| | Joe,
This is another article from the past - an excellent article - that deserves a fresh viewing.
Joe, you have a real talent clearly explaining epistemological theories.
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I took this as an opportunity to approach the epistemological issues of certainty, fallibility, and the degrees of skepticism from the context of purpose. In the broadest of terms, there is purpose to knowing things - surviving and flourishing. And there is a process of knowing things. The process will involve using premises as building blocks while understanding that those premises were once conclusions themselves. And regardless of what any particular philosopher might say, we all know that each conclusion is accorded some degree of certainty. It can be denied, but the denial itself can be taken apart to reveal it's building blocks. And we know that the two extremes of "We can never know anything with any certainty" and the other extreme of omniscience are both too silly or self-contradictory to entertain. They both fail from acting as if there were no context.
I'm reminded of how one navigates a boat. It presupposes a destination and arriving there becomes your goal. That sets the purpose and the context for your navigation. You might use the nautical chart to conceptualize the planning and progress of the voyage. That chart has your destination on it. We don't automatically know how to get from where we are to where we want to go. We might not even know with adequate accuracy where we are as time goes by, given the vagaries of currents and the boat's drift. We need to find our location on the chart to calculate the best course to set. Every instrument we use will have some degree of error. We don't know exactly how many degrees off our compass sightings will be - 3%, 6%? Is there a predictable error in the compass itself that we need to add or subtract? We might note how much water the depth sounder says is under the boat, to compare that to depth contours on the chart, but do we need to adjust that for the state of tide? For the height of the average swell?
We need to mark an estimate of where we are on the chart so as to determine any needed course corrections. The course we choose is our conclusion and our premises all have some error built in (compass errors, compass sighting errors, depth sounder reading errors, etc.) Our job was to estimate the margins for those errors and adjust our estimated position accordingly. If we find our location to be X, give or take 1/4 mile as the sum of the individual margins for error, then we might mark the position 1/4 mile out from the nearest danger point our course would take us near. The process of sailing, and the understanding of the dangers, and the processes employed to reach that far harbor determine the amount of accuracy needed. That is opposite the approach of those who will say that no certainty is possible, which is really like trying to think thoughts but without any context. The goal and its context determine the amount of certainty that is called for. Then one can work to get the premises to meet that standard... before pulling a conclusion from them.
Leaving the area of sailing... Theism, atheism, or agnosticism? If we agree that there is no evidence that has been presented for the existence of a God that could be called valid, then the context given us by logic makes us an atheist. We accept the rules of logic as our context and it sets our margin of error. What is my certainty that there is no God? 100%. It comes from having no doubts that my understanding of the different arguments for God are adequate to rule each one out. And I have no doubts that believing in the conclusion that there is a God (as defined in various ways, to this date), would require that one or more of those arguments be true. Might some one come up with a different definition? Yes, but no one is obligated to examine that claim to existence and its arguments until then.
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