In the previous continuation on a tutorial series on Epistemology, the topic in Philosophy dealing with how we know, what we can know, and even what is ‘knowledge’, I began discussing the first qualifier of belief, the one closest to it, ‘true’, from the definition of knowledge in the first post in this series. Today, let’s consider tests for what we believe, whether a belief is true, or not.
We’ve already discussed why we should both trust, to some degree, but also doubt our evaluations of, our perceptions and concepts as true. How can we decide that such evaluations, themselves, are reliable? Well, some people just simply assume the truth of their beliefs, and don’t question them. Worse yet, many of those are resistant to persuasion that their beliefs are mistaken, but we’ll get into cognitive biases in a later post. But, and this is most why these matter, many of those people insist that others believe the same way.
Since the truth of some modeling of reality is the correspondence of that modeling to reality, we ought to consider the question, “what is reality?”. I offer this definition: it is the total sum of causes of our sensory stimuli, including extended senses, which, in turn, inform our mental models as to what is. [Please, don’t ask me what the mean of ‘is’ is. 😉 ]
As our brains develop, in infancy and childhood, we also develop the mental modelings of object permanence, of cause and effect, of “theory of mind“, and the ability to perceive and express meaning using symbols, or, for those who like fewer words, language. Since these developments, the latter two, anyway, occur in, and depend on, social contexts, we also have an assumption, whether explicit or implicit, that external, objective reality is the same for others, as well as for ourselves.
This leads to the prime method of testing perceptions of truth, checking with others. So well known is the experience of a child asking a parent to search for a perceived danger in a dark or concealed place, it has become cliché. One of the screening questions for mental illness is, “Do you ever hear or see people or things others do not?”*
This submission of one’s perception of reality to the confirmation or correction of others is one of the fundamental parts of the practice of Science that is too often left out of a full description of the Scientific Method.
The practice of the codification of both object permanence and causality, Logic, gives the secondary test for consistency of our models of reality with actual reality, though it is the first resort, usually. We have an intuition, at least, of the first-taught maxim in Introduction to Logic, the Law of Non-Contradiction, that some proposition, some perceived feature of reality, can not be both false and true, at the same time. [This last qualification is actually redundant, because temporality is implicit, at least, in every proposition.]
Many of us learn wrong uses of causality in our reasoning; I think this is from experiencing the attempts at reasoning by others. However, I’ll not explore the subject of fallacies further, in this.
Nevertheless, the proper use of the relationships of cause and effect give a method to test the reliability of our perceptions, assumptions, and conclusions, to either confirm, or give place to reject, any of them. However, since our application of Logic may be as faulty as our conception or perception, or evaluation, we still gain confidence if it passes the scrutiny of others.
*For full disclosure, I have, though rarely enough that neither I nor my psychiatrist worry about it. I don’t seem to have any such very personal, individual perceptions since being on my new combination of medicines in the treatment of dysthymia (persistent depression).
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