving myself open to branch out into music or television or whatever. But let me start with my take on rational analysis, because I'll be using and bitching about other sources' uses of the following words as I go forward. This isn't a deep epistemological treatise, just an explanation of how I'll be evaluating information.
There are three basic levels awareness, for want of a better term: faith/belief, trust/confidence, and knowledge.
The lowest and least useful of these is faith or belief, which is essentially the acceptance of an assertion or idea without consideration of evidence -- either evidence against it or a lack of evidence supporting it. To believe or have faith is a conscious decision to shut off all further rational analysis of the idea, and is therefore useful only when there's no possibility of evidence. If an idea or assertion can be examined rationally, faith must be abandoned.
Knowledge is the highest level of awareness, being the acceptance of an idea or assertion on the basis of demonstrable elimination of all other alternatives. As one might guess, though, this winds up being not especially relevant: humans are finite in sense and memory, and it's just not feasible to locate, examine, and disprove all possible alternative cases of a phenomenon or idea. I may be paraphrasing Vico, but the only things we can know are those things we can create: definitions, mathematics. Of course, what we know by definition may not have any relevance at all to the nature of the world. So knowledge can be employed only in limited cases.
What we're left with is trust or confidence, which I would define as an assignment of probability to the veracity of an idea or asssertion based on previous experience with the phenomenon described or the source relating the assertion -- we talk, for example, about someone "earning' our trust. This is the basis on which we examine the world, and it is dynamic because new information about a phenomenon must change our level of certainty about any assertions or ideas related to it. It implies continued rational thought and analysis on the assertion, and depends on evidence.
I consider myself a materialist, empiricist, and scientist: I believe that the world exists apart from my perception of it, but that it yields to my perception. I must believe this, because I could locate or derive no evidence that could challenge or support this assertion. In fact, it might be less proper to say that I believe the world is real than that I hope it is (hope being the expression of a preference for a given outcome with understanding that such outcome is not the only or even most likely outcome). In accepting this premise on faith, however, I can use my senses to gather evidence about the world around me, and I have no need to believe anything else. My senses are not infallible, nor is my memory, but they can be bolstered by repetition and double-checking perceptions with others; and only in this way can my perception of reality begin to become valid. I think (trust or have confidence that) all humans, and all sentient creatures, are empirical by nature, because it is through empiricism that we learn to walk, use depth perception and location of sound, use language, read expression -- only after a vast amount of information is acquired in this way can we actually learn through abstraction.
So by way of summation, I get impatient with persons who say "I believe" when they really mean they have a high degree of confidence, and I get livid with persons who say "I know" when they really mean they believe. Politics is rife with examples, so I'll refer to this over and over again.
There are three basic levels awareness, for want of a better term: faith/belief, trust/confidence, and knowledge.
The lowest and least useful of these is faith or belief, which is essentially the acceptance of an assertion or idea without consideration of evidence -- either evidence against it or a lack of evidence supporting it. To believe or have faith is a conscious decision to shut off all further rational analysis of the idea, and is therefore useful only when there's no possibility of evidence. If an idea or assertion can be examined rationally, faith must be abandoned.
Knowledge is the highest level of awareness, being the acceptance of an idea or assertion on the basis of demonstrable elimination of all other alternatives. As one might guess, though, this winds up being not especially relevant: humans are finite in sense and memory, and it's just not feasible to locate, examine, and disprove all possible alternative cases of a phenomenon or idea. I may be paraphrasing Vico, but the only things we can know are those things we can create: definitions, mathematics. Of course, what we know by definition may not have any relevance at all to the nature of the world. So knowledge can be employed only in limited cases.
What we're left with is trust or confidence, which I would define as an assignment of probability to the veracity of an idea or asssertion based on previous experience with the phenomenon described or the source relating the assertion -- we talk, for example, about someone "earning' our trust. This is the basis on which we examine the world, and it is dynamic because new information about a phenomenon must change our level of certainty about any assertions or ideas related to it. It implies continued rational thought and analysis on the assertion, and depends on evidence.
I consider myself a materialist, empiricist, and scientist: I believe that the world exists apart from my perception of it, but that it yields to my perception. I must believe this, because I could locate or derive no evidence that could challenge or support this assertion. In fact, it might be less proper to say that I believe the world is real than that I hope it is (hope being the expression of a preference for a given outcome with understanding that such outcome is not the only or even most likely outcome). In accepting this premise on faith, however, I can use my senses to gather evidence about the world around me, and I have no need to believe anything else. My senses are not infallible, nor is my memory, but they can be bolstered by repetition and double-checking perceptions with others; and only in this way can my perception of reality begin to become valid. I think (trust or have confidence that) all humans, and all sentient creatures, are empirical by nature, because it is through empiricism that we learn to walk, use depth perception and location of sound, use language, read expression -- only after a vast amount of information is acquired in this way can we actually learn through abstraction.
So by way of summation, I get impatient with persons who say "I believe" when they really mean they have a high degree of confidence, and I get livid with persons who say "I know" when they really mean they believe. Politics is rife with examples, so I'll refer to this over and over again.
posted by heavynettle at 15:09
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