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Comment by JeffSnazz

1 year ago

> I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.

There are plenty of philosophers that rejected the idea that objective consensus is possible, even more so when faced with assigning a truth value to arbitrary phrases. Off the top of my head, both Hume and Kant noted the impossibility of true posteriori certainty. You're quite correct that this is well-tread territory, but you're wrong to think that there's some widely agreed-upon, well-defined theory of truth or knowledge.

Pragmatically, we're completely immersed in floating signifiers and appear to rely on them for fundamental communication, so I'm more arguing for a move to discussion of degrees of certainty & consensus rather than a binary understanding of knowledge.

(...and this is even before diving into gettier problems!)