(April 20, 2012 at 5:17 am)FallentoReason Wrote: So because we know the nature of light we are more correct in saying that what we observe about the sun isn't necessarily true about it at this instant which is the more correct position than say 500 years ago when we didn't know much about light at all and so we would have been oblivious to the fact that we are observing the past.
Ah ok, I was having trouble before making sense to what you were essentially getting at, but I see what you mean. From what I said above, I guess as we start to understand better the impairments we have, we can then adjust our understanding of the information we're receiving and therefore get closer to the truth, as you mentioned.
-----
I think we've sort of gone off on a tangent and got too caught up on just one aspect of knowing the truth which relies on a physical property. I wanted this to be more on the philosophical side but I'm not too sure how to really go about it. I just downloaded Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method where his starting point for what is true is that he exists, then through logic starts to reassemble reality and what is true. Should be a good read.
I guess that as far as application of epistemology goes - that is, what is knowledge, how do we know it and how much of it do we know, etc. - we are in agreement. Let's try to get this thread where you wanted it to be.
Going back to the philosophical side, this position relies on two metaphysical axioms - reality exists and I exist. As I was saying in the parent thread, without first accepting these two axioms, even implicitly, no statement about knowledge or truth can be made. As the name suggests, these axioms cannot be proven or disproven, because the very concept of proof is derived from them. Basically, with regards to these axioms, ideas such as "reliability", "questioning them", "how do you know" etc are inapplicable because all of them have already implicitly accepted these axioms as true.
