Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 01:23:11PM -0700, JS Bangs wrote:
> This statement itself is an assertion of epistemology.
True enough.

> You believe  photographs to be generally reliable, unlikely to
> be faked and difficult to fake if they are, and to always give
> an accurate portrayal of the thing that they are purported to
> depict. The existence of Adobe Photoshop has
> disproven all three of those assertions, and even before digital
> photograph altering there were plenty of convincing ways of faking a
> photo--and I'm not just talking about the blurry Nessie on a lake photos.
I'm not asserting that photographs aren't easily faked.  I've
made some pretty convincing fakes myself, and I'm not even that skilled
with Photoshop.  But yes, photographs are nevertheless generally
reliable, as a statistical thing.  Not many people modify photos with
the intent to defraud, and fewer of them do so convincingly, and
besides, there'd be little reason to fake the eruption of a volcano.
And so on.  Plus you have a preponderance of people who've seen the
evidence firsthand, not just a select few who wrote about it and
passed nothing but their words down to later generations.

> The point is that deciding what does and does not count as reliable
> evidence is a subjective and non-scientific process. Science itself has a
> particular set of epistemological criteria, as do religions (each religion
> has their own), as does law, etc. You can apply the criteria of one realm
> to another realm, but the results are generally meaningless.
Thank you.  The fact that there are different criteria being applied is all
that I was trying to say.  That is the distinction between what constitutes
"religious" teaching and what doesn't.

> The absolute hegemony of the scientific viewpoint makes this somewhat
> difficult, though, since religious people often wind up mistakenly
> applying scientific principles where they have no relevance.
Well, Creationism is precisely a case of folks trying to apply
religious principles to science.  So I'd say fair's fair. :)

-Mark

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