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Then you just refuted your own argument...It is quite easily defeated. This was the modernist project, namely to answer Descartes cogito. Cartesian skepticism only gives us a defeater for certainty. This seems to be a throwback to his Scholastic forefathers. But this seems to an absurd standard.
For example, just because I can draw false conclusions about my world due to the fact that when I put a stick into water, it appears to my sense of sight that the stick is bending, I can, when combined with experiment, that is introspection, experience, memory, rationality (all faculties of knowing that sit along side of my senses), determine that my senses alone can give me false information about my world. But there is no evidence that my sense of sight is always faulty or even mostly faulty, and when combined with other faculties, such as memory, introspection, rationality, other senses, testimony from others, my understanding of the world seems to be very reliable indeed.
The cartesian barriers erected due to the defeasibility of my faculties turn out to be due to a false standard of "Perfect reliability."
Firstly, we have no good reasons to believe Descartes is correct and we are living in a dream or being tricked by evil demons, or that our brain is in a vat of chemicals where our thoughts are being manipulated by mad scientists or aliens.
Secondly, we have reason to trust that our faculties above are reasonably reliable, from a vast amount of data operating in our world every day. That our understanding of a real external world is the function of the existence of a real external world, is (according to Bertrand Russell), a much simpler and reasonable explanation of the facts.
Further Russell believes our intuition that we live in an external world is immediate knowledge, that is self-evident to all, or intuitive. This external world inference yields consistent scientific data and experimentation that would be unlikely in a dream world, further this science can describe the nature and limits of dreams, where the matrix, dream inference can't explain anything.
He also held similar beliefs in his early writings regarding the origin of moral values and duties as highlighted in the following:
"After 1903, he became an enthusiastic but critical convert to the doctrines of Principia Ethica (though there is some evidence that the conversion process may have begun as early as 1897). Moore is famous for the claim, which he professes to prove by means of what has come to be known as the Open Question Argument, that there is a “non-natural” property of goodness, not identical with or reducible to any other property or assemblage of properties, and that what we ought to do is to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Russell subscribed to this thesis."
(To be fair, Russell initially grounded these moral goods as self-evidently intuitive as an external world or other minds, or the reality of the past, but abandoned this view for moral relativism after 1913.)
for more see: Russell’s Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
GE Moore suggests that all we need to do is look at our own hands or feet or things we interact with to know that there is an external world. Moore relies on the fact we can know things without being able to prove them such as external worlds, a priori truths, logic and math axioms, etc.
Instead of assuming that we need perfect warrant for all of our beliefs and since we don't have direct access by our brain to the external world but instead have our data of same mediated by fallible faculties known as the senses, therefore we can't trust any of our faculties, why not just ask for evidence that we are in such a matrix?
What good evidence is there that the external world isn't real?
What good evidence is there that other minds (people) don't exist?
What good evidence is there that there is no past, so all ideas about the past are false?
Crickets...
This is the real reason Cartesian skepticism has not fared well both with the public given their intuition, that is self-evident belief that such things as mentioned above DO exist or epistemologists (philosophers of knowledge) who have largely relegated skepticism to the flames.
Actually I do think that youve got a decent example with ethics and behavior, because even people who "know better" still behave misbehave.
But I think thats due to self-interest making people compartmentalize and lock away their knowledge.
All this is far removed from the EAAN example of "for all we know poking a bear may just as well result in alien abduction rather than an angry bear" if we live in a strictly naturalist world.
I just recalled why I have you on "ignore." I thought, gee this guy has cogent arguments and seems like he is familiar with the issues to some extent.Then you just refuted your own argument...
That’s fine, you can keep me on ignore. You say far too much at once that takes far too long to address and you end up contradicting yourself in the process. And I just don’t like your attitude.I just recalled why I have you on "ignore." I thought, gee this guy has cogent arguments and seems like he is familiar with the issues to some extent.
But what I did was help you defeat cartesian skepticism which was the topic.
Further I did so by pointing to how philosophers of knowledge including prominent atheists granted that immediate knowledge of our world through self-evident and intuitive knowledge was the basis of the the last 125+ years of epistemology.
Further that such knowledge, is assumed in logic, math (both which underpin science) as axiomatic.
Further, that these faculties get indefeasible grounds for other intuitions, namely moral facts.
Not all agree. So what?
That is why we are engaging the evidence in support of various premises in support of various arguments. Because we have good reason to believe that our accounts of the external world ...
Wait for it...............................
ARE NOT FALSE!
So my attempt to help you understand how epistemologists defeat global skepticism, instead of getting a "Like" or "Informative" gets a strawman misrepresentation by you "As refuting my own argument."
So perhaps given that in your view moral values are illusory, we have an explanation for why you feel no epistemic duty to accurately represent my help understanding how the concept of global skepticism has been utterly defeated, except on the internet.
This is not my argument! It is the argument of Darwin and current understanding of the driver of NATURAL SELECTION.Do you really think that survivability is so untethered from rationality (or even just something like correct understanding) that one could go through life imagining things like "poking bears might lead to alien abduction", rather than understanding something closer to what really happens?
Super bizarre reckoning of how animals and early humans are likely to think....The three f's: Feeding, fighting, and reproduction seem to be blind to how reliable our faculties are. So evolution is not questioned but rather given evolution and specifically how selection is not based on rationality but rather the three f's, we have no good reason to suspect that our cognitive faculties are reliable....
I agree with you that global skepticism is not persuasive, but the tricky part is defeating it. We can't really formally demonstrate that we're not in a matrix, a simulation, or a vat somewhere experiencing delusions of this life.
That doesn’t bother me too much as a pragmatist and the reasons you provided to reject it are valid, but proponents of the EAAN really like to latch on to it.
I don't think that matters to the EAAN argument.Super bizarre reckoning of how animals and early humans are likely to think.
As if there's no advantage to even a crude understanding of how-things-work. As if the guy who thinks poking a bear results in alien invasion will fare just as well in the world than the guy who thinks poking bears makes them angry, and can transfer that understanding to other situations and embed it in a larger coherent picture of how things work.
The alien invasion notion leaves the guy with no way of linking the bear experience with any understanding of the whole rest of the world. Its incoherent - while the world IS coherent. Bear behavior is linked to how the rest of the entire ecosystem behaves.
If you hold to arbitrary disconnected understanding of how each thing in your world behaves - even if that notion helps you through that unique circumstance - youll never build a coherent map of your world. And a coherent map absolutely provides a survival advantage.
Do you think this is wrong?
Well, Uber, I think it's obvious that scientists who try to assert that evolution is purely deterministic end up making a rather ambiguous claim, one that, depending on how one approaches science in the first place, can also be over asserted.I don't think that matters to the EAAN argument.
What matters is that the premise that reliability of cognitive faculties has zero causal influence given the theory both in Darwin's day and currently.
So I am neither defending or attack evolution.
Just representing the EAAN.
So no the point is that the belief by the rabbit that, "The bear is playing hide and go seek therefore I should hide when I see a bear," may be produce more survivability, that his fellow rabbits that rightly perceive the world as it is and run for their little lives.
If you look at behavior the evolutionary inference is purely deterministic. It doesn't even allow for freewill and intentionality , so rationality, which is built on the freedom to choice what and how to investigate your world is discounted to zero on evolutionary models.
Do I think that is the world I live in? No. But that is an argument for another time.
... Sometimes I can't tell exactly where your loyalties lie in regard to the relationship of science and faith, but you might want keep in mind that while I appreciate your citing of Eldridge and Gould, your use of them actually works against the now usual Christian notions of Intelligent Design. Just thought you'd want to know. They're both in fact, generally in line with Eugenie C. Scott as far a scientific method goes (and not with Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne).My point is that individuals that use the evolutionary arguments do so without any evidence in support of those inferences. They are just so stories...nothing more. But they are easy to get away with out here. Less so in college. Impossible in grad school.
But the ad hoc explanations are very difficult to avoid because they are so good at doing the one thing they are designed to do, explain something as seeming cogent. Further what serves as an ad hoc fallacy often started out as a legitimate inference. It just needed narrowing, and design of an experiment that might show the causal relationship in the original ad hoc inference to be possible. A lot of legitimate science does this in fact it makes up a good portion of evolutionary science. However, what makes something a fallacy is when they are not testable, have no evidence to support the explanation, and at end they are only one description of a near-infinite number of possible good descriptions. That last point is the one that most people outside the research community miss. Some inside the research community miss this point as well.
As Eldridge and Gould (leading evolutionists in the 1960s-1990s say things like, "Many scientists are baffled that such poor science can be so easily swallowed," suggesting that what passed for science in the Evolution scholarship was "Baffling," it was due primarily to the ad hoc nature of descriptions coming out of that community. They were evolutionist disappointed in their fellow scientists poor methods.
It’s something like that, yes. I’m hesitant to engage the first premise with someone who doesn’t believe in evolution in the first place (which as I understand it, UG is) since in my experience such people just don’t understand it. Someone who doesn’t understand evolution is unlikely to accept any defense of how it could lead to the development of reliable cognitive faculties, so I just didn’t bother. I sensed that whatever I said he would appeal to global skepticism anyway, so I skipped to that.I am of course guilty of running on a tangent with the global skepticism avenue. I haven't been following the discussion enough to know exactly how it bears on the issue at hand. Presumably the EAAN arguments in question say that evolution and naturalism, taken together, imply global skepticism, which is an absurd conclusion. [(E^N)->GS; ~GS; ∴(~E v ~N)] IMO opponents would do well to attack the first premise rather than the second.
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