(May 11, 2015 at 8:31 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(May 11, 2015 at 7:20 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: I think you have given up the game right there. Yes, people have feelings, but feelings are not knowledge.Sure they are. Feelings are the experience of a state mediation between evolved motivations of a species and the environment. Positive and negative affect are literally expressions of our innate sense of good and evil.
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Given how the discussion progressed, it seems strange to take such a position at this point, instead of having simply started with the claim that feelings are knowledge. However, we can set that aside and get to the important bit.
Feelings can be contrary to each other, as, for example, one may feel like eating an unlimited number of brownies, and one may feel like one does not want to become fat. Yet those feelings conflict, as one cannot eat an unlimited number of brownies and not get fat. In Sophocles' play Antigone, there is a conflict of duty, where a man who has been judged a traitor to the state is to be left unburied, to be dishonored, and yet his sister (Antigone) has a familial obligation to bury her brother. Here we have a woman with a desire to follow the law, which requires her to not bury her brother, and a desire to fulfill her family duty and bury her brother. It is impossible to do both (which is the source of the tragic element of the play). Although that is just a play, it illustrates very well the fact that people often have conflicting feelings.
That situation differs from knowledge. Knowledge cannot conflict with other knowledge. If there is a conflict in two purported pieces of knowledge, one knows that at least one of them is wrong. For example, if we look at the claim that Anne Boleyn cheated on Henry VIII and committed adultery, and compare that with the claim that Anne Boleyn was ever faithful to Henry VIII, we KNOW that one of those has to be wrong. Conflicts in knowledge are impossible, as one of the conflicting claims must be false.
In the case of feelings, there is no contradiction in having conflicting feelings, because feelings are not claims of fact. Feelings are neither true nor false; one either has a feeling or one does not. Even if one were "wrong" to have a particular feeling, one still has whatever feelings one has, and there is no contradiction in feeling like eating a brownie, while also feeling like not eating it (as, for example, one may not wish to be fat). The suggested actions conflict, and it is impossible to do both actions, but the feelings themselves are both simultaneously possible.
Since conflicts in feelings are possible, feelings cannot be knowledge.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
