Allan Milne Lees
1 min readAug 15, 2019

--

The core problem is the undefined notion of “truth” that underlies epistemological angst. The other problem is that if we decide “nothing is truly knowable” that’s just an abdication from any attempt to understand anything which would seem to be the intellectual equivalent of remaining in total ignorance. Therefore the pragmatic approach is to assume some correspondence between the internal representation our brains make based on stimuli from the outside world and some aspects of those things being represented. It’s highly implausible to propose there is no concordance whatsoever, and therefore any concordance is a starting-point for further investigation. We’re better off, I believe, edging towards things than throwing up our hands in despair at the impossibility of ever knowing some undefined abstraction called “truth.”

--

--

Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

Responses (1)