(Note: replies 39 and 40 are out of logical sequence since they were moved separately later, and the arrow references don’t transfer. They should probably follow replies 29 and 33, respectively.)
For Trust and Peace to prosper, it would be good for Atheists to not require scientific proof of God,
nor for Christians to challenge an atheist about Godless Evolution.
These are footnote topics, not the thrust of Peaceful Science.
I agree with that. In our everyday lives we don’t generally go around and try to parse out our actions and behavior according to complicated philosophical and mathematical principles. That’s one of the problems with philosophy.
It can be a useful guide to help us analyze our own thinking and behavior(and thus can help us understand when something goes wrong), but it is often times impractical in our day to day business.
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They would know it, because it is a human convention that red exists. They know that convention because of their participation in the culture and because they have found that they need to adopt it to make sense of the conversations that they hear. It is not just a matter of testimony.
I hope they distrust all testimony until there is supporting evidence. In the case of the unicorn, the blind person is probably aware that there are no such things as unicorns. And that awareness comes from their participation in their cultural group.
Yes, a blind person is somewhat dependent on what other folk tell them. But, much like everyone else, I expect them to have stricter criteria than just believing what other folk say.
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They would know it [we have of course been presuming someone blind since birth] because of their (sighted) parents’ testimony. Awareness of a convention would come later, and ‘red’ would depend on their language. Are you suggesting that convention is a source of truth? (Conceptualizing the sighted world, and in particular, colors, is another story.)
That seems unlikely.
Remembering back to my childhood, I had trouble working out what people were talking about when they used “red” or “green”. It eventually clicked, when I managed to connect the talk with my visual experience. I expect it is harder for a blind person, who lacks that visual experience. The blind child will require that someone explain it, before he can begin to make sense of it. And making sense of it required adopting the meaning conventions for color terms.
No. But truth can depend on conventions. It is true that my desk is 30 inches high, but that depends on our conventions for measuring distance.
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Testimony is a valid source of knowledge. Without we are blind and deaf to some, actually many, many things.
An trivial example:
My favorite local bird is the brown thrasher. I’m from the east coast originally, and I used to like mockingbirds quite a lot. They really do mimic other birds and they are fun to listen to – they do a real good cardinal imitation, for instance (a simple slurred two-pitch call with maybe four variations), and they can mimic numerous other birds as well. Now I live on the western edge of the corn belt, and we have brown thrashers, but no mockingbirds. The brown thrasher has a repertoire that is hilarious (I have laughed out loud), because it is all over the place and multifarious, and it doesn’t really mimic other local birds. My take is that it is the true mocking bird because it is mocking the mockingbird, who takes itself seriously, with exaggeration and variety.
Now, without my preceding testimony, you would have had no access* to the truth of my affinity for brown thrashers. You were deaf to it. The true knowledge that you have now is dependent upon that testimony. And so it is with a multitude of other kinds of information.
That seems unlikely that that is unlikely. Remembering back to my childhood (although you would be well founded in accusing me of having senior memory 
), my adult children’s childhood, their teenage children and observing children and parents today, there were and are children’s books with colored objects along with their associated adjectives. So from an early age, the adult or older sibling is giving the child testimony about colors and the associated written and spoken words. So yes, I am doubting your testimony, or perhaps you had some disadvantages.
Which brings to mind language itself – why isn’t the knowledge of one, how it is spoken, its vocabulary, diction and rules and pronunciation almost exclusively testimonial?
This seems to be the bait and switch you are trying to play:
You use a trivial example of a subjective preference that you have, regarding a particular bird. Your telling me this falls under the criteria of direct observation, one of the ways of knowing that I have acknowledged.
I then take this observation and apply logic and science to it. I will judge what you tell me about your subjective feeling, and all I really need to determine is whether you are trustworthy in what you tell me. If I can’t think of any good reason you would lie to me about this, nor any reason to doubt your general trustworthiness, then it is reasonable that I accept what you tell me and consider it knowledge.
But then you give me "testimony that God exists, and insist it is the same thing. It is not. You are using some subjective experience as evidence for something that you believe objectively exists in the world. This is NOT sufficient evidence to believe in a god.
I may well believe that you had some subjective experience that convinces you a god exists, just as you have a subjective experience of liking brown thrashers. But that is not to take testimony as a particular and unique source of knowledge apart from the ones I listed. It is just an example of things we may observe that still must be evaluated by the other criteria before it can be considered knowledge.
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‘My telling you’ falls precisely under the category of testimony.
It has nothing to do with your direct observation. Please don’t accuse me of bait and switch when that is exactly what you just unthinkingly did.
You were blind and deaf to the truth of my affinity for brown thrashers without testimony.
OK. So what?
If no scientists ever told anyone about the results of their experiments, we would not know about them.
But if they gave us “testimony” of stuff they believed to be true, without any evidence to back it up, it would not be knowledge.
For the umpteenth time: “Testimony” is just something I observe. It is no different than seeing the sky is blue or that it is raining. It is not a discrete and unique source of knowledge apart from science, math, logic and observation.
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The so what is that testimony absolutely is a source of true knowledge. That is a fact in which you err greatly in denying.
You may deny the truth of the fact that I like brown thrashers, but you would be lying to yourself.
I don’t deny that. What I am not accepting is your insistence that what you call “testimony” is a qualitatively different source of knowledge than the others I have listed. It is just a subcategory of those sources.
Here is an analogy to your argument: I can know the temperature of a room by using a thermometer. Therefore, a thermometer can be a source of knowledge.
So should we now create an additional category: Logic, math, science and thermometers?
Or would that just be a stupid thing to do?
And would it be any less stupid if someone said “And not only that, but my thermometer can detect unicorns, so therefore unicorns exist.”?
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You are making a category error and, that is a terrible analogy. A thermometer is just a means of making a direct observation.
Testimony is a qualitatively different source of knowledge, as evidenced by the brown thrasher example. There is no observation by you of my mind or affections, the only thing you are observing is symbols on a screen. They directly inform you of nothing about me. It the content of the testimony that informs you of the truth, and it requires faith and trust that I am not lying and trying to deceive you.
And when I read your words on the screen, I am also making a direct observation.
And with a thermometer, you are only reading the numbers on the digital readout, or the length of the column of mercury. You aren’t observing the motion of the air molecules in the room (or whatever it is that determines the termperature; I don’t exactly recall).
The analogy holds perfectly.
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I don’t think it does. A factor that you have not accounted for is the personal. I have a will, the motion of air molecules does not. You have observed nothing about my mind and affections that I have not chosen to reveal to you. The symbols on the screen are placed there at my discretion. You can only trust that I am telling the truth and you have no alternative way of detecting it. It is a qualitatively different means of acquiring knowledge.
That’s irrelevant. Also, we do not know that you actually have free will. That is just something you believe and give “testimony” to, with no way of actually demonstrating it to be true.
Not sure there is much left to say.
How is it not relevant?!