First off, I think the question of “believe” versus “know” is a difficult thing to address, mostly because “believe” isn’t defined distinctly enough to apply objectively. One person saying, “I believe that’s so” may be indicating their deep commitment to the concept, or indicating that they have never had it adequately proven but support it based on hearsay, or simply avowing that they have faith. On hearing that phrase, however, I may have a tendency to apply my own definition to it, but that hardly means it agrees with theirs. Then it’s simply an argument over semantics, which rarely establishes anything useful.

I feel much the same way about philosophy and postmodernism. They both have little to no predictive value and contribute nothing towards human advancement (unless you consider long drawn out arguments that reach no conclusions as “advancement,” but even semantics has a hard time making that one stick.)

All of our experience – what we see, hear, feel, etc. – is subjective, to a certain degree, true enough. But arguing that it may therefore be false is simply playing silly buggers. There would be no way you could establish such objectively, and no point in trying. I once argued with someone over the idea that experience could simply be imagination by pointing out that if such were true, my arguments were only a figment of his imagination, and yet he was still getting his butt kicked. What did that say about human condition? I never received any answer…

It’s also easy to show how little commitment people have to subjectivity of experience by picking up a sharp object or a lit candle, and approaching them with the instruction of, “Prevent this from causing you pain.” I learned that one from Bill Nye the Science Guy (okay, not really.)

Our minds are really cool things, but they produce more utter crap than deep insights. Telling the difference virtually always comes down to empirical testing. The only people that seem to have a problem with that are the ones that aren’t favored/supported/vindicated by empirical testing.

Jacob,

It’s hard to call realism “naive” when it’s based on tangible evidence. When you rely on being able to inspect something before confirming that it really does exist, you’re being a lot more thorough than someone who goes off the philosophical deep end pontificating on things that may or may not exist, using epistemological arguments as a crutch.

There’s a Greek story about a philosopher who said that a runner will never finish a dash because he has to cover half the distance, than half of the remaining distance, than half of the rest of the remaining distance and so on. In reply, a runner simply finished the dash. Moral of the story? Don’t invent problems that aren’t there by diving headfirst into irrelevant topics. They generally won’t apply to the real world anyway.

Ultimately, our imperfect senses and our admittedly imperfect tools are all we really have to come up with a framework for the universe as we know it. And while we may not always be right about the kind of evidence we collect, we’re at least doing more than just pontificating without providing anything to show for it but rhetorical writhing. There’s a time and place for philosophy and relativism, but it’s not when we have to tangle with the reality of the world before us and collect the relevant facts about it.

1) Dawkins et al *are* indeed preaching to the choir, because that’s (for the most part) their intended audience. Dawkins, in particular, is more about rallying the troops than converting the unconverted. His assertion is that atheists and secularists need to get off the fence and defend their point of view, lest their freedom to partake of it will lose out to alternative points of view.

2) What’s the big deal with the philosophy and all these abstract notions of what is and what isn’t? After all, when approached with a similar notion (in this case, by George Berkeley, that things exist only insomuch as they exist in the mind), Samuel Johnson replied “I refute it thus” and kicked a stone.

The philosophical points of view seek to map out a conceptual mechanism through which we create mental models of phenomena; if these phenomena exist in the “real world”, we call it science; if they don’t, perhaps we may call it fiction, or in some cases, pure mathematics.

Part of this endeavor is to demonstrate, as Daniel Dennett points out, the explanatory power of mechanistic means, through what he calls “cranes” versus “skyhooks”. In his analogy, cranes are foundational building blocks that accumulate from previously established facts, in the manner that we are accustomed to science working, whereas skyhooks are magical deux-ex-machinas that provide some alternative explanation for a particular phenomenon by asserting that no crane-like mechanism exists to explain that particular phenomenon — a god-of-the-gaps sort of explanation.

Part of the scientific method’s reliability is due to this deep explanatory power, and this deep explanatory power relies on asking abstract questions that go beyond “I refute it thus” to demonstrate that a particular phenomenon, however abstract or otherwise socially constructed, may indeed obtain from mechanistic foundations. Whereas you may not necessarily like their route, you can thank the people who have done the deep inspection for the demonstrated soundness of certain strong arguments in favor of scientific empiricism.

3) It is important to acknowledge alternative perspectives insomuch that any comprehensive theory of existence must necessarily account for all potential interpretations of phenomena, however farcical or nonsensical they may seem. That is not to say that hallucinations, delusions, or fictions necessarily obtain or have truth value, but rather that a) people *HAVE* these experiences (that is, they are not lying), and b) these experiences themselves most likely have mechanistic causes.

Thus, as Dennett points out in his book Breaking the Spell, rather than simply dismissing things outside of intuitive notions of science as hogwash, it is important to understand them scientifically, for they are both veridical, insomuch as these experiences are actually held by many people, and moreover potent in swaying the tenor of the argument regarding any ultimate explanation for what is true and what isn’t. A practical argument, but a valid one nonetheless.

4) The post-modernist simply lets go of strongly-held assertions in analyzing a domain as a “text” (much as an artist would actively defy preconceptions to force his/her audience to interpret a piece in a novel manner), and thus the slippery slope of relativism. However, that is not to say that the strong relativist does not hold on to some (perhaps ultimately arbitrary) standards for evaluating truth within a text, and more often than not, these criteria themselves map onto the criteria of a physical, “real” world (otherwise anything goes).

Ultimately, if you take the post-modernists at their word, it’s an arbitrary gesture as to where you plant your flag, regarding what you hold as the ultimate set of functions for the evaluation of truth within any domain or set of domains. Then, the argument becomes why one particular node within this set of evaluations is more worthy than others, to which one can site the wealth of internal consistency that a mechanistic, scientific understanding of the world provides; alternatively, it is also plausible one may wish to live in the la-la land of magical thinking (e.g., the GOP), and whereas you may not necessarily convince them that your perspective is more robust, you can at least provide evidence that your particular choice of where to plant your flag is a valid one; moreover, as per Dawkins, you may convince other reasonable persons to join you in their defense of such a perspective.

You also seem not to grasp that the point of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment is precisely to illustrate the problems with the sort of naive realism that wants to say “I see a couch, thus a couch exists”. (As an aside, I should point out that one can be anti-realist without endorsing epistemic relativism — the latter is a much stronger position.)

I suggest reading Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism. It’s very short, aimed at non-specialists, and written with the explicit purpose of countering the claims of radical relativists. Speaking as someone who does not at all buy in to radical relativism, I don’t think that the claims of the radical relativists are obviously wrong. Indeed, one learns a great deal about epistemology in the course of carefully refuting those claims.

I suppose this is why it is often said that atheists believe in nothing?

“We have to figure some way to refine our comments so people understand the differences between beliefs and facts.”

A tough road. I’m afraid that even a refined way of phrasing something will not overcome uncritical thinking and general ignorance.

His expressed viewpoint is, I think, the other extreme, and equally bad: all knowledge is generated through the senses

That’s clearly not the case, as knowledge of formal systems needs only thought. However, all knowledge of the real world is indeed acquired via the senses.

Which isn’t to say that our senses are foolproof, but that we know some ways that our senses are accurate, and we have calibrated our measurement instruments to report data in these ways so we can sense it reliably.

I have this same problem. I think it’s similar to those who claim that evolution is “just” a theory. The commonly used terms don’t have the same meaning as they do in more rigid, scientific arenas. I am frequently frustrated by those who say they can’t understand how I could “believe in atheism.” Just saying that points out their total lack of understanding of what atheism is! The same with evolution. One cannot believe in facts. The sky IS blue. Water IS wet. Evolution DOES occur. There is nothing to believe or disbelieve.

Unfortunately, there is no way to take back these terms from the public use. We have to figure some way to refine our comments so people understand the differences between beliefs and facts. Given the state of scientific education here in the US, I have my doubt about being able to do that.

Of course this belief question extends to less philosophical areas, also. For many people I encounter in my day to day life, “belief” is simply how they know something and it has less to do with the reality or evidence and more to do with their feelings and emotions on the matter.