phyllo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 3:20 pm
I think that many people don't realize that events are not conducive to scientific demonstrations.
And then: things/entities are not easy to distinguish from events. A perons is an ongoing event for itself and a periodically occurring event for (some) others, for example.
What we have are one off events where most information is not saved for subsequent review.
There is no repeatability.
Yes.
The expectation that there is one thing that all rational men and women are required to believe is completely unrealistic.
Yes
In terms of the cat, there are at least 3 rational accounts ...
1. There was a cat on his lap.
2. He hallucinated a cat.
3. He is lying about the cat.
Which one to pick?
And, of course, one need not commit to any of those. I think in general most people would tend to accept the person's account. Most people believe cats exist. Most of those people know that cats go on laps. There's little paradigmatic or practical threats in believing the person. It doesn't really matter, unless there are factors we don't know about, so why not believe it. But often it could not possibly be demonstrated.
With something like 'rape', which most people do believe happens, it can get trickier because 1) the stakes are higher and 2) we often have two accounts. For example.
Then we get to situations where there are paradigmatic differences between the discussion partners. This often has very high stakes also.
That's going to depend a lot on how much you trust him. Do you believe that he is honest or dishonest?
Has his previous behavior shown a pattern?
And if it comes to it, what your paradigm is.
But even if there was a pattern in the past, one cannot know that it has not been broken in this case.
If one selects one account, is one doing it rationally or irrationally?
I think it's knee jerk and non-rational in most cases. Just want to add that: irrational means some negative process of coming to a conclusion (defined by whatever one's judgments are), rational indicates, generally, that one has gone through some process of reasoning - attempted to use logic and consensus knowledge - and it generally has a positve connotation.
I am adding non-rational.
The problem with these terms is that they are a mix of descriptions of a process with a value judgment in each case.
I think these meanings should be teased apart.
One can use a rational process, but do it poorly, and even do it well but arrive at a wrong conclusion. One can use a non-rational process but be quite right to generally depend on that.
We make hundreds of decisions (non-rationally) when walking and driving. Quick gut decisions. Just because they are non-rational does not mean we should distrust them. But at the same time others need not assume our choices are correct. We are simply not using some verbal process of analysis which we carry out using logic and consciously sifted through knowledge.
Is it possible to suspend judgement if one interacts with him regularly?
One could, I think, if the he's a bit hit or miss in his accounts as far as we know. I think we can also have mental asterisks. Like, yeah, generally I accept such assertions from this person, but if it was a more important issue I might not, and I'm sort of aware that he makes stuff up sometimes.
That was an example, not thinking of Iambiguous as an individual, but rather just about some hypothetical person asserting they had a cat in their lap an hour ago.
If Iambiguous says he had a cat in his lap a half and hour ago, I'd generally assume this was the case. I mean, the stakes are so low. Sure, perhaps he's fooling me. Whatever. No loss.
