RE: Proving What We Already "Know"
June 16, 2022 at 8:59 pm
(This post was last modified: June 16, 2022 at 8:59 pm by Belacqua.)
(June 16, 2022 at 6:34 pm)bennyboy Wrote: My question: by what mental process, or academic study, or philosophical methodology, could one pull away that veil and hope to arrive at something like truth?
This is one of the main questions of philosophy. You could read 100 books on epistemology and get a lot of variation in opinion.
Roughly (since Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) we say that everything of which we are aware is an interpretation of what's out there. There is no direct access.
Whether it's even possible to "pull back the veil" is a serious question, but mostly the consensus seems to be that we can't.
Sometimes people assume that what science tells us is a view of the world that's free of human interpretation, and corresponds more directly to whatever it is which is behind the veil. I think it's more correct to say that the conclusions scientists reach are a different kind of interpretation, which are often useful and, at best, less affected by emotion, politics, or economics.
