Philosophical Speculations

Ashvin, you are confusing pragmatic assertions with proofs of nonexistence.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:32 pmThis capitalizing of words has been used throughout modern philosophy. It is pretty simple - a capital word represents the most Universal version of the concept a word is expressing. That is why most people capitalize "God" regardless of what they specifically mean by it - whatever "God" is, it is the highest ideal one can imagine. "Thinking" is the most universal concept of cognitive activity. "World" is the most universal concept of phenomenal manifestations. "Light" is the most universal concept of shedding conscious awareness on the World. And so on. It takes no initiation to understand.

And lest we forget, I am a Moderator

Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:03 pm And lest we forget, I am a Moderator

And I am Terminator

Cleric, with all due respect and with my standard caveat that I'm not a philosopher I'd like to make an observation that is seemingly obvious to me. Your very logical voluminous outpourings amount to an act of modeling or representation, which, lead to an obvious and quite predictable conclusion: the model says, "thinking will lead to Thought and rigorous thinking will lead to rigorous Thought." What one gets out of this practice (quite predictably) is a never-ending thought process with endless new levels and representational higher thinking beings. I dunno. It just seems obvious to me.

Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:25 pm Cleric, with all due respect and with my standard caveat that I'm not a philosopher I'd like to make an observation that is seemingly obvious to me. Your very logical voluminous outpourings amount to an act of modeling or representation, which, lead to an obvious and quite predictable conclusion: the model says, "thinking will lead to Thought and rigorous thinking will lead to rigorous Thought." What one gets out of this practice (quite predictably) is a never-ending thought process with endless new levels and representational higher beings. I dunno. It just seems obvious to me.

Exactly, and that's what Adur and me pointed to Cleric here

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:56 pm Ashvin, you are confusing pragmatic assertions with proofs of nonexistence.

No, Eugene, I am saying your definition of "proof" is a nonsensical one, a definition which was only made possible in the modern age ironically due to non-existent 3rd person spectator perspective (which obviously comes from Cartesian dualism), and it is a definition almost no field of inquiry uses (except speculative philosophy) to make progress towards genuine knowledge in their respective fields. I can tell you for certain that, in the field where "proof" is most frequently invoked, i.e. legal practice, the pragmatic definition holds sway whether people realize it or not.

In pure mathematics, once can also speak of "proofs", and this is also pragmatic, because it implicitly recognizes that the world of ideal mathematics cannot refer to symbols which may or may not exist external to it, and that there are principles within mathematics which cannot be ignored when working towards "proofs". Godel's incompleteness theorem is actually a mathematical expression of this pragmatic appraoch.

Anyway, all of this is to make clear why "no universal limits to knowledge" is a pragmatic truth based on Steiner's reasoning. You apparently skipped over all the reasoning, saw the conclusion in the abridged version of PoF, and decided to treat it as an assumption for no reason. The only possible reason to justify that was because you hold to naive correspondence theory of truth, rather than pragmatic. Instead of just stating things as if they are certainties, why don't you look at Steiner's arguments for this conclusion (no universal limits to knowledge) and then formulate a logical counter-argument.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:12 pm

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:56 pm Ashvin, you are confusing pragmatic assertions with proofs of nonexistence.

No, Eugene, I am saying your definition of "proof" is a nonsensical one, a definition which was only made possible in the modern age ironically due to non-existent 3rd person spectator perspective (which obviously comes from Cartesian dualism), and it is a definition almost no field of inquiry uses (except speculative philosophy) to make progress towards genuine knowledge in their respective fields. I can tell you for certain that, in the field where "proof" is most frequently invoked, i.e. legal practice, the pragmatic definition holds sway whether people realize it or not.

In pure mathematics, once can also speak of "proofs", and this is also pragmatic, because it implicitly recognizes that the world of ideal mathematics cannot refer to symbols which may or may not exist external to it, and that there are principles within mathematics which cannot be ignored when working towards "proofs". Godel's incompleteness theorem is actually a mathematical expression of this pragmatic appraoch.

Anyway, all of this is to make clear why "no universal limits to knowledge" is a pragmatic truth based on Steiner's reasoning. You apparently skipped over all the reasoning, saw the conclusion in the abridged version of PoF, and decided to treat it as an assumption for no reason. The only possible reason to justify that was because you hold to naive correspondence theory of truth, rather than pragmatic. Instead of just stating things as if they are certainties, why don't you look at Steiner's arguments for this conclusion (no universal limits to knowledge) and then formulate a logical counter-argument.

Another way of saying the above is that the givens of our experience clearly reveal we start with little knowledge and expand outwards towards more knowledge. The person who claims "we can't ever know whether this knowledge-expansion can keep happening forever" is adding an assumption, and it is an assumption which only makes sense for hypothetical beings who could remove themselves from their own knowing activity and potentially observe the "limits". Basically you are adopting the same flawed axioms as Kant did, even though you have previously claimed to disagree with Kant. Cleric and I have beaten this topic to death at this point, which just goes to show how often the Kantian epistemic dualism snaps back into our thinking in the modern age.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:12 pm Anyway, all of this is to make clear why "no universal limits to knowledge" is a pragmatic truth based on Steiner's reasoning.

So, if "pragmatic truth" is supposed to mean an assertion that we can conditionally adopt for practical purposes, then I have no problem with such assertions. But we should not mistake them for Universal Truths. I agree that "provability" does not apply to Universal Truths, they are simply not subject to proofs (and that is why they are beyond the realm of sciences), but that does not mean that practical assertions can now become sufficient to support the undeniability or unconditional truthfulness of any ontological assumptions (Truths). That is why any ontological assertion always remains an assumption (I will drop the word "unprovable" here), or I would phrase them as "practically asserted conditional assumptions".

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:29 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:12 pm Anyway, all of this is to make clear why "no universal limits to knowledge" is a pragmatic truth based on Steiner's reasoning.

So, if "pragmatic truth" is supposed to mean an assertion that we can conditionally adopt for practical purposes, then I have no problem with such assertions. But we should not mistake them for Universal Truths. I agree that "provability" does not apply to Universal Truths, they are simply not subject to proofs (and that is why they are beyond the realm of sciences), but that does not mean that practical assertions can now become sufficient to support the undeniability or unconditional truthfulness of any ontological assumptions (Truths). That is why any ontological assertion always remains an assumption (I will drop the word "unprovable" here), or I would phrase them as "practically asserted conditional assumptions".

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trut ... agTheoTrut

The history of the pragmatic theory of truth is tied to the history of classical American pragmatism. According to the standard account, C.S. Peirce gets credit for first proposing a pragmatic theory of truth, William James is responsible for popularizing the pragmatic theory, and John Dewey subsequently reframed truth in terms of warranted assertibility (for this reading of Dewey see Burgess & Burgess 2011: 4). More specifically, Peirce is associated with the idea that true beliefs are those that will withstand future scrutiny; James with the idea that true beliefs are dependable and useful; Dewey with the idea that truth is a property of well-verified claims (or “judgments”).

1.1 Peirce’s Pragmatic Theory of Truth
The American philosopher, logician and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is generally recognized for first proposing a “pragmatic” theory of truth. Peirce’s pragmatic theory of truth is a byproduct of his pragmatic theory of meaning. In a frequently-quoted passage in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce writes that, in order to pin down the meaning of a concept, we must:

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (1878 [1986: 266])

The meaning of the concept of “truth” then boils down to the “practical bearings” of using this term: that is, of describing a belief as true. What, then, is the practical difference of describing a belief as “true” as opposed to any number of other positive attributes such as “creative”, “clever”, or “well-justified”? Peirce’s answer to this question is that true beliefs eventually gain general acceptance by withstanding future inquiry. (Inquiry, for Peirce, is the process that takes us from a state of doubt to a state of stable belief.) This gives us the pragmatic meaning of truth and leads Peirce to conclude, in another frequently-quoted passage, that:

All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to every question to which they can be applied.…The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth. (1878 [1986: 273])
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Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief. (1901a [1935: 5.565])
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If Truth consists in satisfaction, it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue. (1908 [1935: 6.485], emphasis in original)
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If by truth and falsity you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems would be greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the “Truth”, you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt. (1905 [1998: 336])
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if we were to reach a stage where we could no longer improve upon a belief, there is no point in withholding the title “true” from it. (Misak 2000: 101)

Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:26 pm It is impossible prove non-existence of limits to knowledge.

Are you sure about that?
Do you have proof?

Statements like these feel close to things like Halting Problems, Incompletemess Theorems etc.

From "Truth" perspecive i find it just as unjustified to claim "It is impossible prove non-existence of limits to knowledge" as "There is no limit to knowledge" without any further reasoning.