All of Alice's Comments + Replies

Alice00

I take your point...if your point is 'we gotta start somewhere'. Nontheless, the use of 'obviously' is problematic and misleading. To whom is it obvious? To you? Or perhaps you and your friends, or you and other people on the internet who tend to think in the same way as you and with whom you generally agree? Don't get me wrong, I have a very clear idea of what I think is crap (and I strongly suspect it'd be similar to yours) and I'm just as keen to impose my vision of the 'uncrap' on the world as the next person. However, I can't help but be troubled by t... (read more)

Alice00

The request that we should 'fix the world' suggests that a.)we know that it is broken and b.)we know how to fix it; I am not so sure that this is the case. When one says 'X is wrong/unfair/undesirable etc., one is more often than not actually making a statement about one's state of mind rather than the state of reality i.e., one is saying 'I think or feel that X is wrong/unfair/undesirable'. Personally, I don't like to see images of suffering and death but I'm not sure that my distaste for suffering and death is enough to confidently assert that they are w... (read more)

Alice20

Does the idea that it is a good thing to subject our beliefs (and even our belief in belief) to logical and analytical scrutiny count as belief in itself or is it so justifiable as to count as knowledge? If so, what is the justification?

0Anomylous
I don't think it does. Scrutinizing your beliefs is a corollary - it naturally follows if you believe that "Truth is good and valuable and its pursuit is worthwhile." We value truth, we want our maps to match the territory, and so we scrutinize our beliefs. If anything needs to be justified, it's the value placed on truth and knowledge thereof. And that's actually an interesting problem. Although my intuition shouts TRUTH IS GOOD, there's not much I can say to prove that statement, outside of "It's useful to be able to make accurate predictions." It seems like the goodness of truth ought to be provable some way. But maybe it's just a moral value that our (sub-)culture happens to hold particularly strongly? Perhaps someone better versed than I am in the arts of rationality can give a better answer.