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Saint Gasoline: Why is it that you think universality is necessary for epistemic criteria to be considered objectively valid?

I don't think we're capable of arriving at objectively valid criteria -- or at least, of knowing that it is objective. The best we can hope for, as a society, is consensus, and the closer that you get to universality in consensus, the better.

The simple fact that we are undoubtedly natural beings, capable of reasoning about and experiencing natural objects out in the world, and incapable of "supernatural" experiences should lead one to conclude that naturalism is a lot more warranted than a belief in the supernatural.

But those are not, at all, simple facts. Exclusive naturalism in reference to humanity is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint, but it is not in itself patently obvious. Again, the persistence of religion indicates a great deal here. Many religious beliefs holds that we are at least partly supernatural (ie. the soul or spirit is not a natural object), and mysticism as a whole is built on the idea that we are capable of supernatural belief. To tie this into our other conversation (ie. ekstasis), the character of some experience apparantly suggests to some people the possibility, if not the verity, of some forms of supernatural encounter.

It doesn't matter if people exist who doubt that the entire universe is naturalistic.

As I understood it, you were positing a direct correlation between methodological naturalism and ontological (ie. metaphysical) naturalism. I'm not claiming that universality or even broad consensus is necessary to justify a epistemic stance; I'm merely addressing the assertion that one should necessarily suggest the other. I don't think that's the case, and even a strict methodological naturalist should be capable of supposes the possibility of special cases -- unless, that is, he already assumes metaphysical naturalism.

Me: Descartes pointed to one of the dilemmas, which is that we ultimately have no evidence that our senses are reliable indicators of what is happening around us.
Gasoline: For instance, in order for Descartes' dilemma to stand, we must assume that we can take a perspective outside of our senses to see that they are unreliable, but this is frankly impossible to do.

That doesn't really solve Descartes' dilemma. That merely describes an epistemic position, but recognizing our epistemic limitations says nothing about the nature of things apart from our knowing them. It would require a viewpoint distinct from our perceptions to verify the correspondence of those perceptions to the things perceived, but that we have no access to such a viewpoint does not mean that the perceived things don't have a reality of their own. Philosophical pragmatism, as I understand it, seeks to replace the idea of the thing in itself with a fully relational view of things. As a recognition of our epistemic limitations, I think that's a realistic transition, but philosophical pragmatism starts to fall into fallacy when it assumes that, because we're incapable of knowing the thing in itself, it necessarily follows that there is no thing in itself.

(And, actually, as I understand it, philosophical pragmatism doesn't argue towards that conclusion, but rather borrows it wholesale from Wittgenstein.)

There is no need to ask whether our senses are adequate indicators of reality, then, because "reality" IS what we sense!

Maybe there are some schools of pragmatism that argue to this conclusion. I'm really only familiar the pragmatism via Richard Rorty, and I think he would eschew it. Rather, he would suggest that we do away with the notion of reality altogether. Whether or not we perceive reality is beside the point for him -- what matters is how we construct the relationships between perceived things in order to progress, in whatever way it is we hope to progress.

I'd say that defining reality such that it invariably corresponds to whatever it is we sense ultimately does nothing but negate the value of the term "reality". It makes impractical, for example, any distinction we might have made between common perception and extreme states like paranoid delusion. If reality is what we sense, then the content of the paranoid delusion must also be reality, no?

Why should we work with this festively plump and unverifiable conception of truth and reality when it makes more sense to describe truth and reality from our own perspectives as human beings?

Because, a) experience tells us that a consensus view of reality is typically more reliable -- if nothing else, as a survival tactic -- than a simple correlation between "reality" and what is perceived, and b) once we accept the superior reliability of consensus reality, we stratify the notion of reality from the senses (since, after all, if our senses fail us on an individual level, they may also fail us as a group) and make possible the recognition that some hypothetical set of senses would be even more reliable.

I do not believe that the possible epistemic rules we can take as foundational or basic are all equal--I think that we can distinguish between which rules cohere better with our exeriences as human beings, and so on.

The problem with this, I'd say, is that it supposes a set of experiences which are typical of human beings, whereas it is entirely possible that our experiences are diverse enough from person to person as to render the notion of "our experiences as human beings" rather dubious. In fact, if our experiences are so commensurable as all that, I fail to see why we would have ever developed in the first place rules which failed to cohere to the extent that they produced an idea like God.

To me, not even foundational beliefs are exempt from criticism.

I'd say that nothing is exempt from criticism, but that the set of critical tools you choose may have their own limitations. That's a pretty fundamental critique I have of Dennett's thesis -- the critical tools he's chosen don't seem capable of performing the tasks I think he wants them to perform.

Given a lack of evidence, it makes much more sense to assume that something does not exist to produce that evidence than to assume that something exists and the evidence is hidden.

I won't go through the whole ringamarole again, but to reiterate my point on this, whether or not that "makes much more sense" depends entirely on the assumptions you've taken for granted.

Both views are compatible with the evidence, to be sure, but the atheistic view does not require assuming unnecessary entities without reason.

Ask around, and I think that you'd find something in the range of 99% of theists who disagreed with you on the subject of whether or not a concept like God was necessary. What I'm getting at is that your interpretation of the world does not necessitate the existence of God, but that interpretation is not necessarily compatible with the interpretations of others, and there isn't necessarily a consensible criteria for mediating or choosing between the two. If you had a fully articulated description of a theists worldview, you might agree -- without feeling the need to adopt either the worldview or the conclusions that it necessitated -- that, given those premises, the existence of a God would be necessary.

Both an atheist and an agnostic can recognize that God is an open possibility, and yet disbelieve in God's existence.

The very language itself suggests that a person can suspend judgement altogether and be an agnostic, but cannot suspend judgement altogether and be an atheist. If they were to sum it up as answers to the question of "Is there a god?" the atheist would say, "I don't know, but I believe there isn't," while the agnostic would say, "I don't know, and therefore I don't believe either way."

Another way to look at it is that the agnostic might still go looking for some way to answer that question of whether or not there is a God (though that way would always be through sense experience), while the atheist would consider it a closed issue unless some new evidence presented itself.

Before I get any flak about making assumption about other people's belief systems, let me make the apology that I'm only elaborating on the denotative sense of the words. There are, I know, plenty of people who choose to describe themselves in one term or another, but who don't exactly fit the descriptions I've made, and I don't mean to denegrate them by focussing on what those terms mean etylogically or denotatively.

The problem with agnosticism, then, and the reason it is irrational, is that it demands epistemic infallibility

I don't think that's the case. True gnostic experience would, presumably, be infallible, because it implies the direct, unmediated experience of a thing. Agnosticism provides only for mediated experience -- that is, mediated by sense datum -- which is recognizably fallible. To that end, I think that agnosticism typically assumes fallibility as a feature of human knowledge, and is content to call that the best we have.

All knowledge requires a "leap of faith" in this regard

You'd be surprised how many freethinkers resist this idea.

--the difference between scientific faith and religious faith, of course, is that a scientific leap hopes to land upon some evidence and changes course if it doesn't, whereas religious faith is content to keep on free-falling.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate description of most solid philosophy of science, and a pretty limited understanding of the way religion has developed historically.

To me, agnosticism entails an epistemic standard of infallibility.

I don't understand where you're getting this. Could you explain a little more?

My understanding of agnosticism is that it rejects the notion of the mystical experience, specifically gnosticism, which entails direct knowledge of a thing. The alternative proposed by orthodox agnosticism is reliance on the senses as the only humanly available mode of knowledge. As such, the reason agnostics don't affirm belief in God is that the traditional Judeo-Christian God is normally imperceptible. I don't know that I've ever read anything to the effect that agnosticism demands infallible knowledge.

This conversation is amusing. Keep it comin'.

Agreed; as long as it keeps moving along.

Saint Gasoline: Now, we know what it is to exist, to be true, to be real, and so on, but something totally outside of these meanings can't even be said to exist, to be true, or to be real.

Do we know what it means to exist? I don't think that's the case at all. Try providing a non-dogmatic, non-circular explanation of existence. It's more difficult than you might imagine.

What could we possibly mean when we say that something supernatural "exists"?

It would mean that, in reference to the characteristics we posit for a natural world -- and in naturalism, specifically, I understand that to mean every causal, material thing -- something exists which either does not have those characteristics, or which has some characteristics not included within the definition of natural. If you define existence in strictly natural terms -- eg. to exist is to be material -- then you're logically going to exclude supernatural existants from the picture. The question, though, is why we ought to define existence that way. From a pragmatic point of view, we may be able to argue that it is more useful in furthering our current goals to do so, but I haven't seen any argument that would lead me to believe that we have solid, evidential grounds for limiting existence to materialism. That correlation, ultimately, is taken on faith.

It is in this sense that reality as we know it is all that reality can be--because these words like reality and truth and so on are formulated from this perspective, and there is no way they could be applicable from without it.

If that were so, then it would also be impractical, and perhaps impossible, to talk about infinity, even as a mathematical concept.

Me: If reality is what we sense, then the content of the paranoid delusion must also be reality, no?
Now we are just getting bogged down in subtleties.

I don't think that's a subtlety at all. In fact, it looks to me as though we were initially discussing subtleties, and I brought in a very practical reason for doubting the correspondence between reality and sensory evidence.

I think that ultimately this issue boils down to what we mean by "reality", "existence", and so on.

But you do recognize, don't you, that the terms "reality" and "existence" have historically been meant in ways that include non-material existence -- in fact, you might go so far as to say that, were it not for the question of non-material existence, we likely wouldn't have need of those terms at all. Rorty, in particular, objects to the use of the term reality as needlessly trying pragmatists to the dichotomies of traditional Western dualism.

Could it be that God does exist--but only in the way something imaged or thought exists?

I'd say that our epistemic position makes that a necessary conclusion. The validity of religion, then -- provided that we're not prepared to admit so-called revealed religion into our discussion -- depends on the correspondence between the imagined god and a possibly actual God existing independently of our image of god. If there is no such God, then we have to admit that our image of god is, in many ways, idle. But so far no one has given me good reason to deny the possibility of such a God.

...how is it possible to see God's existence as "necessary"?

Have I argued the necessity of God's existence? I'd be pretty surprised if anyone could point to any thread on BookTalk (save one) where I've talked about the necessity of God's existence.

Now, the obvious theistic response to this is to argue that it is silly to demand evidence for God, because things that exist immaterially or supernaturally do not produce empirical evidence. However, as I've noted, this response assumes that there is such a realm as the supernatural or immaterial, and that it makes sense to speak of something "existing" or "being" in such a realm, even though these words are bound up with our human conception of existence.

That statement itself doesn't assume either of those things, and it could be taken as entirely hypothetical. It makes the same amount of sense to say, if there were some supernatural existant, then we would have no reason to expect it to produce empirical evidence. Given that such a statement is logically true -- and given our definitions, I'd say it is -- then we'd be unable to draw a conclusion either way.

As for whether or not the terms "existing" and "being" are tied up with our "human conception of existence", whatever that may be, let's assume, for the moment, that limitation. Does that prevent us from expanding what we mean by those terms in order to embrace the existence of the supernatural? It seems to me like you're attempting to argue that the very terms by which we talk about existence render us incapable of conceiving of the supernatural. Frankly, given that people have been using just those terms to talk about and believe in the supernatural for the better part of human history, I don't see why we should take that contention seriously.

I don't see how one could argue against the fact that it is indeed plausible to doubt the existence of God given the complete lack of evidence.

It is plausible. I'm not arguing against that at all. What I'm arguing against is the contention that it is necessarily more reasonable to deny God's existence.

I would consider myself a sort of agnostic atheist in that regard--I agree that we cannot know for certain whether God exists, but I do not agree with the further agnostic claim that this lack of certainty should make it impossible to choose a side.

And on a personal level, I think that's fine. But the entire point of the tangent was to draw an analogy between science and the agnostic who reserves judgement.

However, once we note that claims of nonexistence are NOT justified with evidence, but with a lack of evidence, it becomes clear that agnosticism entails an epistemic standard of infallibility in regards to claims of nonexistence.

I doubt that's a standard that an agnostic would apply to a purely naturalistic question -- eg. what is the chemical composition of milk -- so I see no reason why they would also apply it to a supernatural question. In the case of a chemical analysis, I think the agnostic would be entirely comfortable allowing for the fallibility of sensory evidence. Where their agnosticism comes into play is the point of determining what sort of method allows for knowledge, and the agnostic's point of view is that our own limitations make sense perception the best choice, so much so that they exclude all other forms. I still don't understand how that would imply a standard of infallibility.

It looks to me like part of the problem may be that of expecting a personal criteria to stand as a consensible criteria. In the case of proving that a person has an elephant sitting on their head, the proper question would be, can you provide evidence from sensory perception to demonstrate to me that there is an elephant sitting on your head, and if the person cannot, then the proper response is, then you cannot convince me that it is so. But the agnostic cannot expect the delusional man to accept the same criteria, for the simple reason that the choice of criteria is ultimately a personal matter. You can justify a particular choice with reason, but there are always, at base, premises that the person must either affirm or deny before reason can operate.

Saint Gasoline: However, if someone responds that the evidence is somehow hidden or unknowable, and that given this the lack of evidence accords with the theory, most people would recognize that this assertion is patently ridiculous and unwarranted.

If they made that assertion with no rationale to support it, then yes, I think we'd be right to suspect it. But as it happens, in the case of supernatural phenomenon as we've defined it, it logically follows that it would produce no empirical evidence.

Surely an agnostic would have to grant this point--if a theist can say, "You can't argue that God does not exist from the lack of evidence because given the hidden and unknowable nature of the evidence we wouldn't expect to find any", then supposedly someone could use this justification for anything, simply arguing that the evidence is somehow unknowable or hidden.

I think that's a limitation that the pure agnostic would be willing to accept. The agnostic position is essentially a position on which sorts of knowledge are available to us and which are not. And that's where it ends, really. The train of thought that takes you from agnosticism to atheism is not, that I can tell, implicit in agnosticism, and I can't see why it would be so objectionable to suggest that there is another premise at work in that transition.

In essence, this makes it impossible to say that something does not exist, and the only reason it does so is because it sets too high an epistemic standard by allowing people to grant, without sufficient reason, that there is such a thing as "unknowable evidence" or that this sort of thing even makes sense.

Why shouldn't there be unknowable evidence? Consider the position of a completely sightless animal. What would be his evidence for the existence of color? He'd have none, because his epistemic position provides no way of knowing the evidence necessary for that knowledge. Color, from his standpoint, would be a form of "unknowable evidence."

Frankly, I see no reason to suppose that our epistemic apparatus is so comprehensive that there is no possibility of evidence that is unknowable to us. In a very real sense, the natural world is determined precisely by the extent of our epistemic apparatus.

Me: If that were so, then it would also be impractical, and perhaps impossible, to talk about infinity, even as a mathematical concept.
Gasoline: The concept of infinity is not something that is "unknowable" or "beyond our reality", though. It is something that we can infer and discourse about based upon principles of logic and so on.

Not as an actual thing; rather we infer it as a concept, something imagined. We may be able to derive it based on the nature of our number set, but it's important to remember that the number set is an imaginative construction, not an artifact found in nature, and not something which produces evidence. Numbers themselves are not things; they're attributes of descriptions, and the descriptions themselves are not implicit in the thing being described. As such, infinity can produce no natural evidence, because the number set from which it is derived is not itself a natural existant. (This, incidentally, is a point that both Russell and Whitehead explain at length.)

This is in no way comparable to something "supernatural".

It is in precisely the sense that it is a) not a natural existant, b) incapable of producing evidence, and c) known to us only because we have derived it from axioms of our own construction.

However, I think you can still see my point. Regardless of whether it is difficut to define these concepts from our own perspective, it stands to reason that speaking of them from outside of it would be rather meaningless and absurd.

That may be so. But I think it's crucial that you recognize how much hangs in the balance. Because the fact of the matter is that so much of what we take for granted, and not just the supernatural, was achieved by, and is maintained by, acting as though such a point of view were possible. The very idea of a worldview supposes a view beyond the limits of our own immediate sense perceptions.

To me, it is a logical contradiction to say that you can sense or know about the supernatural.

It is so far as you assume that sensation is always relative to the natural world. Medieval man certainly didn't hold that to be true, and it's a fair bet that other cultures have held views related to the medieval.

Saint Gasoline: The fact that it is indeed possible to say that something does not exist, and the fact that we rule out the possibility of the thing existing but being unknowable, should lead us to reject all claims about existing "unknowable" things.

Who's "we"? And how did we decide that those were facts? It doesn't look to me at all that we, as a species, are capable of knowing that something does not exist, however much we may say it. And we as a culture certainly haven't ruled out the possibility of an unknowable existant -- for that matter, we as two lone conversants haven't agreed on that. It looks to me as though you're treating your own premises as though they were easily consensible, despite a situation in which they have failed to find broad consensus.

If we don't rule out this possibility, then anyone who tells us that there are elephants on our heads but which produce unknowable evidence of their existence would be unassailable--we couldn't tell him he was full of it.

Honestly, I don't really understand your motive here. Why are we so interested in telling him that he's full of it?

There may be more, but there are in particular two uses of epistemology. One is personal: that is, it allows a basis for establishing a personal worldview and for determining what is and is not a valid criteria for personal knowledge of a thing. If that's the use we put epistemology to, then it should be immaterial to us whether or not someone else believes they have an elephant on their head. What really matters is whether or not we as individuals believe it. The other use is social: that is, it allows a basis for establishing knowledge as a form of social control or power, whereby we can reject certain claims by reference to a certain criteria of knowledge, and in doing so, further certain claims without having to give much consideration to objections that cannot be justified by the same criteria. It looks to me like telling someone that they're full of it is an example of the social use of knowledge. And of the two uses, I'd say that's both the less important one, and the one that warrants the most suspicion.

We feel it is reasonable to deny the existence of an elephant on our heads even if someone comes along and says this hypothesis is compatible with our observations because the elephant produces unknowable evidence--so then why shouldn't we also deny the existence of a supernatural realm?

On a personal level, I have no problem with that. If you look back through my posts, I think you'll see as much. But even if we maintain that on the personal level, I think it's prudent and rational to recognize that the epistemic criteria we set for ourselves may ultimately suffer from some defect, particularly when we take those criteria as an effective commentary on ontology -- that is, when we say something of the order of, what I can't know probably doesn't exist. Recognizing that fallibility doesn't necessitate that we change our epistemic assumptions. It simply makes us more felxible should we ever find good reason to change our minds.

I feel it is reasonable to deny the existence of such a realm...

And, again, I'm fine with that. I haven't tried to argue you out of that. What I'm questioning is any attempt to hold other people to the same standards, to direct them towards the same conclusions, particularly when you've failed, so far, to given any clear reason for why they should settle on the same personal epistemic criteria. And in doing so, I have argued for the possibility of other criteria.

And, as I've said elsewhere, I think the concept of an "unknowable reality" doesn't even make sense.

And that, as I see it, is a strategy for forcing a consensus. The question is why such a consensus is so imperative that it's worth attempting to negate the epistemic conclusions others have drawn.

Me: Why shouldn't there be unknowable evidence? Consider the position of a completely sightless animal. What would be his evidence for the existence of color? He'd have none, because his epistemic position provides no way of knowing the evidence necessary for that knowledge. Color, from his standpoint, would be a form of "unknowable evidence."
Gasoline: If none of us could see or conceive of color though, then color wouldn't exist!

This is where your argument gets circular. Because the orthodox theists believes that there is a god who serves as the ultimate observer -- who has the capacity to "sense", in whatever sense that it's reasonable to say that god "senses", all qualities -- to whom, in effect, there is nothing unknowable. That presumably includes qualities which we are, because of our epistemic limitations, incapable of knowing. So to argue that there is no reason to believe in God, because we're capable of knowing all evidence, because there is no reason to suspect the ecistence of evidence we cannot know, because anything we cannot no cannot be known by anything, and therefore cannot exist, presumes a priori that these is no God -- ie. nothing that can know what we cannot know. The theist's argument is, of course, equally circular. It's a divide that apparantly cannot be bridged, and the decision to avow one point of view or another is likely premised on the adoption of propositions which are somewhat arbitrary.

I don't think that you can say that infinity is not a natural existent, for instance, because for me "natural" doesn't necessarily mean physical.

Then we can't make any headway until you've described in what way a thing can be a natural existant without being physical.

One can be a naturalist and believe in the truths of mathematics--they just tend to believe that these concepts aren't "real".

In precisely that sense I'd say that they avoid simultaneous classification as natural and existing. Either they don't exist but we're capable of supposing them in reference to the natural world, or they exist but as artificial constructions rather than natural kinds.

The concept of infinity is derived from basic axioms--axioms that can be "tested" in a very basic way by seeing if they accord with the empirical world--

Not according to mathematics since Russell, as I understand them. Russell demonstrated that mathematics is set which cannot be reduced to a completely consistent axiomatic set. Mathematics cannot, as such, be tested so as to demonstrate its correspondence to the physical world. It's a construction every bit as artificial as human language -- though perhaps more consensible and internally consistent.

Me: It doesn't look to me at all that we, as a species, are capable of knowing that something does not exist, however much we may say it.
Gasoline: We can "know" it in the same way we can "know" that evolution is true, or that non-tautological facts are true.

I don't think we can know it even in that sense. Evolution is persuasive in that it solves a number of problems, provides a center for the full range of biological theory, and accounts for a mass of evidence drawn from a broad range of times and places. Not many assertions of the non-existence of a thing would manage even one of those feats.

All of your objections about nonexistence claims could just as well be voiced for existence claims and other basic empirical facts we take to be true.

Not all of them, but some of them, yes. That's something I'm well aware of, and I have my own thoughts on the subject, but that's one of those matters I intend to remain mostly silent about.

Me: The other use is social: that is, it allows a basis for establishing knowledge as a form of social control or power, whereby we can reject certain claims by reference to a certain criteria of knowledge
It's not meant as a form of social control or a way to create "power" among people at all. The social form of epistemology allows for the accumulation of knowledge, and it provides standards that let us test them for truth value.

Go back to the development of scientific method, which is the nexus that most modern epistemic theory forms itself around. Bacon was the first to assert that knowledge was power -- the phrase has been taken in contemporary contexts to refer mostly to "intelligence" in the political sense, but the original sense was that all knowledge amounted to a description of a thing that allowed the knower to bring it into his sphere of influence. Thus, knowledge is power. This was the basis for the steps taken by Descartes to structure an epistemic method, which is the prototype for scientific method.

Bacon's maxim could also be taken to mean that the insistence on the factualness of a thing is the same sort of bid at influence, this time over one's contemporaries. Knowledge, as I've argued, is at best an uncertain proposition, but the currency of fact is that it establishes a thing as undeniable (little experiment: go back and count how often each of us has used the word "fact" in this thread). We make reference to what everyone knows in order to make it unreasonable to dissent from a given opinion.

So there are two sides to epistemology: one is the honest inquiry into whether or not we can know things and how -- and I don't think that side extends much beyond the personal; the other is the attempt to forge consensus, sometimes as the cost of free inquiry, in support of one agenda or another.

Unlike you, I don't think there is any reason to suppose these standards are completely arbitrary and a matter of invidual preference.

Perhaps not entirely arbitrary, but there's certainly no reason to think them objective. As they are all supported by one premise or another, and as those premises are always ultimately rooted in assumption or assertion rather than on an undeniable truth (after all, how would you recognize the undeniable truth which makes possible knowledge?), then I can't see how they'd avoid being a matter of individual preference.

I don't see why my motives matter, or why I must demonstrate that this is imperative.

To me, ultimately, your motives don't matter -- from my end, it's your rationale that matters. But forgive me for suggesting that your motives should matter to you.

For instance, if I were expounding on the theory of evolution to a creationist, for him to say that the question is really "Why such a consensus is so imperative that it's worth attempting to negate the conclusions others have drawn" is to evade the simple fact that the creationist's views are just simply wrong.

No, I think the Creationist would still be right to ask that question. The difference here is that I can think of at least a handful of answers that would put him in his place. The simplest is that Creationist objections have played a part in dictating public policy, and consensus is the ideal of public policy in democratic societies.

It is worth attempting to negate belief in the supernatural realm for the simple reason that it is incomprehensible, unable to be validated, and absolutely warrantless as a hypothesis.

Again, those reasons aren't simple. I've given rational arguments against each of the terms of that reason, and the basis for your dismissal in each one was recourse to one "fact" or another, none of which were self-evident or the subject of a broad (or even dialogical) consensus.

I am not "assuming" that there is no God--I'm demonstrating that there is no such thing by arguing that the concept itself is nonsensical, and that because our idea of "reality" can only encompass what would make sense to us, it is downright silly to say something supernatural "exists" or is "real".

Silly or not, people have been saying it for aeons, and they seem to think that it was at least marginally comprehensible. Until you can demonstrate that they didn't understand, at the very least, some of the implications of the idea, I'm not convinced. Beyond which, there's a pretty big non sequitur in your argument between "it's silly to claim the existence of a thing we cannot cognize" and "therefore, there is no such thing."

I'm not asking anyone to assume anything a priori.

No argument proceeds without at least one a priori. That's just the nature of logic.