Yazata:
I kind of agree. I'm inclined to think that (all?) propositions have some non-zero possibility. I'm not using 'possibility' in a strict logical sense there, more of an ontological sense. I accept at least the possibility of
dialetheism.
The possibility that some statements are both true and false at the same time? Got an example?
While we can't be totally certain that any of our beliefs is really true, and hence we can't be certain that we really know anything, we can make judgements about how well our beliefs seem to be justified. Some beliefs are obviously going to be better justified than others.
One view of "truth" is that posited truths should be
consistent with everything else that is known. One justification for something, therefore, is that it is not inconsistent with anything else that is known. A stronger justification, of course, is that it is
implied by or
inferred from what else is known.
An additional problem is that our judgements about levels of justification are all historically contextual. They are arrived at in the context of what we take to be current knowledge. The ancients and medievals lived in very different intellectual contexts and they reached very different conclusions than our own today. But those conclusions seemed well justified to the ancients and medievals, by their lights.
That is correct. It's also why it can be unfair to judge outdated ideas by the standards of today. We have access to more knowledge today than the ancients or the medievals did, so while their ideas might have been consistent with what
they knew at the time, they might well be
inconsistent with what is known now. They might well have been doing the best they could, given their state of knowledge.
Similarly, here and now we are doing the best we can in the light of what
we know now. It is inevitable that some of our current ideas will turn out to be wrong in the light of future knowledge, but we're doing the best with what we've got. It's unrealistic to expect more than that.
I'm inclined to identify 'facts' as objective states of affairs with their own ontological reality.
That makes you a realist, and I am too.
Personally, I am
very wary of claims that certain people have some kind of direct access to special knowledge that is
innate in them, for example by virtue of a claimed connection to a God. I'm wary because I've seen so many examples of how this kind of thinking can lead people astray, to the point where they preference their own subjective notions over that "objective state of affairs" that you mention.
There's no guarantee that what what we take to be the facts really are.
I think a fact is basically a piece of information that reasonable people agree on. The most valuable facts seem to have a very close connection to the material world. As we move away from what is directly and easily perceivable by an average observer, the status of "facts" becomes more debatable.
I also think that we should recognise, though, that useful knowledge does not, by and large, consist of collections of facts. On the contrary, the most useful knowledge seems to lie in well-supported
theories that make sense of large collections of facts. A good-enough theory actually has the power to trump certain "facts". By that, I mean that if a theory is supported by a million observations, and then a new observation comes to light that appears to be inconsistent, then it can be reasonable to assume, as a working hypothesis, that it is the new observation that is likely at fault, rather than the theory. This is not to say that we shouldn't carefully check the facts, of course.
