> On 8 May, 22:30, TruthSlave home.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>

>> How do you know? - Dialogue with a Puppet.

>

>> "How do you know?"

>

>>       "Well isn't it obvious,..."

>

>> "No it isn't obvious, there is no such thing as
>> the obvious. As an answer, the obvious isn't good
>> enough."  "Again, how do you know?"

>

>>       "well I was taught that..."

>

>> "By whom and for what reason?"
>> "How do you know, they knew what they were talking
>> about?" "How do you know what they taught you was
>> honest, truthful or accurate?"

>

>> "Note their sincerity, their believe in what they
>> taught you, doesn't count as truth"

>

>>       "Well how can it not be, everybody knows that..."

>

>> "Everybody else may believe that, or think they know
>> that, but how do you know its not a missed truth, or
>> a misunderstanding, or a misrepresentation, or some
>> other false conjecture arrived at for lack of any
>> other answer. A negative truth"

>

>> "How do you know it is not another acceptable lie.
>> A lie lost in the annals of time, with any number
>> of motives for its inception?" "How do you know?"

>

>>       "Well I believe it to be true, i can't see why
>>       i would be lied to, i trust the source of my
>>       information to have no other motive but the
>>       truth." "why would they lie to me?"

>

>> "Now there is the question".
>> "Why would they lie? Do they know that they lie?
>> "Why would they not lie to you?"

>

>> "why would they place you at this disadvantage?"
>> "Why would they control you in this way? "

>

>> "Why indeed?"

>

>> "Again the question, how do you know?"

>
> I know because with sufficient grounding in the way things really are,
> a scientific approach can make its own answers. Once you know the
> general position, a billion particulars lie at your feet.
> In your text the first mistake you make is "well I was taught
> that...". The argument from authority has held back intellectual
> progress for thousands of years. Aristotle said that women had fewer
> teeth than men. We were all taught that this was so, but no one
> thought to check so for 2000years a falsehood based on argument from
> authority was accepted. The worst case of this scenario is the entire
> edifice of religion as it contains the uncheckable. Uncheckable
> phenomena are in effect unknowable phenomena and thus are likely to be
> false, as they can only be based on guess work at best and fantasy at
> worst.
>
> It could be that Aristotle chose to examine his wife's teeth. As it
> was common practice for men to marry girl 15  years their junior he
> may well have seen her mouth before her wisdom teeth erupted. What we
> have here is a contingent fact which was not verified by further
> examination. Science thrives on re-affirmation, re-examination,
> testing, re-testing, verification, falsification and demonstration.
> That is how we know what we know and that is how we know we know what
> we know is valid.
>
> However science is not reliable for most of the phenomena we like to
> call "social". For such phenomena to be predictable we would have to
> know the state of charge and contents of every neurone of every human
> in each case - impossible. That makes human "behaviour" almost
> impossible to predict. Such is the joy of the madness of civilisation
> and social theory.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -