Friday, February 9, 2024

Dispelling epistemological confusions

Modern convoluted treatments of the concepts of analytic, synthetic, necessary, contingent, a priori and a posteriori, a mixture of epistemology, logic and metaphysics,  seem to be hopelessly muddled and should not be taken too seriously.

Rather we put forward the following division of knowledge. Logical knowledge consists in statements of the form: in axiomatic-deductive system A expression B can be derived.  Evidential knowledge takes the form:  A consists in evidence for accepting axiomatic-deductive system B (or even just a sentence D) as valid in domain C. These are quite distinct kinds of knowledge.  The first kind is absolutely certain, verifiable, necessary and non-trivial. The second kind is prone to error but equally important, non-trivial and both  'investigable' and epistemically 'enhanceable'.  Leibniz's approach wins.

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