From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 16:01:30 MDT
On 23 Sep 2002 at 14:39, Michelle wrote:
> [Joe] I know things that many others do not, just as many others know
> things that I do not; it benefits us all for each of us to both share
> our respective knowledge with others, and desire to receive knowledge
> from others, for such sharing raises the average general level of
> knowledge.
>
> [Michelle] If you assume that there is such a thing as Truth that
> needs to be disseminated, then you assume that some have knowledge of
> it and some don't. What is the best method for determining who has it
> and who doesn't? How can we apply standards of truth and falsehood and
> remain humble to the prospect that someone else might have a better
> answer? It seems that the analysis of the underlying memes is the
> most indicative of whether a position is formed from motivation to
> Truth or motivation to meme propagation - the fundamental distinction
> being openness to being proved wrong, correct? Anyone motivated by
> Truth is open to being proven wrong, and anyone motivated by being
> _right_ is certainly not open to being proven _wrong_.
>
> I always run into this when trying to have discussions about
> anything... I am kept from assertion by the need to be unassertive to
> serve the greater goal of finding Truth... what happens then?
>
I quote from Hermit's quotations of me in FAQ: Faith and truth in science
Joe Dees provided an elegant formal summary:
Quote:
"The presence of evidence for a contention necessarily relegates adherence to that contention to
the realm of empirical, and therefore probable - rather than absolute - knowledge; it is only in
the absence of evidence that adherence to a contention can be considered to be belief or faith in
it. Subjective transcendent conceptions of ultimacy are believed in, not known, as in fact are
any ultimate conceptions, be they transcendent or immanent, since Popperian Falsifiability
precludes the admittance of any absolute universal positive empirical truth-claim, and
transcendent conceptions are by definition neither testable themselves nor derivable from other
testable propositions.
As Joe Dees described it, science seeks
Quote:
three measures of validity, and therefore of sufficiency, internal consistency (no reductio ad
absurdums within the contention), external coherency (there is no logical conflict with
contiguous truths) and faithful referential correspondence (the proposition seamlessly represents
an observable state/process of affairs). There three are practically never found in isolation;
when one applies, all three do.
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