"E. Shaun Russell" wrote:
> truly, the
> only things one can know absolutely are the things of the past...things
> that have happened already.
Possibly. But most of those are probabilistic, too. I think it's pretty
likely that Jack Kennedy was killed as a result of trauma sustained
subsequent to one or more projectiles entering his body. Further details
are hazy.
And memories are prone to category error, selective attention, etc.
Remember the old Psych 101 "banana stabbing" classroom chestnut? Holding
out for rock solid objectivity is comforting, _and_ experiential
counterexamples abound. There sure seems to be an objective reality to
me most of the time: by that I mean it's largely conservative, I can
make sense of it, and things mostly stay where I put them even when I
stop thinking about them for a while. And I do like those properties of
this "reality" dingus. But I know what a good liar humans can be. :) The
ability to nominalize is the ability to distort. I see no evidence of
nouns in nature. And verbs are pretty nominal, too.
"Know" is a state of mind, and a funny one at that,
MMB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:39 MDT