A rebuttal:
As we are both anti-realists I propose a thought experiment where we allow logic temporary validity, and for worldviews to be critiqued as concepts. If a worldview cannot accommodate this, if the authority of its claims are not logic-based, the edifice falls to the level of all ideologies, enforced by belief. (A side-note: relativism is not an ideology because it makes no claims of universality. There is no either/or, ‘things’ can be either and or).
The crux of my logical argument:
Man’s capacity for knowing exceeds the self-imposed limitations of understanding enforced by the scientific method.
K > k where k is a subset of K
furthermore
subset k is not able to deduce the value of K by means of its own processed conclusions because it is ALWAYS self-limiting of criteria. This is the tautology.
k can only speak of the k in K, or in other-words, itself. (Even if you didn't like the word 'knowledge', use 'perspective' - it is less accurate, but gives you the same fallacy).
Any attempt to reduce my argument to fuzzy metaphysics is self-indicting, because the concept of knowledge is evoked in your own theory. We both take the concept of knowledge as permissible irrespective of the fact that it implies a fuzzy notion of comprehension - we are talking about ‘knowledge’ from a human perspective are we not? If you wish to speak only of computational knowledge and dispense with Being altogether, then we can talk about the nature of knowledge within an AI computer. Otherwise, talking strictly of Being-processed information, and the capacities to intuit what has meaning, and why, there is no logical argument for k to prescribe the limits of K - it prescribes the limits of itself. Now k can contribute to a prescription of certain corporeal truisms, but every time it tries to stare into the sun of Being it is blinded.
Regarding all talk of the ‘demarcation problem of science’: the aim of that philosophical inquiry is to make a division between science and pseudoscience, the problems philosophers have come up against in doing so is including all the ‘good’ science under one methodology, here it is a question of the completeness of definition. Nothing I am talking about pertains to that. I choose the atomic approach, if you will: what essential ingredients are needed without which the bulk of science-doing cannot exist? Answer: formal system(s)-plus-interpretation. Or to unpack it clearly: the application of one or more formal systems of analysis (i.e. geometry, algebra, statistics, unified measurements, etc.) plus an interpretation of so-called ‘real-world’ phenomena. By virtue of this methodological quality of science-doing we can properly frame its proofs.
so,
EVEN if you wanted to include (what I deem) laissez-faire empiricism, i.e. being able to deduce that the sun will rise tomorrow as ‘legitimate science’ I don’t care, nor would it disprove my position. In which case I would say, fine, keep those forms of ‘science’, let that be the science you build your theory on. Everything else is culpable. Go about disproving the lack of value of any opposing theories of knowledge by using one fuzzy form of comprehension over another. The best it can do is establish some basic truisms of objective/subjective divisions, of primitive physical properties of things, it cannot claim logical dominance over parallel (i.e. non-competing) interpretations of knowing. Faith and reason are not in competition as they abide by separate means of authentication.
When one comes to accept anti-realism as the inevitable consequence of the illogical first premises of all positions, faith-based sentiments are no less true than reason-based ones. This is not an inevitable endorsement of nihilism, nor any position that insists upon ‘anything goes’ with complete freedom. Just to say that, in the absence of certainty and with what faculties of knowing at our disposal, we may self-configure.
This is my position. One chief difference between our positions appears to be that I see as nearly certain the likelihood that I am an individual, that knowing is foremost an individual process. There may be a common world out there, and by habit and empirical observation it satisfies me to behave as if there is most of the time, but the burden of knowing is individual, how I sense the world is more than by map-making, because I sense also being, emotions, that pesky humanity you talk of. It is as a human being I self-configure. I do not see the goal of living to be acquiring knowledge for it’s own sake, or to continue to make maps beyond my need. My needs are individual, human. Without certainty to bully me, I choose to self-configure away from the conclusions of what I see as an autistic impulse of man, towards a handicapped form of proof, and from that, belief of knowledge. This is not to say all of the conclusions arrived at via this approach are wrong, just unsuitably contextualized. The parenthesis of meaning too rigidly fixed. I believe individual interpretation is required, to remove the handicap of one kind of proof-making, and sense out the right measure.
Part of that right measure is the re-authenticating of any science-derived knowledge according to indwelling ethics that are individually gleaned. What I am saying is Being is not merely a quantitative piece of phenomena, here is the fallacy. Ethics always pertains to Being, there is no ethics if Being is not privileged. Otherwise, you have an ethics in service wholly of an ideology.
It seems you have lost the first premise of your argument, you have buried the Being of it, subverted language so as to limit the concept of 'knowledge' to be only computational, and have described the ethics of a robot.
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