The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct - TopicsExpress



          

The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” either. Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. (..) A related useful thing that faith tells you, if you take it seriously enough, is that the great majority of people who believe something on faith, in fact believe falsehoods. Hence, faith is insufficient for true belief. As the Nobel-Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar said: “the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.” You know that Medawar’s advice holds for all ideas, not just scientific ones, and, by the same argument, to all the other diverse things that are held up as infallible (or probable) touchstones of truth: holy books; the evidence of the senses; statements about who is probably right; even true love. nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/why-its-good-to-be-wrong
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 20:09:42 +0000

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