Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

I've never been too much a fan of "-isms."  Overcategorization always reminds me of when I read 20,000 Leagues under the sea as a kid.  There would be several pages of exciting, swashbuckling adventure, and then Verne would make a big point of cataloguing a few dozen fucking sea creatures by their Latin names.

The problem is that "-isms" gloss over or straight-up amplify the kinds of categorical conflations that we're talking about-- putting an idea in a box doesn't actually give us any useful tools for approaching knowledge, or for proving anything other than which "-ism" cranks our respective shafts.

That would be noncognitiv-ism and/or some error theories:  that these things x cannot be known in the logical sense because they are not truth apt statements to begin with.  

Or to bring things back to the OP thesis-- they represent academic contexts, and if the truths held in one are to be useful among the others, the question remains-- how do we do that?

Alot of ways - from every moral system.  Utilitarianism is a form of cognitivism, and objectivism, itself.  Asking me the usefulness of x presupposes that there can be some factual state of affairs about it's utility...yay or nay.  Let's say (just for purposes of conversation) that there really can be something bad about x.  That moral realism is true.  So, we know that - but don't we also know about all of the subjective and emotivist "failures" of the human animal in that hypothetical context?   So we include those as a consideration when (and or if) we dole out reward and punishment.  Just about all of these schemes are derived from and primarily engaged in (so we suppose) benefiting society - a relativist goal. Understanding what we're doing, why we're doing it, when..and what-for speak to expectations of competence, neatly circling right back around to utilitarianism.

I can expand on this to no end - and so could you...but discussions of the utility of x are not interchangeable with discussions of the truth of x. Conceivably, a false assertion may be useful, and a true assertion useless.