[lit-ideas] Re: Understanding Why Newton Contributed To Human Knowledge With A False Theory
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:58:56 +0900
On Nov 29, 2007 9:30 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> But the very idea of knowing is that it is opposed to something, namely,
> believing, hoping, guessing, surmising, wondering, predicting, and so
> on. To say that someone knows something is to mark a distinction, a
> distinction that's been around at least since Plato struggled with it in
> Meno and Theatetus. The conception of knowledge that underlies S also
> underlies Aquinas' struggle with the problem of God's knowledge of
> future contingents. If God knows everything, then what he knows must be
> true, and if true, for any statement about some future condition you
> care to mention, thus fated. If God knew everything right from the
> start, he also knew that 'Adam will eat that damned apple,' was true.
> The very fact of his knowing it makes it unavoidable.
Don't all these conundrums arise from the premise that the world is composed
of distinct categories, so that, if only the right definition can be found,
the members of one category will uniformly share some property totally
missing in members of another? Is not the lesson of science that what we
take to be knowledge is approximations all the way down, that the world is
not composed of p and ~p but of 1s and 0s between each pair of which there
exists an infinite number of points and curves, some of which appear to be a
better fit than others?
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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