We see what we want to see

[Ali Quadir]

Quote:You *can* know the limits of your knowledge.

I don't think you can. You can define the limits of the validity of your knowledge. By stating that all I know and accept as true comes through these and these sources, or everything that is repeated in three different sources, or everything that can be proven by the scientific method.

But you cannot know in many cases if something you suspect or feel is true is really true. So I must conclude that in most cases I don't know where my knowledge ends. I might know but I don't know that I know. What you speak of means you can state that some knowledge is true and be almost always right. But that is different.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Being aware of the limits of one's knowledge has nothing to do with veracity of knowledge at all, just whether or not one genuinely perceives relavent knowledge is held. I contend that it's always possible to be aware of that case. That awareness is not even a skill to be learned, unless you consider honesty a skill.

So let me try if I get you... You're basically saying that we know if we have no relevant knowledge?

Yes. But it's entirely subjective of course. By relevancy, I mean perceived relevancy. As we have with one's own prompt to share one's own particular info.

Ok, I suppose that could work. It means that the situation could arise where I don't know I have knowledge relevant from some perspective. And that's all I was really saying.

Yet you seem to me to be demanding a specific format. You actually measure honesty by that format.

It has nothing do with the manner in which something is related. It is the capability to support what is related (again, in any manner). By capability, I don't mean any judgment of capability, I mean one's own awareness of what one understands one knows (perceived relevance) in whatever worldview one has.

But isn't saying "I dreamt it last night" sufficient support if indeed you mean it when you say "In any manner"? If this is true, I don't see how you could reject anything anyone ever says, because quite clearly nothing is said or even thought without being supported in some way.

The issues arise when I give my views a means of support that another person does not agree with.

I have seen however that many people are stuck on one specific way of communication and they blame others who fail to follow protocol. While if they themselves chose to communicate on a different level or along a different protocol, they would conclude those people to be very intelligent and insightful.

The individual mind has been uniquely developed in a way that tends to bias certain ways of relating what is known. One would be a sociopath not to understand that.

Yet it is extremely human to fall for those biases anyway.

Or maybe there is a limit of successful discourse due to perhaps the time/energy required vs the perceived benefit.

There's another alternative, not being word oriented, but being intention oriented. Don't ask yourself what is the other saying, but what is the other trying to say? It will help a lot most people are all over the place with their communications. Exaggerating one moment and ignoring something the next. We should not take words too literal.

@Eric, That forum was killed. It was the Dawkins forum. I think the man grew pretty tired of all the bickering. I half suspected him to be fed up with the fact that the subtitle of the forum "An oasis of reason" was no more than a thin layer of paint on what was essentially a cestpit of emotional gut responses and badly contained frustrations. He pulled the plug quite suddenly and people actually rabidly started attacking him for it.

I don't agree with Dawkins on a lot of levels. But he is a very decent and civilized human being. And I do sympathize with his desire for religion to just get out of the social arena.

Those don't ask don't tell issues the US is having right now don't belong in this century. People don't have the right to stop other people from expressing who they are just because they happen to be uncomfortable with the idea of two men kissing. Certainly not in a place where they're being very comfortable with two men trying to put bullets in each others bodies. The numerous child abuse cases in Europe don't belong in society and would not have occurred (at least to this level) if some people in the church got of their high horse and gave priests and nuns the permissions to just have sex to their hearts content. In the monestaries churches and cloister gardens. It would not only revitalize the church it would also get that sour dried plum expression of their faces.

The core of religion to me is beauty with no limits. It brings me to tears on a regular basis. But what mankind has made of it should not be mistaken for divine.