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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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the person I was responding to was making a positive claim without proof

Incorrect. They were making a negative claim. That is a statement about the nonexistence or exclusion of something. Saying something is impossible is not a positive claim, it is a negative one. By definition.

Ross should have responded that both of them had an obligation to believe whatever the evidence said at this time.

And Ross would be mistaken, clearly, as being wrong in a context that gave you good reasons to think your error was the truth is still being wrong. At least in the absolute terms we speak of here.

What Ross should have said is that this is our best approximation of the truth. And that operating under one's best guess is reasonable.

That we might update our knowledge doesn't mean we can't have it, as far as I know.

Oh but it does mean just that. What you think is knowledge isn't knowledge. It's a model. The map is not the territory.

I don't understand how you wouldn't be approximating truth by doing that.

You would, but there is no other possible thing you can do.

Incorrect. They were making a negative claim. That is a statement about the nonexistence or exclusion of something. Saying something is impossible is not a positive claim, it is a negative one. By definition.

Okay, fine. They were making a claim without evidence. There you go. I don't know what the point of this philosophical discussion is, it seems to be fairly trivial.

The point is that you seem to have variable geometry skepticism and it's not a coherent position to hold.

Making negative claims without evidence is perfectly rational in an empiricist framework. The burden of evidence is on positive claims.

As you would have Ross say it is your duty to believe that things are impossible lest they have been demonstrated to be possible. And one doesn't get to escape this just because the belief is inconvenient.