Only One Person Can Stop Us Now: The Pumaman.
That is a direct quote from both the immortal classic MST3k episode, and also the obligatory drunken-ex phonecall that my most recent ex received from me the other night. Justin and I decided it was high time to do something like that to her, so we called Sunday night. It was...interesting. The funny part was Monday morning, when she left a message for me, asking if I wanted to talk. No, I didn't (and still don't) want to talk, just mess with her. I've taken the bloody high road for so long, I feel like I can at least occasionally give her a crank phone call from time to time.
In other news, Dave and Tramp showed up at our pad last night to do some hanging out. It was cool to see them around. We talked about cool things like rangers, aliens, sasquatches, and werewolves (oh my!). 'Twas most entertaining.
Also: Ryan and I have begun an epic quest to watch as much crappy anime as possible. Our first conquest was Silent Mobius. Seriously, when a main character is named "Labia," you know it's too much. Plus, there is a prodigious amount of Engrish present in it, so whoop-de-doo. Right now, we are plowing through Hellsing. Yeah, I know many people like it, but let's face it, the entire last half of the show is disjointed and leaves so many dangling plot threads that you couldn't take it near a kitten for fear of it all falling apart. Add to that a crappy and hard-to-follow script, and you have a recipe for animated disaster.
And now, some philosophy from my new project, or, as it has sometimes been ominously referred to, "Willosophy":
Towards an Integrated Theory of Epistemology
Within the field of episteology, there has been a long-running debate over what exactly knowledge is and the manner in which it is obtained. Some argue that knowledge is justified true belief (henceforth "JTB") and is obtained throught evidential support for said belief. Others argue that JTB is found by the degree in which it coheres with a set of other accepted beliefs. Still othres postulate that knowledge is simply true belief resulting from properly functioning faculties. Each of these approaches highlingts an important aspect of the manner in which we as humans obtain knowledge. Though each is necessary, no single epistemic "tool" is sufficient on its own to arrive at knowledge. I propose that a true and effective epistemic tool-kit will integrate the important aspects of each of these theories.
Okay, so that's just the intro, and it's still a work in progress. Questions and comments from my philsophical comrades would be appreciated, as would any thoughts from the uninitiated, as this is intended to form a practical means by which all people can be said to have knowledge, not just the philosophical elites such as myself.
Okay, so that's just the intro, and it's still a work in progress. Questions and comments from my philsophical comrades would be appreciated, as would any thoughts from the uninitiated, as this is intended to form a practical means by which all people can be said to have knowledge, not just the philosophical elites such as myself.
3 Comments:
What is interesting to me, is that you don't get knowledge from epistemology. Sure you get random factoids that help pass finals, but its not as if you actually have to learn "THE" epistemological theory before your brain can learn anything at all. This is one of those things, like a lot of philosophy, where we are trying to reverse engineer, if you will, what our minds are actually doing when we learn something.
I think one of the biggest problems out in epistemology is that so many people are studying the problem and not enough are just studying. What I mean by this is that most thoeries don't actually explain well how you know something. This is because the writer has spent far too much time thinking about it and not enough time actually doing it. Will has just come from an intense learning experience (namely college) and has, in my opinion, the clearest view of this I have seen. And it happens to be a trifecta hybrid (I had to slip trifecta in somehow). What does this tell us? It tells us that those people who were studying the problem found a facet of the problem and latched onto it and then blew it up to cover for everything. This may seem contractiory to my former statements, but in actuallity, it affirmst that you can get part of the answer by studying the problem, but the whole answer comes from lerning.
You may note that I use the term learning and studying as one. I hold that the only clear way to figure out how it is you know something is to learn something and to document what it took for that thing you learned to become JTB.
I know this comment is going on far too long, but Will, I would be interested to hear how your theory explains innate knowledge/a priori.
I agree. Although by no means would I consider myself a philosopher, I've read enough recent literary theory to become sick of people blowing up one aspect of what they think is "knowledge" and pretending it's the entire thing. I think that when you don't over-analyze it, most people tend to integrate these processes naturally, though of course a person devoted to a single epistemology would never admit it, and someone who has never studied differentiated epistemologies would rarely be able to explain clearly exactly how it is they came to know something. Up until recent years, at least as far as literary theory is concerned, many people seem to have been almost afraid of admitting the possibility of integration/hybridity of theories, etc. Slowly that's changing, and I for one am glad of it. I don't believe that knowledge or people or theories like that can or should be separated into distinct categories the way that they previously have been. Not that there's ever any way to get a genuinely whole picture, but still...that blocks out too much. I'm beginning to ramble I think, so I'm going to stop now.
Thanks for the feedback, guys. I think that one thing everybody agrees upon when speaking of epistemology is that knowledge must be true. After all, you can't know a falsehood (you can believe you know a something that turns out to be false, but that is a mistaken belief). The trick is figuring out some nigh-foolproof method for discerning true propositions from false propositions. No single method has found a way to get around instances where knowledge and false belief are indistinguishable. Thus, something else is needed, acting as a sort of tie-breaker.
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