(The comments below were paraphrased from Scott Smith's articles)
Are you 100% sure you are real?
Maybe... ur plugged into a Matrix while being harvested as a human battery?
Does my belief have to be “bomb proof,” in order to count as knowledge?
That is an extremely unrealistic standard. Skeptics like David Hume, could always reply, “But isn’t it possible that you could be mistaken?”
If we are honest, we would answer “yes,” but that's exactly where the skeptic wants us to be. He's demanding for a criterion in order for us to know anything...
But there are some things we simply know, without having to provide a criterion to show how we know them.
For example, I simply know that 2+2=4; that red is a color; that murder is wrong; and many more such things. There are particular things I simply do know and now the burden is on the skeptic to defeat my knowledge claim.
In this strategy, I simply rebut the skeptical assertions; I don’t have to prove him to be wrong (i.e., to refute him).
No living philosopher thinks we must have certainty in our foundational beliefs. People realize that the certitude requirement is ridiculously high as a standard to have knowledge.
There are several things we know, yet without certainty. I know that Abdullah Badawi is the 5th PM of Malaysia, but do I know this with 100% certainty? No; I could be mistaken, although I highly doubt it (your evidence must be extremely compelling).
Logically speaking, it is conceivable that I could be mistaken. It might be the case that some mad scientist is deceiving me with drugs.
But, why should I believe these mere possibilities?
I am entitled to my knowledge claims, even if I do not hold them with one hundred percent certainty. I need good and sufficient evidence to believe that I am mistaken. I want to believe as many truths as possible, and not believe as many falsehoods as possible, too.
In that process, I may make some mistakes. But if I do not have one-hundred-percent certainty, why would that mean that I do not know many things?
Comments
but now i'm not so sure. it's not that i think absolute truth doesn't exist anymore or that we ARE living in the matrix or something (ha!). it's that i want to focus on the VALUE of statements like, "Everything is an illusion", "All talk is nonsense", etc.
I don't mean to validate such stuff as *worldview*, of course, but i wonder if some methodological gems could, err, 'emerge' from a serious consideration of some of their applications.
cut off sensory experiences for some an extended period and people will start seeing Agent Smiths, Oracles running around.
What say ye?
If there is no possible observation that can possibly go against it, (ie the green man who is always 3 inches out-of-range from our best telescope) it is not scientific.
I think it's a good criterio for scientific knowledge. But if we talk abt existence of angels, i dun see how that's falsifiable.
if 'non-falsifiable' means 'unscientific' then this would include many things we believe in e.g. love. i can commit adultery, have a divorce, slap my girlfriend, and do every heinous thing towards her, but who's to say that i DO NOT love? can we completely falsify that? (who knows, maybe i'm showing an extreme kind of 'tough love'?)
also, if we can never be ABSOLUTELY SURE that a certain theory is 'non-falsifiable' e.g. how sure are we that 'green man who's always 3 inches out of our best telescope' is non-falsifiable? what if we get a better telescope?
of course the other twist is that Popper's criteria is ITSELF unfalsifiable - should we then call it 'unscientific'?
with angels, of course we're in tricky waters because we're referring to meta-physical and super-personal beings here. still, in principle, they ARE 'falsifiable'. first, you can try to 'falsify' the historical documents which speak about angels. secondly, and this is more bizarre but i don't see it as any less valid, we'll know whether they exist when we die (grin).