On Feb 19, 4:00 pm, "Stathis Papaioannou" <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> On 2/20/07, Tom Caylor <Daddycay....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> > These are positivist questions. This is your basic error in this
> > whole post (and previous ones). These questions are assuming that
> > positivism is the right way of viewing everything, even ultimate
> > meaning (at least when meaning is said to be based on God, but not
> > when meaning is said to be based on ourselves).
>
> > Tom
>
> Can you explain that a bit further? I can understand that personal meaning
> is not necessarily connected to empirical facts. The ancient Greeks believed
> in the gods of Olympus, built temples to them, wrote songs about them, and
> so on. They provided meaning to the Greeks, and had an overall positive
> effect on Greek society even though as a matter of fact there weren't any
> gods living on Mount Olympus. Just as long as we are clear about that.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
It is a given that whatever belief we have falls short of the set of
all truth. But here we are talking about different "theories" behind
beliefs in general. Positivism is one such "theory" or world view.
This problematic type of world view in which positivism falls has also
been referred to as "rationalism in a closed system". In such a world
view there is no ultimate meaning. All meaning is a reference to
something else which is in turn meaningless except for in reference to
yet something else which is meaningless. We can try to hide this
problem by putting the end of the meaning dependency line inside each
individual person's 1st person point of view. At that point, if we
claim that we still have a closed system, then we have to call the 1st
person point of view meaningless. Or, if we at that point allow an
"open system", then we can say that the 1st person point of view has
meaning which comes from where-we-know-not. This is just as useless
as the meaningless view (in terms of being meaningful ;). This is all
opposed to the world view which allows an ultimate source of meaning
for persons. If there were such an ultimate source of meaning for
persons, then, even though our beliefs would fall short of the full
truth of it, it makes sense that there would be some way of "seeing"
or discovering the truth in a sort of progressive or growing process
at the personal level. Gotta go.
Tom
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Received on Mon Feb 19 2007 - 19:48:54 PST