this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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I'm not interested in what the dictionary says or a textbook definition I'm interested in your personal distinction between the two ideas. How do you decide to put an idea in one category versus the other? I'm not interested in the abstract concepts like 'objective truth' I want to know how it works in real life for you.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's incredibly naive I'm afraid. This sort of logic works in very simple cases, but quickly breaks down in any complex scenario. The reality is that a lot of knowledge cannot be easily verified because it's just too complex. Take a peer reviewed scientific study as an example, the study might reference a different study as its basis, that references another study, and so on. If one of the studies in the chain wasn't conducted properly, and nobody noticed then the whole basis could be flawed. This sort of thing happens all the time in practice.

What you really have is an ideology, which is a set of beliefs that fit together and create a coherent narrative of how the world works. A lot of the knowledge that you integrate into your world view has various biases and interpretations associated with it. Thus, it's not an absolute truth about the world, but merely an interpretation of it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Knowledge is something that can be prov

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Saying something can be proven in principle isn't very useful in practical terms. The fact of the matter is that the real world is simply too complex for the human mind to fully understand from first principles. Science is fundamentally about creating models of the world that are useful approximations of reality, it's not a black and white thing. Asimov explains this well here https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_anglosaboteurs.pdf