Sorry, I honestly don't remember. I read the quote in another context about a month ago, but I gave you all the information I know about it.

oooh, just realized something. The whole "god of the gaps" concept, is something that pre assumes that only empirical data is true knowledge. No wonder I can never explain to people who think that religious people only believe in the god of the gaps, why I don't. To them, anything that is not physical and is not empirical, is itself a "gap."

You do recognize the contrast between a set of long, considered posts carefully rebutting each other and you posting more or less four times in a row, with two sentences each?

Xavius,

It's very simple.

If you are correct, and empiricism does NOT rely on trust in unproven, unempirical assumptions, and it can be proved to be trustworthy -prior- to acceptance, then all you need to do is demonstrate this.

Of course, once you do demonstrate this, you will have destroyed your case that empiricism is the final court of appeal for truth. And if you fail to demonstrate this, then empiricism relies on trust in unproven, unempirical assumptions and you have to assume its validity in order to prove its validity.

Considering that you have consistently failed to demonstrate this, it would seem to indicate (to the empiricist in me) that the latter is likely.

It is, therefore, unfair of you to demand of a religious person that they prove their assumptions outside their own system, because you are also unable to do the same with yours.

You're still stretching your analogies.

I've put up the case for empiricism. You dismissed it inappropriately as a tautology. If you'd like to demonstrate it as such, feel free. At this point, it's still an unsupported assertion on your part.

"Empiricism" as a concept is not actually empiric. It's a philosophic stance and subject to rationalist, religious, and nihilistic arguments. Empiricism as a methodology is not self-reflective. Multiple meaning words should be properly discerned and separated.

Come, friend. I know you aren't this sloppy. Slow down, rework your arguments more carefully, and try again.

EDIT: And I want to make sure we're debating the same thing.

Epistemologically speaking, empiricism is the sole definitive method of inquiry. This is my stance. This I will defend.

I do not claim that all scientists are perfect empiricists. I do not claim that every whimsy of an empiricist is empirical.

As I stated earlier, I believe in human free will. I also said that 1) I'm aware it doesn't meet empiric scrutiny, and 2) I don't insist on it in an argument. Those are both very important points. When referring to my beliefs on free will, I speak of them as guesses. I do not build grand theories off of guesses, just like you wouldn't buy a 50-lb bag of dog food because you have a guess that you'll get a dog as a gift. You wait until you get the dog. Human beings have to make guesses, but they don't have to write thousands of pages in support of Platonic formalism and insist on it as a valid stance to build information off of. They don't have to encourage people to kill themselves as a form of literary analysis on an ancient text. They don't have to cow a population with strict laws enforcing a code of conduct found in a historically inaccurate book. Those actions are inappropriate.

I'm not making an analogy. I'm simply asking you for two things, which are supposed to be easy if your contentions are correct:

1. Give me the proofs for the assumptions on which empiricism depends, or admit that they have no such proofs and it is therefore legitimate to make epistemic decisions without them.

2. Show me how empiricism is valid without resorting to using it to support itself.

What you said in your case for empiricism supplied neither of those things, or if it did, I'm not smart enough to see it (entirely possible), and I need you to point out to me how. Your case looked a lot to me like you were just saying that the object of perception is things that are real, and empiricism is based on perception. That might not be a bad trial definition of empiricism (although I see some issues with it), but it doesn't defend it.

It sounds like people are getting confused with terminologies here and arguing nonsensical notions.

Empiricism is not a philosophic stance. It is a process, and nothing else. Nobody can argue against "empiricism" - every person develops theories and beliefs using the empirical process. Basically, we plug in the pieces, follow the empirical process, and reach a conclusion. The problem comes when people claim that their conclusion is the only possibility, and that any conflicting conclusions (even using the same process) are mistaken. What you are defending is not "empiricism," but the conclusions you reached using the empirical process.

Let's say, for example, I find a set of bones in a tomb labeled "Jesus", which dating methods place at around 3-5 A.D.. I could take these, and come to the empirical conclusion that these are the bones of Jesus of Nazereth. There are no problems so far. The problem comes when I go so far as to say that these absolutely are the bones of Jesus, implying that anyone who believes otherwise is obviously wrong. My conclusion is absolute fact, as reached through empiricism. Empiricism itself is not to blame for any ensuing arguments, but faulty pieces (i.e. imperfect dating methods) and/or a weak conclusion (how do we know it's not another Jesus) lead to problems.

Let's clarify before descending into nonsensical arguments. Are you actually arguing to defend the process of empiricism itself, or some conclusion you reached using empirical means? If it's the former, then the whole argument is nonsensical since every person uses the empirical method basically from birth. If it's the latter, the argument is misdirected and should be focused on the evidences and conclusion that you are proposing instead of the process itself. Are you proposing that empiricism is the only way to absolute truth? If so, that's unfalsifiable and not really worth discussing unless you want to discuss your reasoning for believing so. Are you saying that empiricism is the only way to get to any semblance of truth? Or that empiricism leads to a belief in Atheism? Or that the followers of the New Atheist Movement follow the empirical method more faithfully (yes, I see the irony in my word choice) than anyone else? Any of those things are worth discussing, but without clarification the conversation is pretty meaningless.

Knowledge--Awareness of fact or truth

Fact--Information of real occurances

Truth--Verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like

Real--Having objective existence

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

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.

As an extension: With few exceptions, reasonable people reject rationalist arguments when confronted with perceptual evidence to the contrary. Inversely, rationalist arguments do not necessarily refute other rationalist arguments, as they are considered to be on par with each other and to be weighed against each other. Also, perceptions do not necessarily refute other perceptions, as all independent perceptions are said to be equal and are weighed against each other in terms of which perception is likely to have the better perspective and most complete information.

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.

(Emphasis added to highlight the significance of the contention.)

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.

This is a bit better, there is some stuff here that can be discussed...



I'm curious as to the definition of "objective" in the definition of "real." Do you mean something has to exist outside of personal observations to be considered real?

I believe this is mistaken. Given an observation and a rational argument which counteracts that observation, the rational argument will in most cases prove superior. For example, I can look at the sky, and the moon looks like it is smaller than the mouse for my computer. Rational arguments explain that, contrary to perception, the moon is truly quite large. The rational explanation is the one I (and hopefully most people) accept, even though it differs from my perception.

Also, there are several things we know and believe which have not (and could not) be perceived. The entire field of calculus can serve as an example for this type of "knowledge."



Ok, I can buy with all of this as written.



Agreed again. Empiricists do just that - they take their observations (detections) and make deductions based on them. The real question, though, is how we know those observations or deductions are valid.

Your own beliefs and observations are real insofar as they are real beliefs and observations. Beyond that caveat, yes.

Except that, as a part of the process of perception, you have depth perception and are completely aware that the number of degrees something occupies in your field of vision is only one part of estimating size.

EDIT: And that's not a rational argument. The moon has a diameter of 2,159 miles. That is an empiric argument.

Mitbulls hit a lot of the same questions/objections I would have, but that aside, you still didn't provide anything I asked of you. Are you ever going to do it, or may I take your silence as compliance?

If the latter, then I would suggest that you belay all demands that religious people justify the truth of their assumptions using a system outside their own, because you can't do it, either, apparently.

This is not a weakness in your position; it is just the way human thought works. You start with assumptions that you cannot prove, but trust, and your system follows consistently from those assumptions.

Daganev, if I read right, is Jewish. Assuming trust that the Hebrew scriptures are the word of God, it is entirely rational and empirically consistent for him to believe the claims therein. In fact, it would be absurd not to believe such claims, given such an assumption. The system becomes self-verifying, but cannot be validated outside itself. One might find rational arguments, empirical artifacts, etc. that might appear to correlate with his trust, but ultimately, they cannot prove his trust, nor can they disprove his trust, because they are not his final court of appeal for that trust.

And if you think he ought to be able to do that, let's see you do it.

I'm still a little confused. If I believe something, is it "real" by this definition, or does it have to exist outside of my beliefs and observations?



Ah, but the things you are listing now are truly rationalizations, not perceptions. For clarification, how about a different example. As I look at the sky, sometimes the moon is bigger than other times. Perception tells me that the moon actually grows and shrinks, and sometimes completely disappears. Rational explanations tell me that my perception is flawed, and that it is truly always the same size and simply reflects light in different ways. I accept and believe that - but I have not truly ever perceived it. I have never looked through a telescope and observed the dark side of the moon, I just assume it is there because it is what makes sense. In reality, the conclusion is not directly reached by the perceptions - the perceptions travel through a filter of beliefs and logic before the conclusion is reached. This is all an important part of the empirical process, but it is one that pure empiricists seem to want to ignore or deny most of the time.

Those are the proofs for the assumptions on which empiricism rests. They are not empiric observations.

To expound on that last bit a little:

An empiricist does not, by definition, reject religion. Exodus has a textual account of hundreds of thousands of people hearing God's voice. This, by itself, is empirically neutral. You can empirically demonstrate that, indeed, Exodus has this story, most writings are designed to communicate information, and some writings are true and some writings are false. Then we have historians who go out looking for traces of their passage. Oh, look, it's not there, even though we have traces of similar or small things. It then becomes empirically doubtful--it doesn't actually say anything about hearing voices, but it destroys the context of the revelation. Then some statisticians and literary historians pick apart the text itself and find that it wasn't written anywhere near the time of the supposed revelation, all of the people who received the revelation are dead by the time the work was penned, as are their children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren. With further investigation, we find that the Mosaic Law is a forgery, monotheism was a rare practice in early Israel and Judea, Passover is a ritual that began when the books were written, and other bits of information to discredit the idea that 600,000 people actually believed that they heard the voice of God for more than a fleeting moment. While the event itself is never empirically discredited, it eventually becomes so unlikely that the idea is rejected until someone finds some sort of empiric evidence in favor of the story is produced.

They look a lot like restatements of your premises, to me:

That's a tenet of empiricism, not a proof for it. Maybe it would help if you provided the foundations for those.

And either that statement is false, or your justifications are unreliable, because that statement is not based on perceptions.



Then you have to decide what you believe gets the last word in what is and is not true. It's not empirical observations, evidently. And if it's not empirical observations, then what?

I just have to laugh at this line.

I am going to take a guess here, that this "fact" is known because there was nothing written about it previously?

Just wanted to comment that my basis of trust is in the uncanny ability for my 2,000 year old tradition to accurately predict and understand human behavior today. In short, it is from my experience of it. And I imagine it is from people's experience of their own things which leads them to believe or not believe. And not any of the outside evidence of artifacts or rational arguments.

1) Empiricism as philosophic stance or empiricism as methodology? Empiricism as philosophic stance is indeed not empirically proven. I've conceded this twice already and you keep trying to bring it up like it pokes a hole in something. The justification borders on a rationalist argument, but empiricism-as-philosophy is falsifiable through empiricism-as-method, which is more than can be said for most rationalist, religious, or nihilist stances, and is thus not a hypocritical stance. (Ok, actually, it can't, but that's because it's true--theoretically, if perception was found to not correlate with reality, we would have to reject empiricism)

2) As far as the foundation of perception being the root of all reliable knowledge, best I can do without dredging up a hundred pages in quotes from philosophers and scientists is to offer a few illustrations. (The reason that this is such a complex process is that the assertion requires affirming one statement, perception produces reliable knowledge, and negating a large set of alternatives, like pure reason produces reliable knowledge, and proving the non-existence of something is touchy business.)

Try to imagine something you have never perceived--like, say, the Invisible Pink Unicorn. You can do this without wracking your brain too hard. Now, break your imagined image into its component parts. You find that everything in your imagination is an adaptation and recompilation of things that you have seen. Thus you find that, even when working beyond the realm of perception, you are bound by that which you have already perceived.

Now take a completely unempirical philosophic stance, like Platonic formalism. Plato's theory adheres to rationalist beliefs and practices, although rationalists will debate among themselves as to its virtue. Ask yourself what knowledge is gleaned from it. Can you better explain why an apple is red and not just? The Platonic answer of "It participates in the form of red but does not participate in the form of justice" doesn't actually tell you a damn thing. Can you better explain evil? Not really, but it gives you a justification to talk about it some more to whatever end you so desire.



Empiricists are not brainless automatons. Logic is not forbidden in the empiric process. The empiric stance does demand the wholesale rejection of Plato's philosophy as useless and baseless, however, because it does not at any point make itself available to empiric scrutiny.

Ok. Dinner. Be back later.

Your position of a dichotomy behind the idea of empiricism and the practice of empiricism isn't going to help in this case. The practice depends on the assumptions. If you remove the assumptions, the practice becomes meaningless. Why bother with experimentation if the universe is fundamentally chaotic or our senses are unreliable?

The reason I keep bringing this up is because you have indeed conceded a non-empirical basis for knowledge, but you seem to be reluctant to own up to the ramifications for the way you've been arguing against religion. When you say, "Empiricism is the only/best way to decide between truth and falsity, and the reasons why are all non-empirical," this is a contradiction. Either empiricism is the only/best way to decide between truth and falsity, or something else is, and I'm trying to figure out, perhaps along with you, what you -really- think is the final word on what is true or false, possible or impossible.
The quotes won't help you. Several posts back in this thread, you asserted that anything that could even make it out of the gates claiming to be knowledge can't rely on philosophical arguments, so using philosophical arguments will only open up another hole in your position.

Arguments from scientists are begging the question - you're using empiricism to prove empiricism, just like the Christian who says, "The Bible is God's word. Look, the Bible says it is." That argument is not any different from, "Empiricism is valid. Look, the empiricists say it is."



But you're asking me to form a mental -image- of something. I can conceive of the law of the excluded middle, but I've never seen it. I can conceive of the square root of four, although I've never seen it. Obviously, if you ask me to envision something comprised of empirically discernible elements, it will... well... be comprised of empirically discernible elements.

If you ask me to envision a square circle, I cannot do that - not because I've never seen a square or a circle, but because it's a logical impossibility.

Well, if I were Plato, I might feel like jumping on this one, but I fail to see how this refutes anything (except Platonism). Euclideanism is also a purely rationalist system of thought, as well as Aristotelian logic. Are you going to say no knowledge has been gleaned from geometry or logic?



Ok, so Plato's on the rocks. I'm not sure why you felt a sudden need to share your thoughts on Platonism, but I'll give it to you.

The problem here, though, is not that you believe that empiricists can also use logic (although that belief causes problems with the whole "all knowledge arises from perception" issue), but rather that, on the one hand, you claim a position of epistemic supremacy for empiricism, and on the other hand, you say that empiricism is trustworthy on the basis of non-empirical evidence.

So, what I want to know is, why is it not ok to offer non-empirical evidence for propositions? Because you seem to be doing that exact thing. And if it is ok to have non-empirical reasons for holding to something, then you'll need to conduct your discussion about religious thought somewhat differently.

I do believe an impossible situation is being created here solely through the stubborn insistence that empiricism is anything but a way of gathering evidence.

EDIT: And by impossible situation, I mean the production of a proof of empiricism using either empiric or non-empiric claims.