Janus

It may be said to be analytic because 7+5 is one of the 6 ways that 12 can be divided up into two groups. Just as 'bachelor' is a name for an unmarrie...

I agree that when it comes to claims of knowledge, justification is required. On the other hand I know many things with certainty that require no just...

Yes, the problem is that the power elites and the financial elites tend to make their own rules, the comfortable-enough turn a complacent or blind eye...

Verbal diarrhoea?

I think life itself teaches us to trust our observations?animals do, so why shouldn't we? You are right that understanding definitions and logical sel...

I disagree?since liberalism advocates both democracy and individual rights it does not accord any notion of my rights being any more important than yo...

Right so one idea cannot on its own be tautologous, but rather a statement is tautologous that redundantly states something about two ideas that both ...

:up: As I said earlier, knowing we are justified in believing that some purported piece of propositional knowledge is true, and that we can thus be sa...

:up:

Ah, I see the problem now, it seems we've been talking at cross purposes—"could have been false" is not equivalent to "could be false".

Think about the ancient shepherds—if they put in just two parallel fence lines, it would have been obvious that would not keep the sheep in or the wol...

That's right. So, if we know p could be false, then we don't know that it's true, but we may well believe that it's true. Thinking we know something i...

It's not a matter of feeling, as much as you would like to cast it in that light. On analysis I judge it to be unjustified because it simply doesn't l...

Right, and if p is true then it cannot be false, no? Likewise if you know that p is true then you cannot know that it could be false, or so it would s...

I think the idea of qualia is misleading. The way I understand it when I see something I don't see a quale or the experiential quality of what I'm see...

You say that if we know something is true we must know it is not false. But is not knowing something is not false the same as knowing that it could no...

I agree that we know that we don't know in the case re alien species...There are also many truths we do know. The problem I see is that if we know som...

No, I didn't mean that. I don't know how you got to that conclusion. For example, we don't know whether there is sentient life on other planets, and i...

The distinction between something's being true and our knowing it to be true is of necessary and useful?it is useful to know whether we do know someth...

We know analytic statements are true. Given competence we know that mathematical proofs are true. We know that true propositions about directly observ...

I thought it was implied, that you were not addressing empirical truth. It's really very simple, and no need for a law-giving God. There will always b...

So, what you seem to be talking about is not certainty, but consistency. I think we agree on this. Do you mean that syntheses are hypotheses, whereas ...

You say that we have knowledge and that it may be overturned by new evidence. You say what we believed we knew is overturned, in which case it wasn't ...

:up: I like to be less than diplomatic at times?only for the sake of emphasis, mind...:wink: The above was what I had in mind. What could knowledge of...

I haven't studied the demographics of such things. I used to attend the Sydney Gurdjieff Foundation meditation nights and weekend workshops, and the p...

:up: Yep, philosophy can easily become a fetish.

I agree. I love the Dao De Ching myself (although I bet I haven't read as many different translations as you have). Speaking of Buddhism, I was intens...

You have it arse-about. We only know that something is a "proper" expression if it is consistent and coherent. The latter are the criteria for the for...

Modern self-help programs often seem to be excessively self-focused. But I would argue that the same is true of many traditional spiritual practices. ...

Returning to your 'raining' example, would you have said that you know it is raining? Justification is a slippery concept. It might be said that it wo...

I'm not a believer in properness, but rather in consistency and coherency. We humans are so humancentric that we tend to think of human being as the p...

Okay thanks for explaining. I have a different take than you on this it seems. I think that conceiving the character of conscious experience in terms ...

For me "forgetfulness of being" is not an intellectual oversight, but a failure to live to the fullest due to being distracted by various kinds of pre...

I agree there is logic used in "cognitive methods" (given that I'm understanding correctly what you mean by that), but that logic is not deductive, so...

I've heard it said that I think, therefore I am not.

Okay, cheers, I won't say any more since I would be speaking from relative ignorance if I did.

But "x is y" is not an explicit assertion of being as such, but an assertion about some being's characteristics. That it exists is already implicitly ...

Ontology is the general study of being, of what it means to be or to exist. Once the general characteristics shared by all beings are decided then wha...

I've read that entanglement enables faster than light information?and I've wondered whether that is just hype, given that it seems that all that's bei...

It's obvious that you have a different view of things than I do, but that does not constitute either an explanation or a justification for your views....

Okay, it's too bad that I can see no reason at all why you would think such things?are you just being contrarian or perverse?

Why not? If you do have a reason to live, then surely having that reason is a fact about you? Your reason may of course also be said to be subjective,...

Thanks there's a lot there, but I'll just address this at the moment: My question about entanglement (which I have only a superficial understanding of...

Perhaps an example might help. It is not logically impossible that Mt Everest might detach form the Earth and float up into the sky. We might say it i...

In my book to say something is physical is to say it is either mind-independently existent and measurable, a property or activity of something mind-in...

I wonder what "some non-physical aspect to mind" could even mean. Of course we can say, based on a kind of "folk" intuition, that abstractions and con...

That leaves me wondering what could be the criteria for logical impossibility other than contradiction. And then what would be the criteria determinin...

Can anything we know except those things whose negation would be a logical contradiction be apodeictic?

Right, I'm not claiming that Kant necessarily believed he knew that space and time and the categories are purely subjective (subjective in the sense o...

It's like "I'm reading sentence X at the moment". I don't see the words 'objective' and 'subjective' as unambiguous. If I can only determine some fact...