What kind of things do we actually know about teapots?

Question

This question is not meant to deal with the religious side of the Teapot (or FSM or the Invisible Pink Unicorn), but rather the inherent epistemological claims and their export to other areas of knowledge.

With respect solely to the epistemic;

• By which methods is it possible to evaluate a claim about a teapot in a place that neither I, nor any other person, nor any possible current technology can access?
• What kinds of claims to knowledge can be made about such a teapot?
• How can these types of claims and the consequent claims be exported to a conversation about something else?

Answer 1

The first sort of thing we know about the teapot is owing to the logical constraint of inaccessibility: we know we can't know it, that any instance of learning associated with it must be causally disconnected from us and anything we can conceivably learn. It's absolutely external to our configuration space; there isn't a straight pathway through the world to such a teapot. But what does this mean?

One way to think of this is the problem of entanglement. At some fundamental level, any component of anything that's ever been interconnected "remembers" the other components, can theoretically be affected by its behavior independent of time or distance. So, the kettle can't be entangled with anything that could then be entangled with us.

We could propose perhaps that the kettle is in another cosmos; at any rate, somewhere radically inaccessible. But once granting the possibility of gaining knowledge about some theoretical larger metaverse, a "truly" inaccessible teakettle then would have to be not only in an entirely different cosmos than ours, but outside of any cosmos that could be conceivably interconnected with ours at any point.

I sense that we may already be straying beyond the bounds of your question, but I would speculatively suggest that the kettle would ultimately have to be considered as a kind of virtual particle. The kettle then would have to be walking a vacuum diagram -- somehow travelling backwards in time to causally found itself -- in order to truly minimize access.

Is it possible any longer to evaluate any claim about such a kettle? On my reading, no claim to knowledge can reliably be made -- except for our knowledge that it is outside of our knowledge-context. There amounts to a kind of fundamental paradox in making a claim to such "external context knowledge" as any in-context justification is impossible. The only justifications would also be external, and they in turn could not utilize any in-context justification. Indeed, the only way to justify this knowledge would be to render it in-context -- to directly demonstrate the inaccessible kettle.

Answer 2

There is a principal in quantum mechanics that states that if you can't measure it then you can't talk about it, unverifiable claims are nothing more than speculation. In linguistics the research about origin of language fell into the category of neither being provable nor refuted.

However just equally valid view point would be : Just because we can talk about pink unicorns it doesn't mean we can use them to pull a cart or having a stable of pink unicorns to be less or more meaningfull than one.

But yet pink unicorns do find a use in children stories after all.