(July 5, 2009 at 5:57 pm)Purple Rabbit Wrote: I side with Kyu on this one. There's just to many homonyms of the word agnostic. In one of my older dutch dictionaries there even is the meaning of agnosticism as fundamentally unknowability. On a useful scale its use should be undenaible and straightforward, it isn't (your need for notes illustrates this). Am I being agnostic when I doubt if it is me typing this? Of course not, I'm only being not absolutely sure about it.The reason there are so many homonyms is because people have been mis-using the word. The word in a philosophical sense (as defined by Huxley) is someone who does not claim absolute knowledge on certain matters; they hold that concepts such as God are unknowable. Your dutch dictionary is correct with the definition (although it seems a bit short, what was the full definition?).
On a useful scale it should be used in the way in which it accurately reflects the definition. The only reason we have a note there is because so many people have a misconception about the word. We want people to choose a definition and use the label, not look at the label and say "but I'm not agnostic" (thinking it means something else) and reject it. Hence the note to explain the definition.
"Am I being agnostic when I doubt if it is me typing this?" You could be if you did not claim absolute knowledge that you were typing it. An agnostic would hold that all their experiences could not be real, and that there is no way to either confirm or deny this, given the subjectivity of their position.
