(January 8, 2015 at 12:33 pm)robvalue Wrote: You missed out the rest of my quote where I said that if you are throwing out current theory, this must be justified. In einsteins case, he did justify it.Fair enough on Einstein, but you still need to define "we" and "know" and justify why others should accept those definitions.
That doesn't mean you can just ignore reality as you see fit without justification.
If you are making a claim which is meant to improve on previously established claims, then you need to justify why that is. It's possible the claims before were wrongly accepted.
Maybe I didn't explain that very well in my OP. Sure, there are always issues of epistemology and so forth. But we're dealing with demonstrated knowledge and theories, which we are justified in thinking is correct based on information at that time. I'm not talking about absolute truths, only practical demonstrations beyond reasonable doubt.
What I'm getting at is that you have certain standards of evidence and knowledge. Other people have other standards. I suspect you're considering your own standards to determine what "we know about reality." Other people believe they know different things about reality than you do.
