What We Know

 

 

The content of my take on epistemology is my own, but I was influenced by Victor J Gijsbers, after taking some notes on one of his videos in his Philosophy of the Humanities series, in the questions he asked about epistemological issues, and his take that most epistemologists are fallibilist. I much enjoy his videos.

 

I was driving around this morning running errands, and listening to radio host Carl Jackson who is filling in for injured Dennis Prager, my favorite radio celebrity.

 

I do not recall the context in which Jackson used the phrase objective truth, but he and most Christians believe that metaphysical reality holds, that God created the universe along the lines of natural law, that those laws can be studied, linguistically captured, and conceived of in clear meaningful language, revealing the objective truth about the nature of the world, the nature of God (as far as we can ascertain God’s nature), and the human place in it.

 

Now, I am no great shakes as an epistemologist but the skeptical antirealists among professional philosophers are not going to cede all the above-mentioned presupposition accepted as established axioms by Christians and believers of all stripes, from around the world.

 

My commonsense take is that we can know the external world, though the truth claims that this premise generates are more falliblistic and highly probable, rather than infalliblistically certain. I would never say that God is not so knowing, or that a really smart human one day may be so sure about her truth claims, but, to live, evaluate and plan, our fallible claims about reality, its nature and our nature, and our place and role within it, we can move forward with great confidence built upon what we do know, though we do not know it with utter certainty, a standard for believing and acting that is just impossibly high: we need to employ belief and knowledge to live, to act, to survive.

 

Yes, the external world exists, and we likely know the external world rather well, as we now see it and characterize it. That is my take on epistemological certainty and the nature of reality, and what we can know of and about it.