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What is your epistemology?
#1
What is your epistemology?
Just curious about your epistemology (way of knowing), i thought it would be interesting to see the epistemological views of members here (theists and atheists).

Firstly i'll start with a brief explanation of my Epistemology.

Reliablism.

This is an epistemological position that unlike other epistemologies held by Atheists does not depend on naturalism being true, and unlike the epistemologies held by the likes of Dawkings and Harris, does not engage in reductionism or scientism (Re: Harris and 'Science informing morality' or Dawkings 'God is in the realm of science').

Reliablism is the idea that our ways of knowing (or more practically the standards we set for ourselves in our acceptance of propositions as true) should be formed by methodologies that are reliable (such as the scientific method and logical argument) and should exclude approaches that tend to lead to contradictory conclusions (introspection, emotion etc).

Reliablism is also a take on True Justified Belief.

Reliablism states that someone can obtain 'knowledge' if The proposition is true, is believed and is obtained by reliable process. This specifically excludes guessing or 'pure intuition' (the distinction is important as most things believed to be intuition are actually informed by data) as qualified knowledge, for instance: where P and S believes P but no reliable process was used to arrive at belief in P. This specifically excludes the chances of being accidentally right about P.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/
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#2
RE: What is your epistemology?
@ Void;
Interesting question. About 40 years ago I read Carl Jung's autobiography,"Memories,Dreams and Reflections". In it he argued our attitudes beliefs,sense of self and others are the result of direct experience.

I accepted Jung's hypothesis at the time. That view was reinforced when I studied the concept of socialisaton and the process by which it occurs.I even wrote a paper on socialising influences.


My reality is what I perceive it to be.That I may sometimes (or completely) be wrong matters not a jot or a tittle in my daily life. I respond to my perceptions,whether they are external or internal,in the form of ideas, attitudes and beliefs. I make my own distinctions between illusion, fantasy and reality.

Is that an answer to your question?
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#3
RE: What is your epistemology?
Not really Smile

So far it seems that you form your beliefs simply through preference of perception, but how do you relate this to what you know? In other words, how do you consider something knowable? What is the standard that has to be met to claim knowledge?

For instance, one could believe in P but not know P, either because P is false or belief in P was arrived at through a guess or "preferred perception" (IE My perception is better than yours).
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#4
RE: What is your epistemology?
Maybe there is no better way of knowing.
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#5
RE: What is your epistemology?
No better than what? I really don't see how your objection is in any way relevent...

This isn't an argument for Reliablismm, if someone wants to get into the nitty gritty then we'll get onto that later - For now I'm just interested in the guaging epistemology of the members here, to see where the spread is.

So Lrh9, do you have a preferred Epistemology? In other words:

What is knowledge?
How do we gain knowledge?
How do we know what we know?

These are the questions addressed by epistemology. Almost all have the first in common, the TJB (true justified belief) where someone Knows something if it is true and if they believe it to be true - There are minor variations between epistemologies, such as reliabilism positing that one must use a method that tends towards the truth to Know something - the whole idea of this is to exclude guessing and similar approaches where one could believe something that is in fact true, but their method for arriving at this belief was simply chance.

There are many other epistemologies out there, all with merits and flaws.
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#6
RE: What is your epistemology?
I think I would lean more towards cognitive constructivism or internal ism.. is that what you're asking?
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post

always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
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#7
RE: What is your epistemology?
Yep that's the one Tack Smile

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.
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#8
RE: What is your epistemology?
(September 12, 2010 at 11:15 pm)theVOID Wrote: No better than what? I really don't see how your objection is in any way relevent...

I don't see how I'm making an objection.

What is knowledge? If you ignore it, it can kill you.
How do we gain knowledge? Observation.

How do we know what we know?

Doesn't this question ask for an uninformative tautology? We know what we know because we know it.

I think a better wording is, 'How do we know something?'

Arguably the same question as, 'How do we gain knowledge?'
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#9
RE: What is your epistemology?
(September 12, 2010 at 11:51 pm)theVOID Wrote: Yep that's the one Tack Smile

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.

I don't believe you can completely eliminate false beliefs. Through constant input, selectivity of attention and priority processing we just focus more on the things we do believe instead of those we don't. I mean have you ever been somewhere.. utterly despise it and go back years later.. and feel a strange sense of comfort or familiarity? It's sort of like that. What I meant with including the internalist slant on constructivism is more of a Descarte's perspective. It's a very cautious approach to trusting the inputs we receive and ingesting them, while wholly recognizing the necessity for the subjectivity of the senses. While I gamble I probably have a more relaxed view of the division of conscious and subconscious than you I think we can agree that the more something passes through the thalamus the more it has an affect on our views of reality.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post

always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
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#10
RE: What is your epistemology?
(September 12, 2010 at 11:15 pm)theVOID Wrote: What is knowledge?
How do we gain knowledge?
How do we know what we know?

These are the questions addressed by epistemology. Almost all have the first in common, the TJB (true justified belief) where someone Knows something if it is true and if they believe it to be true - There are minor variations between epistemologies, such as reliabilism positing that one must use a method that tends towards the truth to Know something - the whole idea of this is to exclude guessing and similar approaches where one could believe something that is in fact true, but their method for arriving at this belief was simply chance.

There are many other epistemologies out there, all with merits and flaws.

I think that this is the best I can come up with as a "label" to answer your question VoiD.
Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

This in particular took my fancy....

Solipsism amounts to realism
An objection, raised by David Deutsch[15] (among others), is that since the solipsist has no control over the "universe" she is creating for herself, there must be some part of her mind, of which she is not conscious, that is doing the creating. If the solipsist makes her unconscious mind the object of scientific study (e.g. by conducting experiments), she will find that it behaves with the same complexity as the universe described by a realist. Thus what realism calls "the universe", solipsism calls "one's unconscious mind." Understood this way, the distinction between realism and solipsism collapses and amounts to different ways of describing the same thing: a massively complex process that causes all of the solipsist's experiences, but is not identical to the solipsist's conscious mind.

Presumably having made the case that the solipsist scientist is actually a realist scientist, Deutsch next argues in favor of the more common understanding of reality. He applies Occam's Razor, and suggests that it prefers the standard external 'reality' over something like a brain in a vat. This is because the standard 'reality' fits all the data available to the scientist, rendering superfluous the other more complicated possibilities.

If seeking to avoid rejecting the laws of thought, the solipsist may appeal to the problem of induction to reiterate that the realist's theory of reality could still, in the end, be an illusion in some way. She could also appeal to some types of idealism.
~~~~~~~~~~
Personally I hate labels mainly because we are dealing with humans and we are a very complicated species capable of deluding ourselves very well. What we think we have proven to know may be in strict contrast to what actually is or how 'it' actually is. Walk the plank!

As you have stated ...'There are many epistemologies out there' (six billion and counting - imho) All we can hope to do is apply our insatiable curiosity; our scientific methodologies; and best minds to the task of finding THE answer.

In the mean time I'm busying myself to ensure that we all get there. Alarm
"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." G'Kar-B5
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