me: I'm not saying that our sense are flawed.
Frank: It sure sounds that way.
To contend that our senses are flawed, I'd first have to establish that they're supposed to be doing something that they're not. My vision is, in that sense, "flawed", because it requires some kind of corrective to bring it to the standard that most humans were evolved to see.
What I'm saying is that the kinds of questions that our senses are being employed to answer are not the sort of problems that they were evolved to deal with. That's only a flaw if you take it as given that humans were evolved to know things like how matter works, what's the origin of life, etc.
AKA, there is no rational belief no matter what information its based off of, or how logically arrived at.
Again, this is a difference in how we conceive of the topic. I don't see reason as some sort of objective knowledge of things. Rather, I see reason as a procedure for elaborating on premises by interrelated, continuous cognitive steps. So a rational belief would be one that derives a conclusion from a stated premise by steps that any rational person could follow. That doesn't mean that the argument is objectively true, only that z follows from a. The truth value of a may still be in question, and that calls z into question by association.
...but that does not automatically mean that our process is fundamentally faulty or untrustworthy.
And I'm not saying that it is. I'm trying to counter a swing in the opposite direction, ie. one that takes that process to be fundamentally trustworthy and essentially infallible as a guide to truth.
Science is a process and the things science offers as theory have been tested literally millions, billions, even trillions of times with the same results. These results have been shown to be universal 100% of the time.
I think you may have an inflated sense of the operation of science. I'd be interested to see some evidence to the effect that any assertion has been scientifically tested even a quarter as many times as you say they've been tested (unless you're counting high school science lab), or that any tests have been made to confirm the "universality" of the results of any scientific theory.
Frank: It sure sounds that way.
To contend that our senses are flawed, I'd first have to establish that they're supposed to be doing something that they're not. My vision is, in that sense, "flawed", because it requires some kind of corrective to bring it to the standard that most humans were evolved to see.
What I'm saying is that the kinds of questions that our senses are being employed to answer are not the sort of problems that they were evolved to deal with. That's only a flaw if you take it as given that humans were evolved to know things like how matter works, what's the origin of life, etc.
AKA, there is no rational belief no matter what information its based off of, or how logically arrived at.
Again, this is a difference in how we conceive of the topic. I don't see reason as some sort of objective knowledge of things. Rather, I see reason as a procedure for elaborating on premises by interrelated, continuous cognitive steps. So a rational belief would be one that derives a conclusion from a stated premise by steps that any rational person could follow. That doesn't mean that the argument is objectively true, only that z follows from a. The truth value of a may still be in question, and that calls z into question by association.
...but that does not automatically mean that our process is fundamentally faulty or untrustworthy.
And I'm not saying that it is. I'm trying to counter a swing in the opposite direction, ie. one that takes that process to be fundamentally trustworthy and essentially infallible as a guide to truth.
Science is a process and the things science offers as theory have been tested literally millions, billions, even trillions of times with the same results. These results have been shown to be universal 100% of the time.
I think you may have an inflated sense of the operation of science. I'd be interested to see some evidence to the effect that any assertion has been scientifically tested even a quarter as many times as you say they've been tested (unless you're counting high school science lab), or that any tests have been made to confirm the "universality" of the results of any scientific theory.
