One item I notice in your statements of positions is that you tend to assert what the other person is thinking or assuming. It does strike me that this could interfere with actually understanding the other person’s position accurately.
You are correct that I simply don’t have time to try and understand other people’s non-falsifiable beliefs. If they have them, I just leave that alone generally speaking. I have enough scientific problems I want to try and understand and struggle with and life is finite, especially as we get older.
I do understand that some people, especially those with non-falsifiable beliefs, can be offended by this apparent shortness, so I try and be polite about it.
Still waiting for some falsiability experiment that could disprove the premiss "only falsifiable concepts can be true", or some empirical evidence for the affirmation "only empirical evidence can be true". Choosing non falsifiable and non empirical axioms to later disprove non falsifiable and non empirical concepts seems problematic to say the least. But ok.
Pawn I don’t think there is one. That is axiomatic, as described by Aristotle. Try making any argument, even those here, without assuming that existence exists and that valid concepts refer to reality. It falls apart very quickly.
This is really is a very old philosophical problem on which much ink has been used. So I certainly can’t find a way logically outside that to explain here and would just suggest reading Aristotle on that.
But perhaps Kevin’s Bacon will have more to discuss about it.
There is one other aspect of this I think is interesting to consider as a neuroscientist. From my perspective all our thoughts and concepts correspond to some activity of neurons in our brain. And our brain is an evolved organ which evolved to help us predict the environment and act in ways that propagated our genes.
So in this sense logic and axioms are fundamental arrangements of activity that help us achieve that goal.
Something to ponder.
Yeah I love this insight, I used it to formulate a sort of basis for my own codified epistemology that's roughly based on a realist interpretation of Kant (screw idealism or the assumption that the real world is unknowable and dismissable). Piaget also has something that sort of answers this as saying that every truth is a tool in a framework within which it applies. But I haven't read much about it yet, just discovered him.
Realism rules. Aquinas is the GOAT
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You don't happen to know portuguese, do you? The best book I've ever read on the topic of gnosiology and epistemology is "Gnosiologia Pluridimensional", by the latvian Father Stanislavs Ladusãns, but it was written in portuguese and has no translations that I know of. This book is a gem. If you can, try to find it and ask for help translating it. It would be a great service to the philosophy world
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Honestly that's totally fine. My original post was a discussion essentially about Objectivists' argumentation regarding God and their assertions relating that to their metaphysics, so that was of course the focus of my further debate into it. I thought it very relevant to the discussion as this was my original intent and interest in critiquing.
The idea itself is something I have spent quite a bit of time pondering over, and what I found lacking from any Objectivist sources or debaters was a serious discussion of the topic that gave any further insight at all, or that even considered the stronger arguments that could be posed by theists or agnostics, of which I have about 30 years of experience being and thinking from those frameworks.
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