On what we really know

So you're saying the mere state of your office chair being blue is itself a fact. I suppose we could see it this way. But there is an extra implication about that state made by stating it as so. We are asserting the realness of that state. We are stating it to be so. That's what turns it into a fact imo. Singling out the state as simply being so. Maybe this is just two different ways of looking at the same thing.

 

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That is what I'm saying.

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Asserting the reality does not in any way alter the reality. The state remains the state, irrespective of stating what the state is.

No, it's not. You're adding something to the notion of "fact" that I don't think is there.
Certainly by stating it means that we are aware of it as being the state, but awareness of it does not change the state.

 

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Epistemology much?

I think reffering to our knowledge as a simple reflex of the empirical world is idealism. That solely explains everything you want to know.

 

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"You need to get out of your mind and into reality." -- source: me

 

Bertrand Russel's Problems of philosophy
Chapter 1 and/or 2? Don't remember very well.

 

correct.
what you perceive isn't always true.
you see a red coffee cup.
there is no such thing as "red" . . . in reality.

 

It is only a fact about the current colour of the chair.
The chair may not always be blue.
If the chair is placed in a room room lit by fluorescent light,
with a shaft of sunlight coming through a curtained window,
the parts of the chair that are lit by the sunlight will appear greener in hue.
You could also paint the chair another colour.

A fact is information.
In the sentence "Take the blue chair from the dining room and put it in the conservatory",
you are giving information about which chair to move.
Once in the conservatory, the chair could appear green in colour.

The amount of information given by a word can depend upon circumstances.
In the sentence "Take the blue chair from the dining room and put it in the conservatory",
the word "blue" gives more information if there is an alternative chair to be moved,
that chair being a different colour.
If there is only one chair, then, as an instruction, you could leave out the word "blue".

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The state may not even be a state to a color blind person, when the lights are turned off, or if "being blue" isn't even a scientifically founded state at all. There is thus no factual state sitting out there irrelevant to how it is perceived or understood. There is no fact making our statement of it true. There is only the fact of what we have defined to be so by the statement itself. The truth of that statement, the factuality of the state of your office chair being blue, is entirely dependent on the meaning of the words it consists of.

I agree. Stating that the state is, what it is, and thus becoming aware of the state as such doesn't change it at all. But that's because there's really no preexistent selfsame absolute state TO change. There's no "your office chair being blue" except as constructed conceptually by your words and sensory perceptions. Without those words, how would we even conceive of such a state? We couldn't. Much less so is this state being so a fact endowed with some objective ontic status. The fact, like I said, is in the truth of the statement of the state being so.

"We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations."---Richard Rorty

 

No because like I said, nothing is reducible to the knowledge we have of it.

Observing is not some passive reception of pre-formed sensory data from our environment. We have to construct what we see as a particular thing or set of things first before we ever get to the stage of observing it as "out there." Before that it is mere geometrical shapes and patterns of various shadings and colors. The "thing" or "set of things" we end up observing as "there" is basically a construct or an inference of our own thought. It is a 3D mental gestalt objectified as a physical object or set of objects. THAT's what we observe and that's what we know.

You only know all there is to know ABOUT something. But do you know the something itself? No. All my knowledge of what an apple is will never duplicate what the apple is in itself. There is an extra element to being an apple that knowledge will never contain.

Really? How much of what you claim to know was actually observed by you? Precious little I'd say. And how much of what you DO observe is only you knowing your own conception of it? Most I'd wager. What is constantly entering our experience are changes in what we are observing. Changes in lighting, shading, angle, scale, color, shape, symmetry, background, contrast, visibility, etc. etc. All variations on the one selfsame thing we imagine we are observing. That thing that ideally NEVER changes, no matter what our senses are telling us.

 

Soapy water and Mexican food?

 

That's right. You can know things second-hand.
Because of the mass of information in our culture, we must accept second-hand knowledge far more frequently than a primitive culture.
Which is why we evaluate given information according to the qualifications of the giver.

By observe, you mean experience sensorially rather than see, I assume.
We can only know that which we experience through our senses.

 

Good post Magical realist, They say "the only thing constant in the universe is, Change"

 

There's an implicit mind-body dualism there that I don't think that I want to agree with. I don't think of the "mind" as a "purely mental process". I think of it as a physical process that takes place in our nervous systems. (Or perhaps more accurately, as abstract data-processing that's physically instantiated in the behavior of neurons in our human case.)

Propositions are linguistic kinds of things. I wouldn't want to say that they are the objects of our knowledge when we know the world. They are more along the lines of what we think and say about the world.

 

I agree with Sarkus. That's the standard philosophical definition. In other words, facts are actual states of affairs.

 

Yes. One does need to be careful about what the "fact" actually is, and in this case it is specific to the current colour, specific location etc.

 

Is there a distinction between physical and abstract entities? You seem to be denying the folk psychology distinction between mental and physical, yet you invoke a similar distinction between physical neural processes and abstract data-processing. I see knowledge and beliefs and ideas and facts as existing on this abstract non-physical level. They exist in or as part of our minds. They are as philosophers like to call them intentional states in that they are always ABOUT something. Pure forms or structures empty of substance. My OP is focused on the validity of this aboutness of abstract states to count as real knowing.

If knowledge is justified true belief, then it follows that we only know our own beliefs about the world, and not the world itself. Right?

 

Yes, and with regard to the colour, it is caused by a property of the object.
The chair is unable to absorb those frequencies, so re-emits them.
In a way, the blueness is about what the object is not, rather than what it is.
That doesn't really matter, because the sensory data which is provided gives us information.

 

Observe is more than just seeing a physical object. It entails a thought process along with the act of seeing--the awareness of a factual state. I observed that the lady was rude to the waiter. I observed that the election was a landslide. I observed that I was in imminent danger. There's a sort of mulling over going on with observation. We SEE physical objects and events. We OBSERVE actual and potential states of affairs.

 

I think you are muddying the waters.
If you take an observation as the experience of sensory information, you are closer to actual knowledge.

Secondary experience of the same is further removed.
And analysis of what information is given by combinations of personal and secondary sensory information is even further removed,
and greatly influenced by cultural considerations.

"Hitler was evil".
Is this a fact, or a product of cultural evaluation?

 

I'm not questioning that observations usually count for knowledge. I'm just saying that observations are by and large inferences based on sensory information, and aren't just the passive reception of given information. That's why even eyewitness accounts of what happened often conflict and are often not very reliable.

It's disturbing how much of what we call knowledge is really just second hand accounts and explanations and theories of what is the case. Our brain is filled with all sorts of facts, ideas, possibilities, and stories that have been filtered thru our own culturally-programmed sieve and spun according to our own subjective values and tastes.

It's a fact, but like all facts, it only is such in the context of our own contemporary morality and historical stance. Facts are not absolute objective states. They are descriptions of states which are relative to a particular perspective and context. It's entirely possible that what is a fact for one person isn't for another, and that what is a fact at one time to no longer be a fact at another time.