Fair enough. At what point can you conclude you've avoided folly and arrived at the most likely meaning intended by a philosopher? I asked you for the hermeneutic that led you to conclude Jesus was talking about self-love and the creative process rather than God's provision for his followers who ask, and I'm hearing you say something of an agnostic approach: "we can't know so we just have to appeal to what is self-evident." Do I understand you correctly? In my mind "we can't know" is the foundational idea of postmodernism.
Discussion
Well I don't know enough about postmodernism to really profess to be something especially different from it. I haven't studied it beyond a cursory examination. I am quite the opposite, however, of a critical race theorist or any of that bs.
Well, there is no point at which we suddenly gain certainty that we are right about what a philosopher is saying, as far as I know, but there are clues that we are getting it right when we are actually looking at the problems that arose in the context of that philosopher's life, and what was going on when the person said or did X, which gives meaning to X. Context is key. Application to our own lives and current problems, as well as thought experiments and deduction, can also test these ideas to see if they hold up, and give us insight regarding what a phrase might have meant to someone, in light again of the context and the meaning they put upon words in their relation to concepts and to concrete things. There is, objectively, meaning behind a person's ideas, and this can be approximated through conjecture in light of evidence, deduction, and critical examination.
The fundamental nature of meaning itself can also be understood to overlap with other frameworks which happen to use the same symbols for different things, or different symbols for the same things, like how Japanese people call green things a shade of blue. This is something basic to the interplay of reality and human concepts, and so one's invoking God as a person does not need to contradict another man's expression of God as a creative unraveling of the universe into all the beauty and good that He provides. There is no clear and certain distinction there that is innate in the words themselves, so I have seen nothing to adequately refute my interpretation thus far, and I like my weird interpretation.
This is also dealing with a belief system of mine so I have all the more reason to be creative with my interpretations. In general, though, Popper says that the less likely an explanation is to be correct, the better, because it can tell us more and further knowledge and science in greater ways. We should choose creative interpretations, and then try to refute them or encourage others to refute them. What we got right in our creative interpretation will help us to come up with a good interpretation just as much as what we got wrong.
I take extra liberties with my religion, of course, but I still endeavor to find the truth.
If my understanding of postmodernism is correct, which I really don’t know, Crtitical Rationalism is the much more sophisticated version of it, that encourages the furthering of genuine understanding while still avoiding the dogmatism of other philosophies.
I'll look it up. I'm curious now. Let's see what comes up when I search for Postmodern epistemology.
Thanks for the challenging discussion!
And to be clear: the shorthand for how I figured on the meanings (within my framework of how the universe works) for what Jesus says is there was a LOT of study, reflection, seeing parallels in my own interpretation of the world, studying what laws were like in Jesus's time, reading other examinations of what Jesus actually intended by various phrases or actions, learning about the Roman Empire, the laws of the various Jewish sects, the tax system in the region where Jesus protested at the temple, etc.
What I say is mere conjecture, but it is informed conjecture that has been refined through lots of life experience and critical examination across multiple disciplines. This is how we seek truth. I don't follow what people tell me to think, and that is why I think differently than most sheeple, and why I have a tendency to spot things before other people do. That is the essence of Critical Rationalist epistemology, and coincidentally it's also been my temperament since I was little to be this way, to question, to understand logic and uncertainty and respect it. And to respect people, which is the logical consequence of this understanding.