| In a message dated 3/19/2001 5:29:52 PM Central Standard Time,
xod@sixgirls.org writes: <These are called assumptions.> Not in English nor (under {sruma}) in Lojban. Damn. We're back on different pages. Remember that these beliefs held invulnerable for the moment are, in their own right, based on other evidence and so on. So, they are not merely assumptions for argument; they are rather postulates, which need not be discharged, as assumption must be (indirect proof of one sort or another) or prejudice the conclusion/claim. They cannot in this argument be rejected, as an assumption can be. They are, however, beliefs that the person holds (typically, as you note, on the basis of some evidence -- which cannot now be the issue) and which s/he then uses as evidence for the beliefs under attack. I think we are talking slightly at cross-purposes here. The evidence for the truth of the claim that I am seeing a yellow patch is my seeing a yellow patch, but what is the evidence for my seeing a yellow patch, which is a du'u, something that I believe, but for which no evidence other than itself is possible (the way the usual story goes). "Evidence" as it is used in these epistemological uses is a logical concept, propositions that support another proposition, what they are evidence for. No experience can be that sort of evidence, since no experience is a paroposition (whatever that is). But an experience can be a *cause* of believing a proposition, one for which there is no evidence at all. (I know that this is being fussy about language, and that people -- including philosophers -- would call the experience evidence, but to do so leads to the double problem of an impossible logic and one or another kind of problems with evidence -- infintie regress or contradiction). (It also turns out, for the sake of those who don't like objective facts, etc., that an experience is never enough by itself to cause a belief, there has to be another belief involved as well, an interpretation of the experience -- and that other belief is subject to challenge, so that causation cannot literally be taken as a species of evidence.) |