▲ | card_zero 5 days ago | |
Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction. |