any conceived notion can be doubted

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slowmutant sez:

Any conceived notion can be doubted. Any idea can be challenged.

This applies to everything, every thought anyone ever had on this Earth.

Knowing, not-knowing ...

Believing, not-believing ...

Thinking, not-thinking ...

Feeling, not-feeling ...

Hmph. The Christian faith is spit upon while L. Ron Hubbard keeps winning converts.

I'll agree with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument

Because if there are infinite number of propositions to be justified, for anything and we cannot comprehend all of them, why not doubt or believe anything?

Sure.

But that doesn't mean that the doubt, or the challenge, will make the same amount of sense in every case.



Yeah, life is tough. People dare to criticize Christian nonsense, and other forms of nonsense are allowed to exist.

I have a feeling that you and I are going to intensely dislike each other.

Don't be so sure.

I hope I'm wrong.

Have I insulted you?

All ideas and notions should be challenged and tested to see if they have any merit.

Blind faith is no faith at all. Without a factual basis there should be no reason for it to exist.

As for Hubbard, there are people who actually believe him. To me it seems a fad, a powerful and dangerous fad, but something which exists because of its novelty.

Certain believed notions have truth but no real basis in fact. Do I belief blindly if I have religion? Faith is not factual observation, so I will concede that but only part way. My faith involves things invisible and unseen and taken-for-granted, but doubt and the act of doubting is actualy a healthy sign that one is not completely brainwashed.

The only people who have zero doubts about their beliefs are extremists, zealots, terrorists. Do you agree parakeet?

But how do we assign merit? That itself regresses to something we have already called meritorious? Where does that get merit then? And the thing before that? And before that even? In order to come to a conclusion there must be a final point, but logically there is no final point, therefore nothing can be determined.

But his point is that *anything* can be challenged. How do we assign factual basis without a notion of how factual basis should be assigned? An epistemology in other terms? If we cannot find an epistemology then facts cannot be determined and thus all faiths are blind.

All people have zero doubts about what they actually believe, however they may have plenty of doubts about what they've been taught. Depends mostly on background I think.

Extremists: religious ones or philosophical ones? Extreme thinking is good in some cases, but not all. If you want to be consistent sometimes this is the only option, whether it is fully believed and accepted or not.

Zealots: are you referring to people who would die rather than reject Jesus or the first century Jewish sect which committed suicide at Masada rather than let the Romans get to them or is this a more generalized diminutive by-word?

Terrorists: growing up on State sponsored Islamic propaganda, I'm fairly certain that they have few doubts about their cause.

Regress methodology may be useful for the theoretical, but what about the practical?

Who says that the practical is really separate from the theoretical? If things are different in practice than theory then we have bad theories, and if our theories are bad then we need to find out what the flaw is, and then come up with new theories to bypass this flaw.

Theoretical: you seek a perfect model of explanation.

Practical: you use a working model.

E.g. Bohr model compared to the Quantum mechanical model. The Bohr model, although technically not valid on all points, yields usable and accurate predictions about atomic spectra and only requires a working knowledge of Algebra. The Quantum mechanical model is more technically valid than the Bohr model, yet it requires a couple years beyond Calculus just to understand the math. Which model is used by technicians when determining the elements in a substance? Many technicians with Bachelors know the QM model surely, but is it what is used? Is it necessary to use the perfect model when a simpler one does the job that you're after (in this case, determining the elements in a sample via the atomic spectra)?

This is not a physics problem though or any other problem where the framework being used is clearly defined, this is a philosophical problem where one of the issues is a lack of valid epistemological frameworks as those can be doubted too. There is nothing that can be defined as "working" as the regress argument is an argument that literally all things can be questioned.

I doubt that notion.

Or do I?

No, I accept the idea that much of what I really believe is wrong. I'm just not sure which beliefs should be examined and rejected, or how to do that.

For the last 30 years or so, I have believed that nuclear power was really a bad idea. In the past year, I have changed that belief.