@ Void;
Interesting question. About 40 years ago I read Carl Jung's autobiography,"Memories,Dreams and Reflections". In it he argued our attitudes beliefs,sense of self and others are the result of direct experience.

I accepted Jung's hypothesis at the time. That view was reinforced when I studied the concept of socialisaton and the process by which it occurs.I even wrote a paper on socialising influences.


My reality is what I perceive it to be.That I may sometimes (or completely) be wrong matters not a jot or a tittle in my daily life. I respond to my perceptions,whether they are external or internal,in the form of ideas, attitudes and beliefs. I make my own distinctions between illusion, fantasy and reality.

Is that an answer to your question?

Not really

So far it seems that you form your beliefs simply through preference of perception, but how do you relate this to what you know? In other words, how do you consider something knowable? What is the standard that has to be met to claim knowledge?

For instance, one could believe in P but not know P, either because P is false or belief in P was arrived at through a guess or "preferred perception" (IE My perception is better than yours).

Maybe there is no better way of knowing.

No better than what? I really don't see how your objection is in any way relevent...

This isn't an argument for Reliablismm, if someone wants to get into the nitty gritty then we'll get onto that later - For now I'm just interested in the guaging epistemology of the members here, to see where the spread is.

So Lrh9, do you have a preferred Epistemology? In other words:

What is knowledge?
How do we gain knowledge?
How do we know what we know?

These are the questions addressed by epistemology. Almost all have the first in common, the TJB (true justified belief) where someone Knows something if it is true and if they believe it to be true - There are minor variations between epistemologies, such as reliabilism positing that one must use a method that tends towards the truth to Know something - the whole idea of this is to exclude guessing and similar approaches where one could believe something that is in fact true, but their method for arriving at this belief was simply chance.

There are many other epistemologies out there, all with merits and flaws.

I think I would lean more towards cognitive constructivism or internal ism.. is that what you're asking?

Yep that's the one Tack

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.

(September 12, 2010 at 11:15 pm)theVOID Wrote: No better than what? I really don't see how your objection is in any way relevent...

I don't see how I'm making an objection.

What is knowledge? If you ignore it, it can kill you.
How do we gain knowledge? Observation.

How do we know what we know?

Doesn't this question ask for an uninformative tautology? We know what we know because we know it.

I think a better wording is, 'How do we know something?'

Arguably the same question as, 'How do we gain knowledge?'

(September 12, 2010 at 11:51 pm)theVOID Wrote: Yep that's the one Tack

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.

I don't believe you can completely eliminate false beliefs. Through constant input, selectivity of attention and priority processing we just focus more on the things we do believe instead of those we don't. I mean have you ever been somewhere.. utterly despise it and go back years later.. and feel a strange sense of comfort or familiarity? It's sort of like that. What I meant with including the internalist slant on constructivism is more of a Descarte's perspective. It's a very cautious approach to trusting the inputs we receive and ingesting them, while wholly recognizing the necessity for the subjectivity of the senses. While I gamble I probably have a more relaxed view of the division of conscious and subconscious than you I think we can agree that the more something passes through the thalamus the more it has an affect on our views of reality.