My point wasn't exactly that the existence or not of Christianity relies on the existence or not of God; obviously it goes on just fine with a non-existent god. My point was that for people to believe Christianity is true, then you have to believe God is true; however, you don't need to believe Socrates is true to believe in Socrates' teachings as a foundation for Western philosophy, or to personally believe in those teachings. Religions cannot be separated from their religious figures - No Judaism without Yahweh. Philosophies are independent from the people that came up with them - Existentialism does not require Sartre.

As for the ongoing discussion on evidence:

I take "evidence" to mean "meaningful evidence", given how everything in the universe can be explained by an infinite amount of theories. Thus meaningful evidence is evidence beyond that which can be explained by multiple other equivalent theories; evidence that puts on theory ahead of another. For any given event which we know only through what other people have written or said (Such as, say, the Glorious Revolution) we have two competing theories (Among many other possible ones, but those are the main ones). Either the event described really happened, or it was made up. The writing detailing the event is evidence for both cases, essentially, but we consider that the "it really happened" theory is true (And thus can claim the evidence as supporting it) if it is confirmed by enough independent sources to overcome its extraordinaryness.

Socrates going to the market isn't extraordinary, based on what we know. Thus we take an account of him going to the market to be "more likely than not", and we take the account as evidence for that.

Socrates flying to the market, however, is an extraordinary claim and thus requires extraordinary evidence - Thus we say it is "unlikely" and that "we have no evidence for it," given how the account we have is most likely evidence "for" the theory that Socrates' unpowered flight was apocryphal.

An isolated account of a man turning water into wine, written decades after his death by someone who almost certainly did not know him personally, is more evidence "for" the story being apocryphal, than evidence "for" the man having turned water into wine. Thus we say we have no evidence for the man turning water into wine.

ROFL!

That man is a physicist! Always the best source for the state of biblico-archaelogical studies, today.

I don't think I have ever met a Jew who believes or even knows what Yahweh is.

Double post. Apologies. At least, it was a double post when I began. It might not be by the time I'm done.

All right, I appreciate greatly some of the recent contributions. I thought I'd reciprocate by basically outlining where I'm coming from on the issue of empiricism as evidence. Not only is the topic of "how we know" more interesting to me than a poll on who does and doesn't believe God exists, I also think it's a requisite issue for any such discussion. I'll enumerate the points for ease of refutation.

1) Holding empiricism to be the final arbiter of what is and is not true is a trust (or faith, if you will) commitment.

You can see this yourself by continuing to ask yourself, "Why?" to the reasons that you postulate for believing such a thing in the first place. You will either produce an empirical justification for this belief, which is circular, or you will produce a non-empirical reason for this belief, which disproves the belief, or you will arrive at, "Well, it seems like a good bet to me," which is not epistemically different than a religious person's commitment to a holy text.

This is not a weakness of empiricism. All systems of thought ultimately come down to a decision to trust the core tenets, and these tenets cannot be proved outside the system, itself (otherwise, the tenets would not be the final arbiters of what is and is not true).

In my mind, this doesn't mean all empiricists should throw in the towel, but it does mean a certain degree of humility and self-critique is in order, both when looking at empiricism and dealing with non-empirical systems of thought. Empiricism requires trust in propositions that are unproven and, arguably, unprovable.

Even a statement like "empiricism is valid" or "we can trust our senses" or "the universe operates according to laws of cause and effect that, when demonstrated through phenomena, yield reliable knowledge" or "the theory that proposes the fewest entities is the most likely" are things that cannot be proved outside the system, or proved at all. They are working assumptions that, once adopted, provide a framework for empirical data and the end results and applications being meaningful. However, the same could be said about an assumption like "God exists," "The Bible is God's word," "God spoke through Mohammed." They are working, unprovable assumptions that provide a framework for "religious" data and the end results and applications to be meaningful.

2) Empiricism is subject to frequent revolution.

The history of science bears this out. Scientific "truths" of the past that we dismiss today as children's fictions were once deeply-held axioms by the scientific community, and who's to say what things we insist upon as laws, today, will one day be revealed to be tremendous misunderstandings? In fact, one could argue that epistemic revolution is (or should be, at any rate) the engine of the scientific enterprise. To make a statement such as, "Science has established P, therefore Q cannot be true," is to be dishonest about the nature of the knowledge we're dealing with.

At one point, empirical studies proved that decaying matter spontaneously generated disease and even other beings such as rats and maggots. This phenomenon was so common to everyone's experience that to dispute it would be ridiculous, and in fact, when Pasteur arrived on the scene postulating tiny, invisible creatures that were the actual cause of the disease (gravity elves!), not the decaying matter, itself, he was actively persecuted by the scientific community.

Eventually, of course, Pasteur's contentions became accepted fact. One might tout this as a triumph for empiricism, and perhaps it is, but the point is that, at one point, empiricism said P, and it turned out that Q was the reality. The people who ridiculed Pasteur were being good empiricists despite being dead wrong.

A similar idea applies to the documentation of what we consider glitches in the natural order. A man flying, for example. If a man actually -did- fly unassisted, then that would be true no matter how many people have -not- flown unassisted. No matter how much history of empirical data it bucked, it would still be true. This is why it is fallacious to say that a miracle is impossible because it acts contrary to the usual natural order. A miracle, by definition, is something that acts contrary to the usual natural order. You have to come up with something else. It would be like saying an immortal man cannot exist, because that would mean there was a man who didn't die.

The fact is, we do not know what science will eventually discover and overturn. Once more, this would seem to provide a degree of humility and self-critique. Who knows what truths have been insisted on in this thread that will seem ludicrous a hundred years from now?

The empiricists I respect are the ones that look at their knowledge claims as "best guesses with what we've got to work with at the time" as opposed to "indisputable bulwarks of truth against which no competing claim can stand."

3) We depend all the time on non-empirical knowledge claims.

Pi does not exist in observable reality, nor does a circle that complies with mathematical definitions of a circle. The law of the excluded middle does not exist in observable reality, nor does the idea that eating babies is wrong (in fact, observing the natural world might indicate that eating one's young is perfectly acceptable). The fact that I can say the word "empiricism" and you know that I do not mean "baseball" is not something one can observe in reality.

Observable reality cannot yield mathematics beyond very rudimentary operations, and even that is a stretch, considering the definitions of the entities used are not yielded by observation. Observation cannot yield symbolic association, it cannot yield morality, and it cannot yield logic.

With this point, I am mostly attacking the idea that empiricism -exclusively- counts as truth or evidence. It is one thing to say that empiricism is your most reliable method for adjudicating truth, but quite another to say that it is the -only- reliable method for adjudicating truth.

Further, even most of our empirical knowledge claims do not come to us by way of empiricism, but by trust. Unless you, yourself, have observed personally everything you believe to be true (good luck on building that supercollider), then you have knowledge that you believe based on trust and/or authority.

You might well claim, "The Big Book of Science has never steered me wrong, so I trust it" but I refer you to points 1 and 2. That is not epistemically different from someone trusting the Bible because it has never steered them wrong, nor does it do justice to the fact that the Big Book of Science is, in fact, wrong on a somewhat regular basis. And in any case, how do you know the Big Book of Science isn't wrong? My guess is that your answer would be an empirical one, which leads me to...

4) In order for empiricism to be defended, you -must- presuppose its truth coming out of the gates.

This is really another way of stating point 1, but with a slightly different emphasis.

Let us assume, for a moment, that we wish to establish the validity of empiricism -first- before relying on it. Sounds reasonable, right? We don't want to rely on things unless we can prove them, right? So, let us suspend for a moment the validity of empiricism.

Now, prove that empiricism is valid without relying on it in any shape or form.

Could you do it?

Once again, all systems that claim to be judges of truth have this issue. It's not that empiricism is MORE flawed than other systems. My point is that it does not ESCAPE these weaknesses. The problem here, of course, is that if you admit that empiricism also has these weaknesses, then you lose the high horse. You cannot dismiss something as false just because it is not empirically verifiable. You cannot bludgeon religious people into the ground because they are foolish and you are wise.

It might turn out that a given religious person is foolish and you happen to be wise, but it's a coincidence.

5) Occam's Razor is wrong all the time.

This has nothing to do with my main point, I just get tired of people citing Occam's Razor like others might cite the Ten Commandments. It turns out that MANY times, reality is more complex than a possible, simpler explanation. Billy o' Occam was just some guy.

In order to stave off a potential misunderstanding, I am not saying that empiricism is untrustworthy. I trust my senses. I think the scientific method is a good one, at least for answering the kinds of questions that empiricism is suited for (which is not all questions). I am not recommending that all scientists turn in their clipboards because their trust in empiricism relies on a core of unproven assertions.

I am, however, recommending that empiricism is not, by sheer virtue of being empiricism, inherently epistemically superior to all other epistemic systems.

I never realized Ockham, of Occam's razor fame was a priest as well. Damn those superstitious Christians and their crazy beliefs.

While other schools of thought and reasoning give us good starting points, only empiricism can properly cull opposing theories. There is no need for human beings to be perfectly rational in all of their actions, but big life decisions and major contributions to our collective body of knowledge need basis in empiricism. I'll start with a refutation before moving to my own case.


Partially true. I vaguely remember you mentioning that you'd read Kant at some point, so I'm going to spare you the finer details of this and just make allusion. Argument a priori is troublesome for two reasons. One, as Kant noted, all human activity is governed by precedent and observation. What appears to be an independent cognitive conclusion, even something as basic as cause and effect, the passage of time, or the separation of self and other is going to be colored by experience. Second, and this is Daniel Gilbert, not Kant, is that eminently unreliable imagination fills in the gaps that human memory isn't wired to store, and the filling-in process is entirely subconscious, undetectable by the one remembering, and immune to training to overcome.

If you discount argument a priori, you might as well be using empiric standards, since all of your premises are already empiric or experimentally unreliable. If you can't be trusted to remember how you felt about something that happened yesterday because of the unavoidable processes of the human brain, even though you experienced it yourself, you can't be trusted to judge immaterial action on your psyche.
This is going to become a turned argument. First, though, a clarification. Empiricism is subject to frequent revision. In the case of decaying meat, the principles of empiricism were never violated. Exposure to decaying meat does cause disease. "Spontaneous" is not and was never an empirical observation. The empiric evidence that exposure to outside forces causes disease disproved theories of divine wrath and humor imbalances, though. The incomplete theory didn't compromise its value at all. As the body of evidence improved, the theory was fine-tuned. The statement "exposure to decaying meat causes disease" is no less valid for the discovery of infectious bacteria. In a sense, the empiricists were right all along. What they didn't know is that the factor that caused decay caused disease, rather than the meat itself.

Compare this to the philosophic and theologic arguments. Impiety has no correlation with disease. Humors have not been found in the body. Those attempting to argue without empiric evidence were wrong. They weren't wrong in a certain sense. They weren't working with an incomplete theory. They didn't have a misinterpreted piece of evidence. They were simply wrong.

This is true, but your arguments from math are flawed. Pi is an observed and calculated number and has only been calculated as far as our instruments allow it to be (which, in the modern day, is more exact than anyone cares to work with). Algebra is empirically testable. Geometry is empirically testable. Trigonometry can be tested through geometry. Calculus can be tested through algebra. Both yield results that explain natural patterns.

Your argument on communicated knowledge is valid, but I strongly believe that it is irrelevant. I have never observed a glacier, the Northern Lights, Stonehenge, or Australia. However, in about three weeks, I believe I will see both a glacier and the Northern Lights. You know as well as I do that they're going to be there waiting for me in Alaska, since they've been observed multiple times by multiple people with no ulterior motive.

You can't say the same for divine revelation. We hear about it from biased sources who don't have a solid claim to empirical evidence. No devout Hindu brahman has developed the stigmata and proclaimed Jesus' ressurection. No devout Dominican friar found unity with Shiva while chanting vespers.

Not really. You need to presuppose that we interact with reality and we do not interact with that which isn't real. Your standard of truth must make reference to correlation with reality. Aquinas would concede this much.


You left this as an unsupported assertion, so I'm going to make a blind stab at it.

Occam's Razor does not state that short explanations are always better than long ones. Occam's Razor states that arguments that have no bearing on the final result should be discounted and we should make the fewest assumptions and hypotheses that we can get away with. To use Occam's Razor to reduce an argument beyond what the evidence indicates is improper.

----------------

Now for the opposing case!

I. Existence is determined by potential interaction.

I. A. Perception is the basis of all reliable human knowledge.

As we learned with Mount Olympus, bodily humors, and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, wishful thinking only coincidentally correlates with that which is real. That which cannot be perceived cannot be described or experienced.

I. B. Perception triggers a psychological response to our interaction with our environment.

A fairly common sense premise. You may misinterpret what you perceive on occasion, but your perception, in and of itself, is a mechanical reaction. Sight is triggered by photosensitive electrochemical reaction. Touch and hearing are triggered by tactile-sensitive chemical reactions. Smell and taste are triggered by chemical bonding to organic receptors.

I. C. That which has no interaction with the environment, direct or indirect, cannot be perceived.

No human being makes a serious claim to a being or force that is incapable of action, being, or essence. Gods and fairies are said to have influence on the natural order. Subatomic particles that have no impact on atomic interactions or instruments that measure atomic interactions are not postulated. The claim that an entity or force cannot interact with anything perceived is tantamount to saying that it does not exist.

II. Potential interaction is the basis of empiricism.

This is essentially a premise by definition. Empiricists use perception to detect interactions in the environment and make deductions based on them. That's what makes them empiricists.

Only empiricism can properly cull empirical theories, sure. If someone said, "I wonder what the square root of 4 is," I wouldn't recommend experimentation until she observed the square root of 4.

To absolutize empiricism as the only source of knowledge, however, is both arbitrary and, I would argue, impossible, unless you're prepared to lead a very interesting life free of math, linguistic commonality, morality, logic, etc.



Perhaps we learned Kant differently, but Kant affirmed a priori as a category of knowledge. In fact, it was his sharp classification of purely noumenal truths from the phenomenal (or "arisen") truths and the synthesis of the two that makes him a rationalist par excellence and a historical foe to empiricists since, who would argue that there is no knowledge but what we directly experience. Hume, in fact, makes this very point contra Kant (that was fun to say), and, ironically for your point, argues against the very phenomena that you've described as both trivially perceived and a requisite for adopting empiricism - cause and effect, the passage of time, etc. Those things are the figments of imagination we use to fill in the gaps, to borrow your observation from Gilbert.

Of course, Kant's Critique is one of the three most terminally difficult texts in the history of philosophy, so I'm willing to concede that we're reading him differently.

Despite whose side Kant may or may not be on, I'm not seeing how the above paragraphs do anything but support my first point, which is that empiricism depends on assumptions that are neither empirical nor proven. If all you're trying to say is that those assumptions are, ergo, unexaminable and we more or less eliminate them from thinking critically about empiricism, then I would say that sounds very religious. It sounds very much like someone saying, "The Book of Mormon is the word of God. I just know it."

The fact remains that empiricism does depend on assumptions that are not empirical and, for lack of a better word, must be assumed in order for empiricism to operate. Empiricism becomes a self-validating system in this way, and in order to refute this, you'll need to figure out how empiricism can be judged to be valid (or "the best," just to make it a little easier) without its own use.

I think this is extremely problematic for your position, because if you agree that empiricism depends on non-empirical propositions that we just trust, then you are admitting that empiricism is not the final court of appeal for truth as well as the fact that the system is essentially a faith-based commitment to statements that have no proof. And if you disagree, then your options are to prove those propositions, which you will either do using empirical means (thus assuming the truth of your conclusion for the proof), or non-empirical means, which leads you right back to the first problem.



I understand the motivation for saying that all the empirical parts about spontaneous generation were correct, and all the wrong parts were something else, but it just doesn't bear out.

It was -scientists- who persecuted Louis Pasteur, not high priests of Shabbabul the Disease God, and they did so on the basis of their observations, experiments, and findings, not because they had philosophical or theological problems with his theory. Furthermore, Pasteur's propositions were not clarifications of the same basic idea, unless you define contradiction as clarification, which is a pretty hagiographical way to look at the history of science (as well as a trifle humorous to imagine, "That's an interesting theory that rotten meat spontaneously produces maggots. Allow me to tweak that a bit by suggesting that's not at all what happens.").

If you don't like the spontaneous generation example, it isn't hard to find other examples where the scientific community once held one thing to be true, but now holds something different. Even "laws" like "Matter cannot occupy two spaces at once" are falling apart at the subatomic level. This group of scientists says global warming is primarily caused by human interference in the environment. This other group says it isn't. This other group says there is no global warming. These people are not clarifying each other, or if they are, they are clarifying each other in the same way competing religions are clarifying each other.

I highly recommend The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn - a must read for this subject.

In any case, the scientists who said that meat creates maggots were just as wrong as the witch doctor who says that disease is a failure to placate nature spirits. The only difference is that the former group's error was naturalistic, which is why you're predisposed to cast their error in the more favorable light.

No, pi is not an observed number. You cannot place a rock pi inches away from another rock. Nor is there any natural phenomenon that is mathematically perfect enough to yield pi. The same applies to the other mathematical concepts you mentioned. Nobody built a triangle out of wood, took out a protractor, and said, "What do you know? All the angles add up to 180 degrees."

It is the purely rational and theoretical nature of mathematics that makes it such a popular argument from the rationalist camp in the history of philosophy. I realize it's sort of the opinion du jour to assume that the members of these forums are way smarter than prominent figures in the history of philosophy, but even so, if mathematical truths were derived from observation, don't you think that would occur to the rationalists, eventually?

Logic is the same way. Nobody was in their backyard and tripped over a vicious circle. Nobody burned material in a vacuum tube and it produced the transitive property. And, unlike mathematical identities that can at least be somewhat approximated in actual objects, logical laws cannot.

I use those two examples because they're so closely related as well as being classic refutations of a purely empiricist position.

I could re-introduce the idea of morality, but one might argue that morality isn't knowledge (although that might be put to the test if someone took their seat on an airplane or ate their baby).



But we don't know they've been observed multiple times by multiple people, nor do we know that they have no ulterior motive. Maybe they're trying to boost the tourist trade in Alaska, and everyone who comes back from a trip there doesn't want to sound like an idiot.

The point is that your belief in these items rests on, in this case, the number of people involved (and I thought "your side" already posited that the number of people who claim something, like witnessing acts of God, isn't an indicator of its truth value) and a belief that they have no ulterior motives, which not only do you not know and have no reason to believe whatsoever, it certainly isn't empirically verifiable.

One might conversely argue, "What possible motives could the apostles have for lying about seeing a resurrected Jesus when all it meant for them was torture and death?" And you might respond, "Well, I can think of several motives." But, once again, you have no -reason- for believing they had ulterior motives, you have no way of -knowing- that they did, and you cannot -empirically- verify that. You just believe it, just... well, probably because the ramifications would be a lot more inconvenient for you than the alternative.

And this is my point: you can postulate a theoretical defense of a pure empiricism all day, but you cannot and do not live consistently with it, and it is dishonest to point fingers at religious people for being subject to the same constraints you are.

The Apostle Paul was an orthodox Jew and a ranking official in the Sanhedrin whose living was tied up in killing members of the early church. However, he claimed to have seen the risen Christ, and thus took up a life fraught with persecution, poverty, torture, and ultimately martyrdom. What were his ulterior motives, and how do you know he had them? Weren't his pre-existing biases -against- Christianity? And what makes Paul's sensory input less reliable than yours, anyway?

You have options. You could say that Paul was delusional, deliberately lying, or he didn't write any of his writings and someone else did, and Peter was wrong about that, too, since he refers to Paul's writings as scripture. None of those options are empirically verifiable, however.



If I don't need to presuppose empiricism to prove empiricism's validity and supremacy, then demonstrate how this is done. Show me the non-empirical basis for empiricism, which also must rest on verifiable and provable assumptions.

No, I said that, many times, the simplest hypothesis is not the correct one. Why should we arbitrarily assume that the simplest hypothesis is the one most likely to be true, and what is the empirical foundation for that assumption?



But I can describe Greek Gods, bodily humors, perfect circles, the law of the excluded middle, nouns, and any number of things with are purely conceptual. Your "experienced" qualifier is just another way of saying "perceived."



All you've done in your case is define empiricism. You have yet to establish why it is the final arbiter of truth or how it does not depend on trust in non-verifiable assumptions.

You seem to have some very strange ideas on what empiricism itself is and isn't. Empiricism is the reliance on the observed and quantifiable. By your skewed definition, empiricism is the belief only in what someone can go out and see for himself. It's much akin to me stating that religious people only believe what's written in one book. It would be a highly inflammatory and belittling statement for me to make.

You're also doing a lot of either-or categorization. Rationalists have a claim to mathematics because of proofs, equations, and procedural fact finding. Empiricists have a claim to mathematics because of its consistency and revision in accordance with natural observations. To claim that math is inconsistent with empirical values because it is consistent with rationalist values is fallacious to an extreme.

I think you're going to have to give that whole thing another go.

Aha! Something I can jump in on. Thank you, Jesus!

Sarcasm aside, let's settle in.

Contradiction is clarification, from the perspective of dialectical materialism. Existence is defined by contradiction - existence is contradiction.

He ain't listening.



Awfully grandiose statement to be sitting out there all by its little lonesome.

I've a question for all of you - one that I am sure I may have missed, but want to ask anyway.

Religion, God, and faith...while there are books recording events and stories stating points (not too dissimilar from fables) - Faith and God are abstracts. All written and religious jargon aside - they are abstracts. Much like love (and other such emotions that branch far beyond that which scientists have put to animals in like), concepts of a 'soul' and free-will thinking that is at a state far beyond our animal kin.

If we cannot (yet, for those who will bring it up) explain away the abstracts that are attached to humanity (emotions, souls, consciousness and morality*, all those sorts of things) - how can you explain away God? And not so much god, but the chance that a true higher power exists?

I'm just curious for your points of views.


*morality in a sense of guilt and a difference between right and wrong - which though yes, has been shaped and heavily influenced by society's evolution, can still be grouped as one of the abstracts. It is something unique to humanity which doesn't exist amongst the animal kingdoms


EDIT: Please no biting. I am just curious.

All action in the world is operative through the internal and inherent contradictions of all things. It's just such opposing forces - the utter disagreement of Pasteur and his peers - that brings about change and thus progress. Not to say that progress is inherent in change, but the change must come about in order for progress to follow. By the very contradiction of views between Pasteur and Scientist X, they are united in their belief in empirical discourse and make it all the stronger.

They aren't all that abstract.

Emotions can be regulated with pills. Women complain of cyclical changes in their emotions. If that doesn't say something about their concrete roots, I'm not sure what will.

Consciousness itself might not be measured, but all of the impacts of consciousness on the brain are imaged with modern technology.

Morality, even when supposedly inspired by divine revelation, deals with the concrete interactions with other people.

How do any of these point to a being that transcends time, space, and boundaries?

That is much too narrow of a focus. While pills can control some aspects of feelings - that isn't the point. The point is the abstract of the feeling itself. The pills don't even control the emotion, but hormones and other such influences that enhance it. But not the emotion itself.

Consciousness - not in the sense of as I am now, to being blacked out. It's a whole other form of being aware of things that frankly, we can't explain. Can't explain why we have that - along with the sub-conscious, and all things attached.

As for morality - I am not necessarily pinning that on divine inspiration. It is something a bit more complex, even more so with society's taboos influencing it. But morality ties in to emotion, the gut feeling of your stomach turning when you know you've done something wrong, etc.

That is what I want to know input about. Some things you can't square away to pills, atoms, and society. It is those things that I am asking about.

Well, between those three, you've got a hell of a lot covered.

I'd argue everything comes from society, myself.

A very similar point that Kant makes in his essay on Perpetual peace.

One of the key points of the first cause argument, is that in our agreed upon reality, everything is defined by its limits and by what it is not.

Which means, you can only discover new things by learning of the contradictions and "resolving" them.

What empirical thing is "society" that it is able to act upon me?

What empirical thing is "knowledge" that my actions and behaviors are defined by it?

I forget the terms, but there are ideas out there which basically say, the Code and the Program are not the same thing.

You can write code, and that code will move electrons around. However, you can not observe the electrons and thereby re-create the code. This statement was made as an anology to the understanding of DNA and the brain. We can see the brain light up, we can read the DNA, but we can't pluck out neurons while they fire, and examine them to see exactly what your mind's eye sees.

Reality is percieved through mental constructs.

The mental is inherently social.

Society defines reality.

You are using words which describe things which are not made up of atoms or protons or quarks.

What is the physical thing called society that it is able to affect physical things, such as my actions. (its mostly a question to Xavius)

Though I am not disagreeing with you, I am just asking what physical "thing" is Soceity (Xavius wants to say that things like Love are just hormones.)

Also, I am curious what people think about the apparitions at the coptic church in Egypt.

This is not so much a contribution to the debate, as a request to those participating:
Please, please, please do your research.

Not all of you are guilty of this, but I've seen several instances of someone saying, "Well, I don't remember the exact terminology," or, "I don't know who said it, but..." and it's not only frustrating to those trying to follow along, it actually detracts from whatever point you're trying to make. You're already on teh interweb when you're posting, so it should take only minimal effort to do some fact-checking before you pen your latest contribution. This is an online forum, after all, not an impromptu face-to-face debate, so you can afford to take a few extra minutes to respond.

I, personally, enjoy having the opportunity to research the various viewpoints being discussed, and it's difficult to do so if people skip over those little details. Thank you!