PART II
Perhaps you can give me an example of a claim that isn't framed by the threshold you're talking about, and tell me what kind of a claim it is. Please don't use God as an example, though, because as I understand it you're trying to use this line of discussion to show me how God isn't empirical. I assume there must be things other than God that lack the framing you're talking about.
Tacit knowledge follows explicit knowledge the way a map follows a terrain. A map helps us orient ourselves to the terrain, but by no means corresponds to the terrain in fullness of experience
Again, I have to ask what kind of system of knowledge can deal with the "complete picture of things". We are human beings. We can't pay attention to everything at once.
Knowledge systems that deal exclusively with values - the best examples are ones that exist in closed systems eg mathematics, reason etc - although one can take this discussion a step further to topics of how knowledge/experience of god closes the system of existence although I imagine you really don't want to go there .... needless to say, its sufficient at this point to bring to your attention that empiricism is a poor foundation for justifying explicit claims for reasonns explained.
Having read only this from him, I am inclined to disagree with Polyani. I don't think that perception (by which I mean human perception - perhaps he doesn't) has "inexhaustible profundity..." I think that our perception is limited. And I can't think of any examples of things we can perceive yet not describe in some way. Can you?
he is saying those descriptions are less than what you perceive, hence, at least in comparison to offering descriptions, perception has inexhaustible profundity containing boundless undisclosed, perhaps yet unthinkable, experience.
For instance compare a description of learning how to play the piano to actually learning how to play the piano.
Again, I disagree. I think that such an experience can be broken down into a series of parts. After all, that dear and close friend is such a friend for various reasons, which we can express. And other close friends are probably close friends for similar reasons; thus we extrapolate to other people etc.
It is true that an explicit article has values, but their status (particularly if we are "
bound to them by affection") tends to
empower such values as opposed to being a
sum consequence of such values. For instance our beloved might wear a red dress and we would think that the red dress is beautiful (and even in future take the red dress as an independent source of beauty in and off itself). IOW when an object starts empowering values (as opposed to being the sum consequence of them) we start moving in the direction of explicit descriptions/knowledge. This is why I said
there is no meaningful way to break down our experience of them into a series of parts which we could then extrapolate to other people or objects as a substitute.
So for instance, if we need a mechanic, we really don't care too much about them since any one of a thousand could do the job. In the case of the beloved child however, one can still feel immense loss in their absence, even if they had numerous siblings. So we could say "yeah the mechanic can't come so I called the other guy down the road and he can make it this weekend" but we couldn't say "yeah my 2 year old died, but its not really an issue since my wife is pregnant so we will be able to give it another shot in a couple of months".
All this metonym stuff is interesting enough, but I don't really see what it has to do with the failures of empiricism or, going way back, to the actual topic of the thread. So, it seems I may need you to explain in more detail.
Basically it ties down to claims that there is an empirical basis for disbelieving in god. At the moment, I am just using metonomy to explain how empiricism isn't up to that task
Do you think that a cup of flour has an "essence" beyond what you have listed here?
If further research is ongoing into what a cup of flour actually is, clearly many other people think it does
What I'm most interested in, I think, is what "essence" of the cup you think is beyond the reach of empiricism. And why that essence should matter to us.
I am using it as an example how empiricism cannot give a complete description of something as rudimentary as a cup of flour (since, at a certain point, the language of our understandings of the microcosm disappears ... so it loses even more footing when one attempts to field it as a capable player in in/validating the question of god). IOW the fact that the essential description of a cup of flour evades such investigation indicates that empiricism is dealing exclusively with tacit descriptions
A very powerful microscope would give me empirical knowledge, but you're claiming that things have an "essence" beyond empirical knowledge. Or am I misinterpreting you?
My personal hunch is that the microcosm is not limitless. You can't keep cutting matter into smaller and smaller pieces forever. I am reasonably confident that there's a simplest substrate at the bottom - something like superstrings, perhaps. How about you?
I think it does have a limit, but for all intents and purposes its practically unlimited. Kind of like the pacific ocean has a limit, but for all intents and purposes, a dog swimming the length of it is practically unlimited. IOW the question of our investigating it is contextualized by a greater question of our powers of investigation, or even our powers of creating tools to assist our investigation.
IOW this universe operates out of a stronger potency than ourselves, and unassisted (or by the dint of our own steam), we come out in second place in each and every circumstance
