Piece Of Truth

 

Skeptics, idealists, and subjectivists loudly denounce realist, common sense abstractions, based in sense data perceptions of the world, as illusory, nonexistent, fallacious.

 

As a fallibilist, I am mildly optimistic about the truthfulness of our abstracting from the images we receive from reality. I believe the normal, clear-minded perceiver is truthful, more than just passing off his impressions and names for incoming states of affairs as true when they are lies, misrepresentations, or incomplete categories about what is actually out there.

 

In my view the given is in part a myth, but mostly it is the truth growing out of the directly and indirectly received input from reality. This is the epistemologically moderate stance I maintain as a mildly optimistic fallibilist.

 

For the average person, sane, sober, and unbiased (relatively), his abstractions are a piece of truth about the world more than they are a piece of fiction about a world they cannot ever come to know as it is in itself.

 

Though Max Stirner was too much of an epistemological nihilist for my taste, he provided a corrective criticism about abstracting by humans. When an abstraction, whether accurate about reality, or false and delusional, when it is made sacred, a fetish worshiped as a proper name, an idol to bow down to as the ideology that the worshiper would sacrifice his life for, his pure fanatical distortion of the abstraction has become something nightmarish, false, evil and to be abandoned.