(July 22, 2025 at 10:04 am)Alan V Wrote:(July 22, 2025 at 1:34 am)Belacqua Wrote: In fact the values which you are arguing for in this thread -- that scientifically-tested knowledge is the only kind worth having -- comes from a set of beliefs which has its own history. The fact that you hold other kinds of knowledge to be unimportant is a value judgment with implications for politics, ethics, and other fields of human society. Philosophers work on these things, and ignoring them means that you won't be aware.
You were making good sense until this last bit.
There are various kinds of knowledge which we would like to have, and in some cases even need, which nevertheless elude us. Scientifically-tested knowledge may be the only reliable kind, but it is always limited.
I think we humans are in more desperate straits than you might imagine. Philosophy as a means to approach desired knowledge is highly questionable IMO. This is a part of the reason why I am a variety of misanthrope. I don't trust philosophical methods because we humans are unalterably imperfect and our perceptions are always impermanent and incomplete. Scientists, at least, understand this problem and capture their knowledge in probabilities and statistics.
This is why I think religious people can't use philosophy to prove science is biased against certain conclusions. They are the people inclined to jumping to conclusions.
This is my justification for intellectual minimalism, at least. I believe in human diversity about other areas of concern because no final answers are pending, except where science has slowly filled in the blanks.
OK, you don't want to know the things that non-scientists teach us about. That's up to you.
