forum for week of 2 October

Argle may not be convinced, but chances are, unless he lives an extremely atypical life, he will accept perceptual evidence while he toils about his everyday work. The fact of the matter is, there really is no possible way to hold beliefs which allow you to interact with the world, even if it is to the most minimal degree to continue living, without accepting first that perception will give reliable results. Interactions between Basic beliefs produce actions, ie. I believe that I am hungry AND I believe that there is an apple in front of me, therefore i eat the apple, thus soothing my hunger. In this most basic case, both assumptions came from perceptual evidence ( you FELT your hunger, and you SAW the apple), and the awareness that the ensuing action had been completed also came from perception. One who wished to live under the assumption that perception was not reliable, however, would be bound to give no grounds to either of the above basic beliefs, and therefore no grounds to pursue the ensuing action. So, they'd be really hungry. I don't feel any anxiety further stating that no action, including actions where you accept or argue some kind of epistemic belief, could ever be founded on any belief that stems solely from non-perceptual reasoning. You can very well attempt to distance yourself from pure perception by claiming sanctuary in mathmatics or logic, but if you are challenged to prove that math or logic is solid, you will inevitably be forced to prove the most basic elements inherent in your math or logic through perception (that you can see that 2 + 2 is the case through the perceptual world, or that K therefore B is so because of observation of that being the case in pratise) So, I side with Bargle.