No reason justifies disbelief.

[LadyForCamus]

Awesome...so....let's ratchet up the dial, shall we?  What if I were to posit, pursuant to the above upon which we have agreed, that we can intuit and deduce....that among the things we know, empirical facts can never give us the whole picture?

Well...I suppose I’d want to know why that idea is intuitive to you, and how you could ever verify that it’s correct, lol.  If someone has an idea of a manticore without a tail, then it isn’t a manticore. That would be faulty intuition. If that same person saw a drawing of a manticore, he would (hopefully) acknowledge that the empirical data demonstrates his intuition about manticores to be incorrect. If someone intuits that empirical facts can never give us the whole picture, that’s a just a bare assertion. By the nature of the claim, they could never use any empirical data to back it up. Yeah?

That no amount of empirical instances proves the necessity of some truth?  That a necessary truth, then, does not and cannot depend on individual instances of empirical facts.

Then, how could it ever be verified as true, lol? What qualifies these things as truths at all? You’d simply be begging the question.  Am I following correctly?  Remember, I’m blonde. 😁

[The Grand Nudger]

Well...wait a minute....we'd already agreed on the issue of the manticore (it was a subtle end run, I'll admit it..... I make no apologies!, lol).   No matter.  Sure, the notion of intuition doesn't rule out false intuition (but I've got another one that does, for when we turn the heat up to eleventy), which is why it's the weakest non-empirical argument as I framed it. 

Still, the existence of false intuitions doesn't rule out the existence of true intuitions..so in a meaningful sense, while it's a relevant criticism, it's a non-issue of concept.  Having an experience can also be a "false experience".  Yes, you experience it, but the contents of your experience are inaccurate with respect to their alleged referents.  Presumably, deduction (in either case, intuition or experience), could help to separate the wheat from the chaff.  

I'll also tip the hat to seeing pictures of a manticore, it may be the case that manticore knowledge is empirical knowledge based on pictures of manticores (or pictures of tails..whats a tail, right?)...but that's an easy problem to solve.  Just replace every use of the word "manticore" with "beejatzulifren" and every use of the words "a tail" with "kenbanhindra"  What are those things, you might ask?  Doesn't matter.  What you know, is that beejatzulifren have kenbanhindra, and that if a thing doesn't have kenbanhindra, it can't be beejatzulifren.  This can't be empirical knowledge, you have no experience of either, no idea what I'm even talking about.  It's stated as a truth by definition of concept.  Like math, or, in some formulations, morality....or...gods. 

Can we appeal to empirical data to show that sense experience is at least sometimes unreliable?  Well...yeah.  If we need to dive in on this one we can (say the word) but..I'm hoping that we can both agree that empirical data suggests that sense experience is not universally reliable.  The whole point of science (for example) was to reduce this known vector of error in empirical analytics.

The intuitionist only needs to present a single example of some knowledge that is not empirical. Empiricism states that all x is y, intuitionism responds with some x that is not y, thus, sense experience may be the foundation of some knowledge or most knowledge or even a great way of verifying knowledge, but cannot be the foundation of knowledge.

Beyond all that, though, I want to ask. Are there notions that you consider true that are intuitive to you. When I describe this set, can you say with authenticity that all of the things you know are known by empirical means, and that you possess no true intuitions? I'm not going to ask you how you verify them, or ask you to prove them, or even what they are. I just wonder whether or not you possess them, or are aware of possessing any of them.

[bennyboy]

.........?

What can "turn the screw" then, how do you know that the hammer can't, and can you please give at least one example of a screw?

"Why is there something rather than nothing?"

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know, but my not knowing doesn't indicate that there's a metaphysical answer to that question or that the question is beyond empirical investigation. You are very simply launching a gap argument, and I don't understand why you recognize it as trash in other contexts but not this one...? It's not even an adversarial thing between us, I am completely certain that this argument is beneath you, lol.

What made you respond that way? You didn't offer anything that could turn a screw, you didn't even attempt to show that the hammer couldn't turn the screw, nor did you attempt to establish that this question -was- a screw. It seems so out of character.

[bennyboy]

Sure.  You can say something like "You can't ask what caused the Big Bang, because causality is time-dependent, and the math breaks down in a singularity, which means there was no such thing as time before time.  Asking what caused it is a broken question."

Well, I think "why", and "how" are different types of questions. We may never discover all the "hows" of reality, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is a "why" question that needs answering.  Why is a water molecule two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom? That's a malformed question. I'm not saying there's no more to be learned about reality simply because science may never have access to it.  I'm merely saying the way the question is being asked may be malformed.

I wouldn't agree, first of all, that that particular question IS malformed.  I could learn a great deal about the material Universe by trying to answer that question.  I suspect that I'd end up discovering a chain of successive proximate causes, leading back perhaps to the four basic forces present in our Universe but not further.

I'd summarize the instinct to label certain questions as malformed in this in this way: brute facts may not be subject to questions about causation, because they ultimately provide all the answers ABOUT causation, and circles are bad.

That's why I compare the discarding of certain questions as malformed as a philosophical "Goddidit."  If a child asks a chain of why questions, starting say with "Why is the sky blue?"  You can talk about photons, about the properties of oxygen that give it a blue color, about the properties of atoms in general or about quantum mechanics.  But eventually, you have to stop the process and say: "That's just the way it is.  Seeking further is pointless."

[The Grand Nudger]

You mean...you'd appeal to the empirical to answer the why question, as if the empirical could answer why questions?  Gee...you don't say..........

So, how about you, can you answer the why question offered as an example of a malformed question? Why is water two atoms of hydro and one atom of oxy? Is telling a person "because that;s what water -is-" not an accurate answer? What? What's the problem? Why -is- that what water is? Because if it were two atoms of hydro and two atoms of oxy it would be hydrogen peroxide.

[bennyboy]

I don't know, but my not knowing doesn't indicate that there's a metaphysical answer to that question or that the question is beyond empirical investigation.  You are very simply launching a gap argument, and I don't understand why you recognize it as trash in other contexts but not this one...?  It's not even an adversarial thing between us, I am completely certain that this argument is beneath you, lol.

What made you respond that way?  You didn't offer anything that could turn a screw, you didn't even attempt to show that the hammer couldn't turn the screw, nor did you attempt to establish that this question -was- a screw.  It seems so out of character.

You've been blathering on about metaphysical answers and things immaterial in response to all my posts.  Have I attempted to make any assertions along those lines?

[The Grand Nudger]

....yes.......

[bennyboy]

....yes.......

Bullshit.

[The Grand Nudger]

The forums exist, Benny.  Jesus christ........