From: Elizaphanian (elizaphanian@tiscali.co.uk)
Date: Wed Mar 26 2003 - 22:25:23 GMT
Hiya Platt,
> Pray that an American soldier being shot at by an Iraqi doesn't wait for
> an interpretation within an overall narrative framework to shoot back.
>
> Do you really not see a difference between fact and fiction? Do you
> really challenge DMB's assertion that as a matter of undeniable fact
> "people do not come back to life after being dead for three days?"
>
> Say it isn't so, Sam.
(picture me smiling as I write this)
You and I share large amounts of 'story' by which to interpret information.
So you and I would agree on what to count as 'fact' and 'not fact'. And we
can certainly agree on what the high quality response of a particular
soldier would be in the present conflict.
I think the best way forward for me would be to refer to the two
contemporaneous experiments carried out by Priestley and Lavoisier in the
late eighteenth century. As we would describe it today, the experiments were
functionally identical (effectively to do with combustion chambers). Yet one
scientist took it as proof of the existence of phlogistion, the other as
proof of the existence of oxygen. What was the 'fact' in this situation? Can
you describe the 'fact' without referring to a larger explanatory story?
My point about facts is that they cannot be understood separately from the
overall explanation in which they are embedded. To use the
paintings-in-an-art-gallery analogy, it is like saying you can't just have a
brushstroke (a fact) without a picture (the overall explanation). What makes
a brushstroke part of a work of art - rather than a random occurrence - is
its context.
Where I would part company from the post-modernists - and where you and I
might find some creative space for agreement, if we explored it - is that I
think some interpretations have higher quality than others. So, to use
traditional language, I think there is such a thing as the truth. I'm just
sceptical about anyone who says that they have found it.
That's all I mean when I say that there are no uninterpreted facts. I'm
trying to highlight the fact that DMB is interpreting information according
to his own criteria - which is fair enough. I do the same. I just think that
my system of interpretation is of higher quality than his. It is assessing
the relative merits of the alternative systems that interests me - not
responding in detail to particular conclusions of each system. (Which is why
I'm not shouting about Jesus all the time in this forum)
As for whether people come back to life after three days, I would refer you
to Hume's discussion of causation. We don't know that the sun will rise
tomorrow, we just know that it always has so far. So we can have a
reasonable expectation - but a reasonable expectation is not a fact. And as,
to my mind, the Christian church would not exist if it were not for
something remarkable happening on the third day, and the Christian church
clearly exists, therefore something remarkable happened on the third day. We
can debate about what it was till the cows come home, but our disagreement
won't be over a 'fact'.
Sam
"When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single
proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually
over the whole)." (Wittgenstein, On Certainty)
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