Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
First, yeah, the worms are artificial, as are all human concepts. If you notice the way I phrased my comment - "...that any human can know "truth"" (emphasis added) - it was aimed in a very particular manner based on, yes, artificial constructions . If I wanted to be really technical about it, I would have written "know and intelligeably communicate", but "know" is the short hand reference.

Basically, they highlight one of the quintessential problems with all human systems of communication, which is that we build these systems using fuzzy sets since it is actually impossible (or has been to date), to build an exact, non-fuzzy, symbol system that accurately reflects our experiences in reality and allows us to precisely communicate them to others.


If a man smokes by himself, is he really smoking?

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This reminds me of a debate I once had with some friends. We started off with Tarski's (semantic/correspondence) definition of Truth ("Truth is that which corresponds to an objective state of affairs" if I recall rightly), got stuck on how exactly to "objectively" apprehend a "state of affairs" (Husserlian "bracketing" didn't help) and went on to Hume and the problem with objective knowledge per se (empirically speaking) to Heidegger and the "Tradition" (phenomenologically speaking) which led us to Peter Winch, Sapir & Whorf, Charles Taylor (not THAT Taylor), and, of course, Kuhn. Strangely, this kind of discussion almost always occurs whilst we/I am smoking. What the hell do they put in those things? (Although I personally roll my own...with liquorice rolling papers).