virus: Re: Angelica de Meme
D. H. Rosdeitcher (76473.3041@compuserve.com)
06 Apr 97 17:44:53 EDT
Lee. D.C. wrote:
>To "know"
>something with certainty is to deny that empirical falsification of
>the assertion is possible, and can only be true of meaningless
>tautologies. Any meaningful assertion can be tested only by empirical
>falsification, failure of which increases verisimilitude, but can
>never lead to omniscience. Rand herself hand-waves the obvious away
>by calling such knowledge "contextual", but when her concept is
>clarified and reduced to its ultimate conclusion, it loses content
>by reducing the context to those conditions that make the assertion
>in question tautological.
The term 'contextual knowledge', has always implied to me, to mean being open to
revision and/or falsification. In Rand's context, the term 'contextual
knowledge' may have been used as a defense against people who claimed that it is
impossible to know anything because you can't know everything.
Also, where do pancritical rationalists get the idea that in objectivism,
inductive reasoning can be used to make universal rules? -David