Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
This suggests a view of science as capable of getting ever closer to the truth without ever reaching it ("asymptotic con-vergence"). This of course reflects our experience of science, for example from epicycles to Newton to General Relativity. However, by itself this view also asserts the independent existence of some reality, which in turns suggests that it is at least conceivable in theory that there would somehow be potential scientific truths out there for us to discover. Possibly you mean that we will never discover them so they will never become actual truths. However, do you know no one will ever discover them? Well, that too would be a truth. So, if you believed you know that truth then you would be contradicting yourself. So, do you?Psychology cares about beliefs and beliefs are notions of what is true. Psychology (and all of science) cares about epistemic methods by which believes are arrived at because it is assumed that methods of justification for belief determine the probable accuracy of those beliefs, with the acknowledgement that complete accuracy (capital T truth) is not possible.
Alternatively, you could fall back on claiming that you merely don't believe, rather than know, that such truths will ever be discovered.
Or you could also have a sort of purely logical argument about knowledge and truth that would preclude potential scien-tific truths from being actually discoverable. Although this doesn't seem to be your argument.
So here you seem to be contradicting yourself merely by suggesting you know the truth that truths cannot be known (whatever the actual reason for that).This is another way of saying what I already said, which is that psychology and science care about parts i and iii of the JTB theory. Part ii is an abstract goal that can never be obtained and we cannot have direct knowledge of how close we are to it, only how much we've satisfied part iii (justification).
There are different possible views on justification. Maybe justification is just a pragmatic process, much like science itself. Or it is a metaphysical concept whereby you are justified if somehow your belief happens to be supported to something real outside your belief system. If the former, then justification itself is a belief and we would be none the wiser for having one more belief to accrue our ever expending system of belief. If the latter (metaphysical) then we go back to the idea that there has to be something real out there that should be potentially the object of a belief of ours, which is just the notion of truth revisited.only how much we've satisfied part iii (justification).
At the very least, you're not clear which way you lean.
Maybe it’s a waste of time for us now but maybe not for the next generations in the future. We’ve managed to survive so far on the basis of an approximate representation of reality but maybe the future will require us to have an exact representation of reality if we or our descendants are to survive. Truths would then become very useful to know.IOW, it is just a waste of time to talk about whether something is true independent of the level of justification for believing that it is. We should acknowledge that the most justified belief possible still falls short of Truth, and then pretty much never bother talking about that kind of Truth again. From a pragmatic standpoint in deciding upon actions, there is no difference between whether an idea is actually true versus it is the epistemicly most justified and supported idea we can reach. Thus, I am fine with the word "true" being used in discourse, so long as we acknowledge it means the latter. IOW, truth is what we have justification to believe is true.
EB