Wow, fantastic email -- getting at the heart of some major philosophical ideas and movements. Empiricists tend to stress the role of perception/experience in producing knowledge, while rationalists tend to promoe the role of reason, often arguing on the basis of such considerations as those you mention. A couple of quick thoughts about the specifics of your message. Your example of a problematic perception (spinning cube looks like sphere) doesn't quite/fully show that perception is problematic, partly because some other perception is relevant to getting at the truth, ie seeing the cube not spinning. The rationalist might say that reason is needed to process these otherwise conflicting perceptions, but even if this so, it does seem that perception is playing a key role in generating our knowledge of the world (that a cube exists, and that, when spun, it looks spherical) -- so what you've raised is a kind of problem for perception, but not one which obviously (to me anyway) undermines the importance of eprception in generation knowledge. Second, you mention the 'gap' between reality and minds -- and probably need to say more there. Even if everything we come to know about the empirical world were ultimately, in some way, derived from perception, it remains possible that perception is 'veridical' -- gives us true information about the world -- so the sheer fact that our access is mediated via perception does not entail that perception isn't veridical, or even direct .... This doesn't fully answer your excellent question -- how do we know we have knowledge not just perception? but aims to suggest that perception may well play important roles in generating knowledge despite the two kinds of worries you raise ....

hope that helps!

best,

Andrew

Thank you for your question. This is a good one that I had not heard before. If I understand you correctly, you are concerned that the notion of omniscience is not coherent. The reason is that omniscience means knowing everything. However, if a being knows everything, then it knows what it is like to be ignorant of something. However, to do that, such a being would have to have the experience of being ignorant of something, and that in turn requires that it is, or at least has been, ignorant of something--but that contradicts the definition of ignorance! This is, I take it, an epistemological analogue of the Paradox of the Stone, namely the question whether an omnipotent being could do something it is impossible to do (like make an unliftable stone).

Someone who wants to defend the coherence of the notion of omniscience might, however, not be convinced that you've raised a compelling objection. The reason is that your objection assumes that to know what ignorance is like, you have to experience it firsthand. However, this assumption is doubtful. It may well be true that to know what the color red looks like, or how the smell of sulfur smells, you have to experience these things firsthand. However, ignorance is not an experiential notion like vision or smell. Rather, it is more like not being tall enough to reach something. Even if I am tall, and (to be picturesque) have always been, and so have never had an experience of not being tall enough to reach door handles, I know what that would be like: I can simply imagine reaching for the handle and not being able to grab it. So too, our omniscient being can imagine what it would be like to be ignorant of something: it would only need to be able to imagine attempting to answer a question and not being able to do so.

So I suspect that a defender of the coherence of omniscience might reply by saying that it's not clear that you've shown the concept to be incoherent. On the other hand, you might wonder whether an omniscient being can know what free agents are going to do before they act. (Theologians and Philosophers have worried about this one.) And you might wonder whether a disembodied being, such as God or an angel, can have knowledge of emotions and experiences, and not just knowledge of facts. For a inquiry into the latter question, you may enjoy Wim Wenders' movie _Wings of Desire_, in which an angel considers giving up eternal life in order to gain one or both of these sorts of knowledge.

Mitch Green

Isn't it just that typically not much hangs on answers about the numbers of stars, but you can e.g. ruin your clothes by getting it wrong about the paint?

But if it matters (say, to win a competition with a big cash prize), I bet you would double check my statement about the number of stars, and not just fill in what I tell you on the competition entry form. And if we are idly gossiping in the pub, and I boringly mention that the new-fangled paint that they've been advertising takes for ever to dry, I don't suppose you'd leap out of your seat to check the room I've been decorating: you'd shrug and say it was my turn to buy a round of drinks.

What you bother to check will depend not on the topic so much as on how much hangs on getting things right.

As I've noted here before, we should surely distinguish loving someone from being in love with them. I might delight in the "sheer goodness and well being of" my daughter, miss her presence, especially when I'm feeling low -- that's evidence of love, but not of being in love.

It is only too easy to be in love with someone you don't really love in Charles's sense (which is why I don't think his reply will do as an answer to a question about being in love). You can be obsessed, lustful, unable to get the other person out of your mind, your heart leaps at their glance, you are wildly jealous of glances bestowed elsewhere, but for all that you don't really care for the other in the right way, or delight in their well-being etc. ("If you really loved her", we might have to say to the man in love, "you wouldn't treat her like that.")

Being in love, as Romeo memorably says, can be a "madness ... a choking gall and a preserving sweet". Proust is depressingly good on this!

It might help to think of such faith as akin to trust. We can trust a hunch about who will win a game without knowing that we are right; and we can trust a stranger to help us without knowing that they will do so.

Some philosophers think that such trust can be reasonable because our unreflective inclinations are usually based on some information, whether or not we recognize what it is. The hunch about the winner is based on something we have observed, perhaps unconsciously; and the expectation of a stranger's help is based on some innate recognition that most people are 'programmed' to be helpful to others.

Other philosophers think that such trust can be reasonable because it tends to tip the balance in favor of the state in question -- the trusted player being more likely to win in virtue of our trust, and the trusted stranger more likely to help in virtue of our trust.

Thus, while we may sometimes trust as a way of evading either the effort or the anticipated outcome of carefully considering the relevant evidence, not all trust is evasive in this way. If the trust is based on unarticulated evidence, or if the trust helps to bring about the anticipated result, then it can be quite reasonable to trust in the absence of knowledge.