In terms of science, this claim has a pretty straightforward answer. Evidence is the base of all scientific claims, and without sufficient evidence any knowledge claim is meaningless. However, what are the implications of this idea for other subjects like art, history, ethics, etc.? Do these subjects require the same type of evidence that science does? Clearly, art and ethics, subjects that tend to be highly subjective, don't necessarily require evidence for knowledge claims, do they?
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Of course they do. What would it mean to make a claim completely devoid of evidence? Do you think there is any philosopher who claims that murder is wrong, or that a work of art is beatiful, for no particular reason? |
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I agree with Michael D. and I'll go even further : arts and ethics can be philosophical objects, and as so, they are part of a science. You may not consider philosophy a rigourous science, but it is, for its strengh comes from observations, deductions and conclusions. It's not always that simple, but that's how philosophers like Leibniz built their whole theories. Read Spinoza's Ethics or his Theologico-Political Treatise, and see if his conception of politics, religion and moral is asserted without justification. |
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this is a great first question :) welcome. one of the things about philosophy is it's very hard a lot of the time to empirically test the things philosophers say. Take for example Sartre's thesis that consciousness is a palpable absence: inheriting Husserl's idea of the directed nature of consciousness (that it is only consciousness insofar as it is a consciousness of an other), Sartre proposes that it in itself is a 'nothingness', devoid of content, a 'Pierre who is never there' .. seeing as you characterise evidence as empirical facts, one thing to question would be does it do justice to dismiss this formulation merely because there can be no physical proof to substantiate it? |
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Every human endeavor is proposed and argued for from everyday reason, in the so-called arts and in so-called religion and in poetry and politics and so in. It makes as much sense to say we take a leap of faith and believe in cause and effect or in facts by a certain community thematization as to say we take a leap and consider some doctrine of revelation in so much as we are granting them a privilege: that of being considered the highest truth about our world. In the contemporary arts, practically speaking, the ability to argue and present conceptual reasons (the evidence could be what people pay, when people report liking, when they go to see, a work of art, or what they report feeling about it, or many other things)for the merit of one's work is almost the center of gravity and almost art itself: it is equivalent to a science community where the ground of the paradigm is in constant argument and opaque transformation. And it is obvious various religions are contently doing polemics, polemics in everyday speech and advanced theology based on logic, with the post-Enlightenment certainty that it is in a privileged relation to truth as scientific facts, which, after all, are nothing but a kind of dumb pointing from a ground of neutral receptivity to sense-data (i.e. theoria in the mystical, Husserlian sense of pure consciousness) at sense-images that correspond to symbols. The short answer is, it is not obvious that so-called evidence in the sciences have any special claim to content (just as in the arts we sit before a schemata of symbols called facts and then put together some technological item, a piece of art in the Greek sense, and ask if it is valuable to us, a computer for instance: what good is empty knowledge about causes and effects or blueprints for making things that we don't care about?). We only pretend that they do (have a content as evidence) by convention and long training in everyday life: go to more primordial people, they will not find such ideas valid or true as weighed by their common sense due to the fact they are lodged in a different community of shared belief or relgio, post-Enlightenment modernity is also one such community. |
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If a claim is not backed up by some sort of evidence how would people ever convince others that what they say is true? What constitute evidence may differ from one discipline to the other. If I may illustrate my point with a example. A chemist may consider the observation of a chemical reaction as pretty trustworthy source of knowledge in his field and then base his conclusions on this The ethicist may look at the effect of Nazi morality on 20th century Europe and make his judgement on Nazi morality on that. Now they both may be perfectly acceptable "evidence" in the broad sense of the word yet the type of evidence a chemist requires to accept a position and what the ethicist require may be of a different sort. My examples may be a bit simplistic but I think they illustrate my point. It is to me plain that different disciplines may have different methodologies and would in certain cases also operate under different epistemology conditions. The logical positivist does not entertain such ideas. To them the empirical method is the Alpha and the Omega of knowledge and anything that uses different means to uncover truth is meaningless. Everything that does not try and confirm its beliefs under their narrow ideas of what constitutes evidence is also discarded as a matter of principle.
As witty as such a quote surely is does he really think people who believe in God do so without any explanation or evidence as to why it is so? He may think the evidence unconvincing but that does not make it disappear for those who have beliefs contrary to his own. Also I'm left wondering as to why a person reasons for believing something has any influence on the truth of the claim. If I were to say to you that a voice in my head told me God exist would that have any influence on whether Jesus of Nazareth did in fact rise from the grave? Would this call into question the eyewitness testimony telling us so? Will this really have any influence on anything the Bible claims to be true? NO! It may just be really hard to try and convince other people of your belief if that is your reason, but still it has nothing to do with the truth of the claim. |
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It should be noted that it takes effort to assert something, so that effort must count as something. Whereas the absence of evidence asserts nothing on it's own, so every assertion should be taken as significant. To take on a belief is not trivial, so shouldn't be dismissed so casually. The confusion arises because one plays with hypotheticals ("Flying shagetti monsters exist") and thinks that because it expresses an assertion that they are the same, but they are not. One has a personal investment in it, the other does not. No scientist has risked his life for a theory, but yet people with a belief that they've seen G-d, for example, would put their life on the line. A fact that should be interesting to any anthropologist. |
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