You are apparently going with your mind where you didn't go with your feet. -
I have no idea what you mean by that last sentence. As for the first, I think I already dealt with that.
When your mind is where your feet aren't: for example, when you're sitting in your room, but think about being on the top of Mt. Everest.
If you're unaware of this discrepancy between where your body is and where your mind is, you could make numerous false assumptions about what it is like to be on the top of Mt. Everest. For example, you might falsely conclude that breathing there is as easy as you have it in your room.
IOW, we cannot adequately conceive of problems in contexts in which we are not fully present.
Essentially, you have conceded my point here. Islam and Hinduism are mutually incompatible.
What about the two is incompatible? That Muslims and Hindus living in the same town sometimes don't get along?
It's common that there is conflict among people; there is conflict among the people of the same religion, within the same congregation. Probably one of the most common places of conflict is within the ingroup.
So, again, what about the different religions is incompatible? That problem of incompatibility only arises if one would somehow try to belong to all religions simultaneously.
Recall the thread topic again: the question of whether the fact that the concept of god appears in many different cultures amounts to evidence of the reality of God or to evidence of God as a human construction.
And I've already said in my first post here that this multiple occurence of the concept of God is evidence of people aspiring to higher ideals.
lightgigantic seems to be arguing that this kind of empirical evidence of God is no evidence at all of God, because God is inaccessible to anything empirical. Which is a little odd, because ordinarily I'd expect lightgigantic to be defending the idea that God is knowable. Having ruled out empirical knowledge, what kind of knowledge is left to us? That's one question I've asked lightgigantic.
I'll explain below on the apple example.
I'm still not sure what your position on the thread question is.
As I said in my first post in it.
It fits my mental image of an apple. It's similar to actual apples I have seen before in my own experience. Bottom line: the simplest explanation is that it is an image of an apple? What reason would I have to think otherwise?
How did you get to that mental image to begin with? By a complex process of acculturation and socialization.
And this is the part that empiricists tend to take for granted: that there is a lot more necessary before one can begin to observe.
A short form of the empirical process is: observe, hypothesize, test, conclude.
But one cannot observe unless one has gone through the process of acculturation and socialization.
We are not born with the ability to read, nor with the ability to speak a language - that is, when we're born, we can neither speak nor read, we have to learn these things. And in the process of acculturation and socialization, we become specifically biased, according to the culture and society we are living in, along with the other biases that come with the specifics of our individual circumstances.
As such, we don't have direct perception. Although for all practical intents and purposes, we tend to assume we do have direct perception; this philosophy of mind is called
naive or common-sense realism.
Naive realism seems to work fine enough, as long as we stay within our specific social group and keep to the activities we are used to. But when we are challenged, such as by contact with people from other cultures, new technologies, or other things we are not used to, naive realism becomes more and more difficult to maintain.
Is it possible, according to you, to ever know me?
How much I can know you will also depend on your input, on your willingness to let yourself be known to me.
There are things I may unilaterally find out about you, such as skin color, shoe size etc. But as far as your beliefs and values go, your wishes, desires, secrets, it is up to you to tell me about them, otherwise, I can only speculate. Also, unless we actually have a relationship, I can only speculate what a relationship with you might be.
But I can never be you, in that sense, I can never have knowledge of the explicit you.
I think not, according to your argument. And certainly not according to lightgigantic's. If I have an "explicit" nature, then there's no way you can ever access that, because all you have at your disposal to know me is your sensory experience, which is empirical knowledge. Therefore, in lightgigantic's terms, your knowledge of me must always be merely "tacit". In fact, going further, my knowledge of myself can only ever be tacit, because in principle everything I know about myself is open to empirical examination. And empirical examination, we are told, can never get to anything explicit.
You're not a rock, you're a person. There's a lot more to explore about and experience with you than what an ordinary, interpersonally verifiable empirical process can reveal.
This point may actually be one of the keys for this discussion. You seem to place all phenomena in the same category, as if knowing a rock, knowing an apple, and knowing a person would all be of the same kind.
Your idea of "explicit" vs. "tacit" seems to be a lot simpler than lightgigantic's.
I chimed in to the discussion between the two of you in the hope to make things easier, to sort of triangulate. LG will state where he differs from my interpretation, if that is the case.
All you're saying is that a report or image of a thing is not the thing itself. Obvious and simple. But lightgigantic claims that there's an "essence" or "explicitness" about food that cannot be accessed by any kind of empirical examination.
And LG and I are not disagreeing on that.
In other words, seeing the food, tasting the food, analysing the food with a mass spectrometer, or whatever, can never tell me anything about the explicit nature of the food. It's like the "explicitness" for lightgigantic is the "soul" of the food - an invisible thing that's accessible only via some kind of mystical direct perception, like a 6th sense for "explicitness" that doesn't play by the ordinary rules of evidence.
I don't think you understand him correctly on this. See my other comments in this post.
Fine. I get it. Your definition is that talking about a thing is not the same as seeing the thing or doing the thing. Easy. But lightgigantic goes way beyond that.
I think my explanation is only a simpler phrasing of his, but otherwise the same.
If I take it into my hands, I am relying on empirical knowledge to know the cup of flour.
No, you're not. You're relying on that empirical knowledge
only when you are talking about taking that cup of flour into your hands.
Otherwise, you can take a cup of flour into your hands while no empirical words or concepts accompany that action.
Obviously, the process is more complex when it comes to people, because while cups of flour don't talk or act, people do.
My impression is that you think you're arguing the same thing as lightgigantic. I don't think you are. I agree with your point: it is straightforward and obvious. But I don't believe things have an "explicit" nature that is shielded from empiricism in the way lightgigantic says it is. Do you?
Science tells us that to the brain, it is (pretty much) the same whether one thinks of doing something or whether one actually does it.
If that were so, and if all that would really matter would be what goes on in the brain, then the hunger problem in Africa could be solved by telling the people to imagine they are eating, and they'd be fed. Obviously, this doesn't work.
Things do have an explicit nature. That is the one that does the work. Such as food feeding people.
When I eat an apple, I'm conducting an empirical investigation of the apple.
Only if, while at it, you think about it all in empirical terms.
An infant or a person with IQ 60 can eat an apple, and thus connect with its explicit nature. Surely infants and mentally impaired people have no scope of empiricism or conducting empirical investigations. But they can eat.
Do you claim, as lightgigantic does, that there is something in the apple that is its "explicit appleness" apart from what I can access by seeing it, touching it, eating it, etc?
I'll address this after I've seen your reply.
Oh, and that fancy word "metonym". I've done a little research. A metonym is a figure of speech, nothing more. It is the act of referring to a thing by referring to something else that is connected to it. An example would be to use the term "the Oval Office" to refer to the US President (e.g. "Word from the Oval Office regarding Obamacare is that ...").
And that
act of referring to a thing by referring to something else that is connected to it is culturally conditioned; that connection is not a given; it's something we learn; and it is something we can conceptualize differently.
Someone from a different culture would not know what "Oval Office" stands for in US use, unless told about it.
It's this
act of referring to a thing by referring to something else that is connected to it that empiricism takes for granted.
lightgigantic's usage of the term "metonymy" implies that when I use a word like "apple", I am not only referring to the object I can eat, touch, see and so on, but to an object that has a "wider" existence - the "explicit apple".
I don't think that's his implication, but he'll best explain his thoughts himself.
