How do you know that things you believe are right?

Suppose that everything you believe in turns out to be wrong and someone with very differnt ideas, philosophes, morals and likes and dislike turns out to be in the right all along?

How do know for a fact that your viewpoint isn't as flawed or biased as the people you disagree on important things like politics and religion or trival things like whether your favorite movie or game is really good or not?

Can any of you have absolute faith in your jugdement on all the things you have opinion on and never doubt them even once?

(I suggest renaming this thread to 'epistemology')

That would be a day of very low probability. IMO, people, even highly experienced and trained people, aren't good enough at being right for any person to be comprehensively 'right'. Also, 'in the right' seems to be conflating science with morality. Did you mean to do that?

SCIENCE! (and more specifically cognitive science) But you don't know for a fact. You just can assign probabilities.

Personally, I assign 90% probability (9/10 cases) that any two people who disagree are both equally flawed and biased in their views, just in different areas.

I think there are certain brain injuries which can induce that. Seriously, there is a difference between having faith in your judgement — which is a separate skill independent of your opinions — and having faith in your opinions. Absolute faith in the former sense could be good, absolute faith in the latter sense could not be good, AFAICS.

'Don't beg for anything, do it yourself, or else you won't get anything.'

But have does probability prove that your favorite book/TV series/movie/game/webcomic/etc is good and that person who thinks it sucks and you suck for liking is wrong and doesn't have any vaild points? Can you prove your taste is superior to others?

The only sense in which that could possibly be true is morally — where your tastes result in definite better life outcomes for you (for example, liking cold showers, liking to pursue the truth — not that either of these are, per se, tastes that definitely are beneficial for their owner to possess).

Even so, an individual person is not equipped for proving any such thing, even in a weak sense. They are even less well equipped to prove that the moral results of their tastes are generalizable across humans-in-general.

All the examples I know of of this kind of dispute, it's simply a definitional problem. When you are both using different definitions (of what 'good' constitutes), nobody can win the argument because you are each participating in your own personal argument using your own personal definition, rather than a shared one. There is no winning 'the' argument because 'the' argument never even existed in any real sense.

edited 28th Apr '11 1:40:55 AM by SavageOrange

'Don't beg for anything, do it yourself, or else you won't get anything.'

I don't.

Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch

I have absolute faith that my judgement is correct for me at the time but acknowledge that later I may discover something that, had I known it at the time, would have caused me to judge differently.

I also am quite aware that other people's judgements may be contrary to mine and are just as valid.

I believe that some things, including tastes in entertainment, are subjective and that it is therefore impossible to be right or wrong about such things.

I may, however, be wrong about this. I don't think there are any beliefs which I wouldn't say there was at least the possibility that I was wrong about.

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I don't. And I don't care, either. Who cares if I'm right, so long as I am happy?

edited 28th Apr '11 3:25:58 AM by MrAHR

Read my stories!

Hmm . . . On subjectives, I'd like to believe in Quality by Popular Vote, but I have a hard time accepting what the public actually likes. On objective things, my beliefs aren't very firm in the first place—I could easily adapt to the existence of magic, or to the revelation that this world isn't real. (I've already had one experience where time stood still for a few seconds and all my senses except vision failed. While probably some sort of malfunction in my own brain, could just as easily have been a "glitch in the Matrix," so to speak.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

There are actually three different things being discussed here.

1. Factual knowledge (is the sky blue, does E = mc^2)
2. Moral knowledge (is it right to do this or that)
3. Preference (do I like X better than Y)

The third is subjective in that it's different for everybody: someone could say "Star Wars is the best movie ever" and someone else could say "Star Wars is the worst movie ever" and they're both right since they're effectively making a declaration of their opinion. For such things, it's impossible to be objectively correct, so don't even worry about it.

For factual knowledge, the scientific method had been the best way we've ever found to determine if something is objectively true or not. The scientific method is itself a long, complicated process that is not infallible, but is the best we've got after thousands of years of trying to figure stuff out.

Moral knowledge is somewhat trickier. There are zillions of different schools of thought on what morality means and how best to achieve it. Until someone manages to invent a morality meter (which would put the whole enterprise firmly under the umbrella of the empirical and make it subject to the scientific method), you basically have to pick which system you like best and adjust it as you see fit. I'm fond of existentialism, myself.

There's another dimension to the question of "how do we know anything", too — how can we trust our own senses? How do we know that what we're experiencing is reality, instead of being a disembodied brain or under the influence of a Cartesian demon? The short answer: we can't, but there's no point in worrying about it.

edited 28th Apr '11 9:47:46 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Because I take most every opportunity to reexamine, reflect, and update them, right down to the very foundations. In the factual, moral, and opinion categories. To make them as consistent and accurate as possible.

It's kind of exhausting sometimes, but it's the only way to be as sure as I can possibly be.

As for what I can do past that? We're only human, speculating on what we can do past our own ability is kind of pointless.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I know for a fact, or at least believe with as much certainty as I believe that the atmosphere will still exist five minutes from now, that there is no such thing as "really good", whether one is speaking of taste in movies or morality, and that biases are the very core of viewpoints about these matters. From an objective viewpoint, there is no good or bad.

But there is an objective "beneficial for me," which lots of people forget.

I don't, for certain. I do with the same confidence I know the world isn't the Matrix.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

All the things I believe are right are right, because all of them are personal choices and philosophies, not universal truths. I can believe that conflict is an essential part of human nature with advantages and disadvantages, and someone can disagree with me. Nobody is right, it's an opinion. There is no way to prove that.

Then you get into things like God and Religion. I hold my beliefs, but I don't really discount the beliefs of others either. I'm a Deist who believes in the Universal Clock Theory. If another religion that exists today turned out to be God made manifest and all their beliefs were true, I'd just say "Ok. Fair enough."

In other words, I don't believe anything is an absolute and universal truth until it is scientifically verified. My beliefs are always fallible until proven true, and that's an intrinsic part of what I belief. Thus I can't really be proven wrong because I don't make assumptions and declare them as a truth that can be disproved.

Well I don't... [1]

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

What's the Universal Clock Theory? Is it at all similar to the idea of a clockwork universe?

edited 28th Apr '11 11:14:13 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

^

Different words for the same thing. Blame college professors who put their own spin on things.

An objective "beneficial for me" can only be determined once one has made the subjective decision as to how to define "beneficial" and "me".

"let me get what I want" and "this one" respectively?

edited 28th Apr '11 1:48:17 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

"this one"

The existence of a metaphysical "you" is a fiction. The self is a vague concept which is useful but not "real". It is not even precisely defined, far from it. It's contradictory and very vague.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I'm mostly just trusting to luck.

Basically what Barkey said. Just throw the word Buddhist in there and give me an ever shifting view on god or gods are and what they do and you have me. Varies from what Barkey believes to there being many gods who are the laws of the universe or a childish god who likes to make things and play with them because it amuses him. Either way I tend to have the constant of gods being transient things. They die too. The universe will too.

edited 28th Apr '11 1:57:13 PM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

I don't get the appeal of indifferent "gods". This is a much more appealing idea of gods to me.

edited 28th Apr '11 2:01:37 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Which why I wasn't talking about a metaphysical me, but the physical me. Unless you're saying it's not an objective fact that I have goals I want to achieve?

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I don't know for certain. Does a physical "me" exist? How are you supposed to know that for sure? But at least it seems more reasonable. You did say "me" though, not X physical object, so I just assumed. Objects don't really persist through time either though... Or so I say.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom