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From: | Lennart Borgman (gmail) |
Subject: | Re: Emacs psychiatrist |
Date: | Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:52:36 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071031 Thunderbird/2.0.0.9 Mnenhy/0.7.5.666 |
David Hansen wrote:
"Knowledge" is kind of worthless if you can't prove it wrong or right. Without falsifiability it's nothing more than a neat idea and no knowledge at all. And statistics is more or less the only way to deal with any data, no matter if you observe planets orbiting the sun or far more complex and weird objects like human beings.
Are you sure about what you mean with "knowledge", "prove", "right" and "wrong" here?
Do you have some knowledge of that you are alive? Do you have some knowledge of your feelings? If you have some children are you sure of that? Is it a fact, is it knowledge?
Even if you would like to reserve "knowledge" for something defined within a "statistical onthology" (which is a strange thing to do for a common word) don't you think other things are worth knowning too? Aren't they important when you try to decide what to do?
Don't you think reasoning about this kind of knowledge can be as sharp as reasoning about statistical kind of knowledge?
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