Skip to main content

A possibly helpful definition of Truth/Knowledge

I think it worthwhile to point out that reason, as directed toward reality in all of its factors, in seeking to know reality in a more and more encompassing manner, naturally seeks to know truths that could be recognized as such by any other rational being.  So far, nothing new here.  But what would be interesting would be add that any rational creature no matter how evolved, created, constructed (i.e., granting the possibility of strong artificial intelligence for the sake of argument) or otherwise existing may reasonably think these truths false.

By construing truths in terms of how any rational agent should be able to recognize it, one highlights just how amazing they are.  They are not constructs, even though we must construct a path to them.  They are not merely part of a coherent system of thoughts or objects of thought -- even though the aspects of reality that they deliver do cohere with each other.  They are not private mental object but ways in which the world in which we live an act presents itself to us.

Note: multiplicity of possible instances of rationality (as openness to reality in all of its factors) evidences that reason is something more than any one instance thereof.

Another thought: human dignity.  Or to put it more abstractly, the objectivity of the beauty of the rational agent.  Think of this, to say that there's something good about yourself that others, insofar as they are reasonable (i.e., open to reality) should recognize is to claim that any rational being no matter how eveolved, created, constructed or otherwise continuing to be.... must appreciate etc.

I haven't worked this out all that adequately, but I think it's promising.
Labels:

Comments

Leo White said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
11:13 AM
Leo White said…
I'm reposting (but not riposte-ing) the comment with typo removed:
Reflecting on this much later on, it seems to me that the point is that anyone trying either to define truth or to give something like a definition must recognize the social dimension of truth and that there is something unbounded both in one's openness to society and possibly to the society to which one is open.
11:19 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).
Post a Comment
Read more