From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 23:09:56 GMT
Erin said:
>I think knowledge is awareness of truth.
>
>Matt:
>Therein lies the bugbear, so thinks the pragmatist. If you think of truth
>as "out there" and our knowledge having to correspond to it, then naturally
>the idea of "knowledge as consensus of opinion" will look pretty shabby.
>The pragmatist argues that no one has yet to make sense of the idea of
>"correspondence of reality" outside of its trivial sense, so we should just
>own up to the fact that when call something knowledge, we are just saying
>that "Everybody I know (or respect) thinks this way" or more specifically
>"Everybody in my community thinks this way."
>
>That's the heart of the disagreement. If you still hold onto the idea that
>"knowledge is awareness of truth," then pragmatists will look sick and
>disgusting. The suggestion of the pragmatist over the Platonist's
>suggestion (Truth is "out there") doesn't actually change any of our
>practices. Scientists wouldn't suddenly start behaving differently. They
>might, however, start talking differently and that might lead to a more
>general cultural change in which self-transformation becomes easier. The
>pragmatist thinks that it will be easier to proliferate vocabularies (and,
>therefore, find better ones) in a culture that hands in its "discovery"
>metaphors for truth and takes up "making" metaphors.
>
>Matt
>
okay you convinced me to not say knowledge is awareness of
truth but I am still not convinced knowlede = consensus of
opinion. I have visions of people hiring marketing/advertising teams to get
there ideas accepted as knowledge.
I have knowledge that my couch is khaki (number of people's
opinion about whether my couch is actually khaki is irrelevent).
I believe you that knowledge is really just an opinion but
I don't see what the statistics of that opinion have to do with it.
erin
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