Interaction with reality only gives you raw sensory experiences. It doesn’t allow you to deduce anything. When you compute 12 x 12 and it turns out to be 144, you believe 144 is the one correct answer. Therefore you implicitly assume that tomorrow you won’t somehow realize the answer is 356.
Not quite. I can test whether a rock is hard by kicking it.
But this byte-sized back-and-forth doesn’t look particularly useful. I don’t understand where you are coming from—to me it seems that you consider your thought processes primary and reality secondary. Truth, say you, is whatever the thought processes converge to, regardless of reality. That doesn’t make sense to me.
When you kick the rock, all you get is a sensory experience (a quale, if you like). You interpret this experience as a sensation arising from your foot. You assume this sensation is the result of your leg undergoing something called “collision” with something called “rock”. You deduce that the rock probably has a property called “hard”. All of those are deductions you do using your model of reality. This model is generated from memories of previous experiences by a process of thought based on something like Occam’s razor.
Since the only access to truth we might have is through our own thought, if the latter doesn’t converge to truth (at least approximately) then truth is completely inaccessible.
if the latter doesn’t converge to truth (at least approximately) then truth is completely inaccessible.
Why not? Granted that we have access to reality only through mental constructs and so any approximations to “the truth” are our own thoughts, but I don’t see any problems with stating that sometimes these mental constructs adequately reflect reality (=truth) and sometimes they don’t. I don’t see where this whole idea of asymptotic convergence is coming from. There is no guarantee that more thinking will get you closer to the truth, but on the other hand sometimes the truth is right there, easily accessible.
How do you know anything about reality if not through your own thought process?
Through interaction with reality. Are you arguing from a brain-in-the-vat position?
Interaction with reality only gives you raw sensory experiences. It doesn’t allow you to deduce anything. When you compute 12 x 12 and it turns out to be 144, you believe 144 is the one correct answer. Therefore you implicitly assume that tomorrow you won’t somehow realize the answer is 356.
And what does that have to do with knowing anything about reality? Your thought process is not a criterion of whether anything is true.
But it is the only criterion you are able to apply.
Not quite. I can test whether a rock is hard by kicking it.
But this byte-sized back-and-forth doesn’t look particularly useful. I don’t understand where you are coming from—to me it seems that you consider your thought processes primary and reality secondary. Truth, say you, is whatever the thought processes converge to, regardless of reality. That doesn’t make sense to me.
When you kick the rock, all you get is a sensory experience (a quale, if you like). You interpret this experience as a sensation arising from your foot. You assume this sensation is the result of your leg undergoing something called “collision” with something called “rock”. You deduce that the rock probably has a property called “hard”. All of those are deductions you do using your model of reality. This model is generated from memories of previous experiences by a process of thought based on something like Occam’s razor.
OK, and how do we get from that to ‘the process of thought asymptotically converges to some point called “truth”’?
Since the only access to truth we might have is through our own thought, if the latter doesn’t converge to truth (at least approximately) then truth is completely inaccessible.
Why not? Granted that we have access to reality only through mental constructs and so any approximations to “the truth” are our own thoughts, but I don’t see any problems with stating that sometimes these mental constructs adequately reflect reality (=truth) and sometimes they don’t. I don’t see where this whole idea of asymptotic convergence is coming from. There is no guarantee that more thinking will get you closer to the truth, but on the other hand sometimes the truth is right there, easily accessible.
I apologize but this discussion seems to be going nowhere.
Agreed.