Pin it! 
kmill, Chet_Manly, BaronKorf and 4 others like this
So Bill Nye just trusts his senses? Okay. So you don't need any empirical evidence to show that they're trustworthy. That's called a properly foundational belief. It involves faith, i.e. belief without evidence. So why do Bill and the other New Atheists get their knickers in a knot when people of faith believe other things? If trust of our sense is properly foundational, why not belief in God?
Bill and Neil should take philosophy classes before they speak on the issue. Richard and Stephen are Oxbridge (Oxford or Cambridge) educated and should know better.
7 comments
Login to comment →
ben.terry 8 years, 1 month ago
I have found in life, that the more I learn the more I realize I don't know. And if you are not willing to challenge what you know or believe to be true, you will never truly understand anything.
Reply
egro 8 years, 1 month ago
Evidence from the senses is not properly basic, another possibility is that the evidence from the senses is illusion. But speaking of evidence for any claim, I enjoy these takes on the matter: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Reply
ahnyerkeester 8 years, 1 month ago
How can the reliability of our sense NOT be basic? We don't have, CAN'T have any empirical evidence that they are reliable and yet we must accept that they are in order to interact with the world. Could they be wrong? We don't know, we can't know so we have to assume that they are. That is the definition of a properly basic belief.
That our senses are not illusion is an extraordinary claim and totally lacks any evidence, let along extraordinary evidence. If we go with your assumption, then how will you evaluate any evidence to determine if it is extraordinary or not? You will use your senses for which you lack evidence of their reliability. But you must assumed that they are in order to evaluate the evidence.
This is not a problem that can easily be brushed aside.
Reply
egro 8 years, 1 month ago
Hold on there, cowboy. I am merely presenting the perspective discussed in philosophy that we cannot necessarily trust our senses. For me, I think that our senses are our windows to the world, but our senses should be combined with empirical evidence and the tools we have made to measure the world outside our senses' limitations to create our world view.
Reply
ahnyerkeester 8 years, 1 month ago
And that's why they're a basic or foundational belief. You believe that your senses accurate portray reality around you. There is no empirical method to verify this and so you just believe them.
Want to verify their reliability? What will you use to do that? Your senses. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing wrong with admitting that a belief is foundational, as a matter of fact, I think we *have* to. The possibility that they could be wrong is a necessary part of being a foundational belief because if we could prove it, it wouldn't be a belief.
And I totally agree. We assume we can believe our sense and then we start using them to make sense of the world.
But this raises the question of whether there are other properly foundational beliefs. I think operationally, we have to assume that the testimony of other, trusted source is to be accepted without evidence. I say "operationally" because we might lose trust in their testimony if they prove unreliable. But, for example, I've never seen Einstein's Cross during a total eclipse, but I trust the testimony of others that it happened and that it proves Einstein's theory of gravity. I don't have to peer into a telescope myself.
I love philosophy. :)
Reply
egro 8 years, 1 month ago
Sure, and that is why I trust these statements: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. As you noted, accepting the testimony of a trusted source is fine, because we presumably have evidence of their trustworthiness or expertise.
Reply
ahnyerkeester 8 years, 1 month ago
I agree with "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" with one caveat: if we say "most extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
If someone says the moon is made of cheese, I'd need some pretty solid evidence that this was the case. :)
Reply