turkalurk
Bluelighter
You don't necessarily need an absolute objective perspective to know some things about objective reality, it depends what conditions you think are necessary and sufficient for knowledge. The 'traditional' account of knowledge is, S knows that P if and only if:
(1) P is true.
(2) S believes that P.
(3) S's belief that P is justified.
It seems quite clear (to me, anyway) that there are cases in which peoples beliefs are justified by their subjective experiences. If you grant this, then it seems there is nothing in this analysis of knowledge that implies one must be able to adopt an absolute objective perspective in order to have knowledge about objective reality. There are problems with the traditional account of knowledge, and I am not here endorsing it, but it conveniently illustrates my point.
I mean that the concept of knowledge already has the concept of truth built into it; you can't know something which is false, but obviously you can believe something which is false. P's being true is a necessary condition of someone knowing that P. This is not to say that knowledge and truth are the same thing, you can fail to know something that is true, but something you know can't fail to be true.
The fact that some persons belief in a proposition is justified through subjective experience does not rule out the proposition (and therefore the belief) being objectively true.
This is trivially true; by 'perspective of the truth' it seems you must be talking about belief. Of course our beliefs are relative to our subjective experience of reality, that's a lot different to saying that truth is relative to our subjective experience of reality, which is the claim I initially objected to.
Science operates on the principle that our best scientific theories could be wrong, which is to say that what those theories tell us is not true. If we observe some phenomenon which contradicts what some scientific theory T predicts then we must either revise or discard T. In other words, some of the things we currently believe to be facts might not actually be facts.
You aren't making much sense to me here, to be honest. I objected to the following claim:
You seem to agree with me that this is wrong, since you are implicitly appealing to absolute truth and raising epistemological issues about how we can know that what we believe to be true is actually true. In my initial post I acknowledged there are epistemological problems about objective reality, but pointed out that raising these problems is distinct from the ontological claim that there is no such thing as objective reality or truth; it is the latter claim which I have challenged. You are mostly talking past me, and you seem not to appreciate that your perspective more closely aligns with my own than it does with the view I was critical of.
I never said you can't have knowledge about reality. To me, if you are aware of something you have knowledge of it. Really I was trying to illustrate the point that "the reality that can be told is not objective reality" (Tao Te Ching)
I do believe in an objective reality but I can only perceive reality subjectively. So, objective reality is like a riddle that I will never be able to solve. When you reason something to be true, you are still just using your subjective experience to justify another subjective experience and calling it objective because its less subjective than using one's experience of reality. Your still just using an experience of cognition as a means to attain information that can only be perceived to be real. It very well could be real, but it can't be objectively perceived. We can only think of what it means to exist objectively, we can never actually process information information without "collapsing" it into a subjective version of reality. So, i can think of it as existing but realize the limits of my perspective. I will never see reality, I will only see a mirage. An image that appears to represent reality but its merely a surface reflection the depths of which are impenetrable. I can make progress through my experiences by gaining more knowledge about reality; I can make my reality seem more real to me the more I understand our human nature the more I can utilize methods that reduce the effect of biases thus forming a more objective perspective. But it will always be just a subjective perspective based on the truth of my experience.
I also don't believe knowledge presupposes truth. I understand how it works semantically, but words aren't that precise and unambiguous. You're basically just saying that we assign the meaning of "being true" to the word "knowledge." in my experience knowledge only presupposes awareness.
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