Final-Fan said:
appolose said:
A. I think your missing my point. If it is true that at every point you can choose from a number of possible beliefs on sense data and that they are all equally possible - then whatever scenario you're developing here is irrelevant to the problem.
I see you creating a set of beliefs to forcefully contradict itself at another point and I don't know why, since you don't have to contradict yourself. You've got an infinite number possibilities to choose from at any point, and whether you pick coherent ones or contradictory ones the problem still remains that each one involved had no reason for being picked.
That's why the doctrine of empiricism isn't a working method of truth. It doesn't point to any one interpretation of sense data. It is offers them all and leaves you in recognition that by picking any one you're being arbitrary and so, therefore, not engaging in a method of truth.
In case there is still further confusion on something I suspect: You can't presuppose sense data is only evidence of one thing. Why? Because just by merely examining possibilities we see that it is evidence of many things. So if you were trying to tell me that you could simply presuppose that a certain blob of sense data only represented cheese... that goes in the face of this unavoidable admission that it simply doesn't.
B. I see "acting on sense data as perceived" as inseparable from the implication that you know something or know something to interact with in a certain way. That's some truth. And again, there's no way to establish these, now termed, 'perceptions' and there corresponding 'actions'.
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A. Except, in the case of the belief sets that include that belief ... then it does. This was all, entirely, SOLELY about my assertion that the "any" in "any belief set is supported by sense data" is not correct. Only infinite numbers are.
B. Think about it. The only actions you can reliably* take are the ones you perceive the results of, yes? So empiricism is the only belief that lets you realistically* do anything. Thus the only "practical" one, thus the most "practical" one.
*I do not by these words imply that you actually KNOW "really for real" that you are in ACTUAL FACT doing these actions. I mean rather that your ONLY MEANS OF INPUT replies to your output in a fairly internally consistent way. (BTW, this includes dreams to the extent that the inputted world explains the discrepancy.) And that "doing" anything requires an input/output system. And that "practicality" by definition refers to "doing" things.
Do you now see my justification for saying something is practical even if we don't know that it is true?
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A. You can't actually do that. Sense data represents anything, so you can't say it only represents one thing; that would be wrong. What you can do is to say that you assume there is cheese, and realize that the sense data still represents anything and is evidence for anything. It's not a contradiction to assume cheese and know the sense data can represent cheese and anything else.
B. I thought we had already discussed this consistency issue in that anything is consistent and consistency lends nothing to the credibility of a method of truth.
