(February 6, 2014 at 9:11 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Well, I guess it's "Is reality knowable?" Is our "objective" knowledge merely consensus reality and nothing inherently "more real" than the subjective experiences we commonly deem psychotic or illusory? Or is consensus reality closer to "true reality" than unverifiable subjective observations? How can we know?
I think this is where Immanuel Kant becomes relevant I think. I tend to think that people often misapply the word "objective" when discussing philosophical issues, which makes the discussion murkier. I mean, objective usually means something like "independent of any particular mind". But in such discussions it seems to change scope to something like "independent of all minds". But clearly wheen you're talking about knowledge it can't be detached from ALL minds, because knowledge is pretty much always defined as a special kind of belief, classically as one that is true and held with justification.
Where Kant comes into this I think is that we only have our experience of the world. We could never have anything but that, because "the world" is a construction that is interpreted and filtered by us. Even within what Kant calls the "phenomenal world" (as in the "world of phenomena"), we can repeatedly demonstrate that our conscious experience of the world is not the whole package. We only see the visible part of the spectrum (although a small percentage of lucky(?) women can see a bit into the ultraviolet range), there are detectable smells and sounds above and below our threshold (think dog whistles) and so on. Things go even further with the fact that not only do we filter out parts of possible experience, we also impose things onto our perception of the world that aren't regarded as "out there", with the classical example being colors, which are entirely mental.
So I'm not sure if the idea of knowing the world as it is in itself is even a meaningful endeavor in that sense. Talking of the world apart from subjective conscious experience is just plain meaningless, because to even talk of the world, you necessarily are going to be calling on your inductive, subjective experience of it and could never call on anything other than that: it's all you have. When we do seemingly talk of the world that way with others, it's more a pragmatic thing than anything else, and hey, it helps.
I shall wait for Rasetsu to strangle me.
She seems to hate when I go this route.
