| | I think that Fred identified a truth: finding any context is valid, given that it is a context. Whether it is or is not is a different question. And one context might be better than another for elucidating facts. Again, that is another question. I believe that both of those questions stem from and lead to broader and deeper understandings of truth and fact.
Ed T:So, in the case of the Earth at Night, it's actually okay to turn it upside down -- because when man views the entire earth like that, he does so from outer-space (where it's natural and normal to be "upside down" in relation to the planet). But the map of the Earth seen from the inside out is not the correct context (though it may have some practical "use") -- because it's never the case, in relation to man, that reality is inside out. So in one case it's fine, and in the other, it's not -- using man as the rubric by which to judge or evaluate the context.
Actually, Ed, the deepest gold mine is over 2 miles underground. The deepest coal mine is a mile under. The deepest oil well is seven miles down. So, your interpretation of the biocentric standard is erroneous in this case.
In Elliot Temple's "Epistemology" topic, I mentioned that I have been to his website and of course read much of what he has posted here on RoR.
I also said that I found Popper and Wittgenstein as a result of Wittgenstein's Poker. I read Tracticus, The Open Society, and Scientific Inquiry. As a previously committed Objectivist, I found Popper acceptable (within limits) and Wittgenstein to be nonsense with some isolated insights. And I pointed to Wittgenstein's Poker which I reviewed on my blog because it is a perfect example of the failure of academic epistemology. None of the 20 people who thought they saw W attack P with a poker, or saw them dueling with hot pokers, or saw nothing at all involving any pokers, referred back to an abstract theory of knowledge -- no matter how well they argued them in their work. All of them reported exactly what they thought they saw. Not even Ayn Rand bridged the everyday working of common sense with the everyday failure of common sense.
I posted the image below as an example of how else we can think about problems. Last month, speaking to a group of software developers about documentation, I cited the standard Microsoft Visio tools as well as Warnier-Orr and Nassi-Sheiderman diagrams.
Our language evolved and evolves. When writing about what "people" "think" - or about any truth - we are limited by our mental tools. If you read Aristotle in the original Greek, it is much cruder than Popper or Wittgenstein. He did not have the language we do. His was 2500 years less well developed.
We think that it is "natural" to count "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten" because we have ten fingers. In fact, every Indo-European language from Hittite to Tocharian, from Hindi to Cymry, borrowed the number seven from the Semites. As recently as 2500 BCE, it is likely that if you as an Indo-European iron smith in the Balkans counted with your fingers, you would skip numbers because you would not have words for them.
We still lack good ways to create and communicate complex perceptions.
In Post 13, Elliot asked: "Ed, I don't know why you're accusing me of having some kind of social or popularity theory of knowledge."
It is a thing that Ed does, learned from Ayn Rand. When I first mentioned the value in Popper, he called me an existentialist. Later, Ed "proved" that Existentialism is the same as Consequentialism. Anyone who suggests that the government should build and maintain highways is a Platonist-rationalist-mysticist-Kantian-collectivist-secret-admirer-of-Hitler. QED. In case you did not understand that, I will make it simple: anyone who suggests Popperism is a range-of-the-moment context dropping social metaphysical whim-worshipping muscle mystic. (Just sayin'...)
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/07, 9:25am)
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