Attention logicians. Facts are constructions!

Religious beliefs are usually concerned with permanence of an entity separate from the believer, because belief is essentially prediction. Whether this entity is an unchanging "God" or an unchanging "world" it is antithetical to the "certain knowledge" that all is "in flux". Even what we call "rocks" decay over time, so any concept of permanence is relative to our own life-span - a triviality on the cosmic scale! And once we admit a "relativity factor" we admit to the co-existence and co-extension of "self" and "world", as surely as "up" is related to "down".

My take is that since the middle of the 19th Century, the belief in the supremacy of the objective realm has been substituted for the belief in God. The objective realm is held to be sole reality, about which more and more is gradually being disclosed by science. This is why the questioning of objectivity is 'frightening' - it's frightening because the so-called mind independent reality is, at the very least, a placeholder for 'the truth'. This fear is what philosopher Richard Bernstein calls the Cartesian Anxiety.

Quote:

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since René Descartes promulgated his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

You're forgetting the third condition, X being true. You can believe and have justification for X, but if X is not true, you do not know X.
quote]

First of all getting used to this new quote system is a pain.

now onto the show

The third condition is also a variable. Truth is predicated on the pre-defined acceptable evidence for belief and justification. One will automatically deem something untrue and unjustifable if it does not meet specific pre-defined axiomatic criteria thus making truth finding a specualtive thing at best.

Zetherin wrote:

First off, let us not confuse contraries with contradictions. If you believed I was in Oklahoma right now, and I believed I was not in Oklahoma right now, we would be holding contradictory beliefs. One belief would be true and one belief would be false, no matter the difference in justification. Even if we both had justification for each of our beliefs, only one of us knew. The other only thought they knew (because, again, to know X, it is necessary that X is true).

But things are different when we speak of contraries, because if two things are contrary, both can be false. For instance, a pair of contrary propositions would be "Zetherin is in Oklahoma" and "Zetherin is in Pennsylvania". If you believed the former, and I believed the ladder, we could both be wrong. I could, for instance, be in New Jersey. And that's why these are contrary propositions and not contradictory propositions. But what is most important here to note is that we could not both be right if we held contrary beliefs. Two propositions are contrary if both cannot be true but both can be false.

excuse my bad use of contrary
to answer that let me quote from Rosencrantz and guildenstern are Dead.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Believing in an objective world has nothing to do with believing in God. There is evidence of an objective world, and so that is why reasonable people believe there is an objective world. Sheesh. *facepalm*

Truth is predicated on the pre-defined acceptable evidence for belief and justification.

Zetherin,

You seem to delight in vacuous tautologies. ("religion is about religion" etc).

And believers in "God" argue that there is plenty of "evidence" for those who will "open their eyes". The issue is that atheists don't accept their "evidence" .

Religious beliefs are usually concerned with permanence of an entity separate from the believer, because belief is essentially prediction. Whether this entity is an unchanging "God" or an unchanging "world" it is antithetical to the "certain knowledge" that all is "in flux". Even what we call "rocks" decay over time, so any concept of permanence is relative to our own life-span - a triviality on the cosmic scale! And once we admit a "relativity factor" we admit to the co-existence and co-extension of "self" and "world", as surely as "up" is related to "down"

Zetherin,

You seem to delight in vacuous tautologies. ("religion is about religion" etc).

And believers in "God" argue that there is plenty of "evidence" for those who will "open their eyes". The issue is that atheists don't accept their "evidence" .

Have our new friends immersed in logical analysis on recent threads considered the etymology of the word "fact" from the Latin facere (similar to French faire) to make or to do? Does this not undermine concepts of "objectivity" and suggest that our picture of "the world" is "brought forth" by observer activity ?

fresco wrote:

Zetherin,

You seem to delight in vacuous tautologies. ("religion is about religion" etc).

And believers in "God" argue that there is plenty of "evidence" for those who will "open their eyes". The issue is that atheists don't accept their "evidence" .

apparently truth is truth with no explanation as well

"The moon exists", like many other propositions, would still be true, no matter if we were ever here to express it.

So, suppose humans did not exist any longer. Nothing would be true anymore?

"The moon exists", like many other propositions, would still be true, no matter if we were ever here to express it.

Zetherin wrote:

"The moon exists", like many other propositions, would still be true, no matter if we were ever here to express it.

Consider the case that there is nobody who can express some proposition, in what sense does that proposition exist?

Nothing would be true for humans, because they wouldn't exist anymore. Truth is irrelevant without an observer, because it has to do with value, and it takes a subject for there to be a value judgment made. The thing we call the moon would still exist, but "the moon exists" wouldn't be true or false--it just wouldn't be. It would take a new species to observe the moon for it to exist in the sense that we mean when we say "the moon exists."

Well, the proposition would still be true, which means, the truth-maker (that which makes the proposition true) would still exist independent of our expression of it. For instance, the state of affairs which makes "The moon exists" true, would still exist regardless if we were able to express it.

Zetherin wrote:

Well, the proposition would still be true, which means, the truth-maker (that which makes the proposition true) would still exist independent of our expression of it. For instance, the state of affairs which makes "The moon exists" true, would still exist regardless if we were able to express it.

The proposition wouldn't be true, as far as I can see, unless it existed, and if there is nobody to make the proposition, in what sense does it exist? That there is a state of affairs, which would make a proposition true, doesn't imply that there is a proposition.

And propositions would exist in the same sense. There is only one sense something can exist in that I know of. What other senses are you referring to?