So What If We Kant Know It All?
Reason vs. faith: A flawed debate by Edward Rothstein in the form of a series of book reviews in The New York Times. Rothstein starts by pandering to the desire to even out a quip, selling out what reason's really about in this description of the debate:
It is a conflict between competing certainties: between followers of Faith, who know because they believe, and followers of Reason, who believe because they know.
True followers of reason don't "believe" or "know" -- they use available evidence to come to a conclusion. I conclude that this piece is a bit of a mess, and bends over backward to give credence to faith -- but it's a thought-provoking read anyway.
Oh joy, a little groggy blogging on epistemology while I finish my first coffee of the day.
Amy said: True followers of reason don't "believe" or "know" -- they use available evidence to come to a conclusion.
Well, we do know some things. If enough reasonable people have independently come to similar conclusions from independently analyzed evidence, we may regard what we have as "a body of knowledge" -- always keeping in mind that future evidence will modify this knowledge.
Some of our work has a strong element of "belief." We call this "theorizing," and it's essential to the scientific method. You have your data, and you have your interpretation of the data. Sometimes the distance between the two is very, very wide. The wider the distance, the more your interpretation has the character of -- GASP! -- faith.
You know that old saying, "Freudian patients have Freudian dreams, and Jungian patients have Jungian dreams"? (or something like that). The same data on human behavior will be interpreted very differently depending on whether the researcher was trained in psychology, or economics, or geography, or whatever. We observe patterns in behavior, but it's hard to pin down definitively the mechanisms that are driving those patterns.
What-EVER!
Recommended reading: The philosophy of social science: An introduction. Martin Hollis. Cambridge University Press.
Lena at December 23, 2003 11:07 AM
"So What If We Kant Know It All?"
Amy, I think you meant to ask "So What If We CUNT Know It All?"
Cuntaleen at December 28, 2003 11:28 PM