From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 31 2002 - 23:47:45 MDT
Damien writes
> At 09:16 PM 8/31/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>
> >1. Do you believe that there is a big hot ball of gas
> > about 8 light minutes from the Earth that we call
> > "the sun"?
>
> >(And I dearly pray that this can be answered with a simple
> >"yes" or "no")
>
> Too bad. Do I `believe' this assertion? Not exactly; a belief is
> a conviction derived from confidence in another person's report
> unsubstantiated in one's own direct experience.
Hmm. That's a mighty narrow use of "belief". Often, you know,
belief is actually built in by the genes. We have some numeracy,
some 3D beliefs (I think), and some social beliefs (e.g., the
hardware primed to detect cheating in others). Of course, I
can also *believe* that there is a keyboard beneath my fingers.
I allude to the "web of belief" metaphor, which is (or should
be) a part of evolutionary epistemology and PCR, which I also
believe.
> Do I `know' that it's true?
> Not in the sense that I surely know the light coming from the small flat
> circle up there is very bright and hurts my eyes if I gaze at it too long.
> But in an extended sense of `know', drawing upon my education, I do indeed
> know that the Sun is a big hot ball of gas about which our spherical world
> orbits. Had I lived a thousand years ago, I would have `known' in exactly
> the same sense that the Sun is a small bright flaming ball which orbits
> about our flat world.
Yes, all knowledge is conjectural. You think of your belief
about the small flat circle above you (a light bulb) as being
more certain, somehow. But of course, you know, there are
illusions; I like the "web of belief" metaphor. It's a whole
package, you thinking you're in Australia, breathing, etc.
> >2. If the answer to the first question is "yes", then I
> > announce to the world that from now on my statements
> > about the sun are to be *taken* as referring to that
> > ball of gas, and *not* any possibly weird thing going
> > on in people's brains.
>
> Obviously it's neither, except in shorthand. The written or auditory
> signifier `Sun' combines with the cognitive mapping inside your brain and
> that of other contemporary English speakers to form a sign that references
> the bright light up there. The sign points us to the thing in the outside
> world, of which we experience very little direct information.
I say that your talk about "mapping", "brains", "English speakers",
etc., is actually less certain than your knowledge of the sun.
Your theories about all that are at least as problematical as
my theories about the sun, so why all the bother? An eight-year-
old is a little machine that correctly maps its external reality
into structures in the brain; if that eight year old then says
"There's grandma!", or "there's the sun!", why can't we leave it
at that without referring to constructs and what not? You
and I really do believe that the same things in the 8-year-
old's brain are occurring.
> Some more bah baby talk, then: The construction of the Sun as a vast ball
> of hot gas is not a physical construction like making a chair our of timber
> and glue but a linguistic/cognitive mapping of a complicated experience
> that each of us, as social animals, have of the world.
:-) That's not exactly baby talk! At least to those of us
not immersed in structuralism or whatever you call the way
you speak that is fairly recent in human history. (What do
you call it, anyway? I hesitate to say that you are a post-
modernist, because that's not exactly true, is it?)
But yes, I agree. Wouldn't it be simpler to just say that
we map external structure (outside our skins) to internal
structures? Of course those mappings exist. But this is
hardly news: if one Viking asked another whether Skor knew
about the ship in the harbor, the Viking knows that this
question is about what is in Skor's head (or heart or somewhere).
> Nobody, not the wildest pomo social constructivist, denies
> that we experience the thing you and I and the rest of us
> call the Sun. But surely you don't mean to say that all
> those honest reporters of the ancient world were just pulling
> our legs when they said it was a flaming chariot or `greater
> light' passing overhead every day?
No, certainly they were as honest as we, (though perhaps not
so well trained in postulating realistic explanations). They
were simply wrong. Today we know that. Their knowledge was
conjectural. Our knowledge is conjectural. Yet you bring
one of those people here for a few days, and he'd quickly
admit that his talk of flaming chariots was in lieu of
anything better. He'd quickly grasp that we were probably
right, and almost surely closer to the truth.
Lee
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