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0:00
[♪♪♪]
0:25
[♪♪♪] ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN:<i> I'd like to know things. Big things.</i> <i> Are there multiple universes?</i>
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<i>Is consciousness only physical?</i> <i> Does God exist?</i> <i> But sometimes I worry.</i> <i> What can I know, and how can I know it?</i> <i>What's knowledge? What's belief?</i> <i> How is belief justified,</i> <i> or what validates my believing what I believe?</i> <i> And is justified belief knowledge?</i> <i> Though more technical, these questions are more disturbing.</i> <i> Must I doubt everything?</i> <i> Is knowledge quicksand? Can I find bedrock?</i>
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<i> How can I know anything?</i>
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<i> I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn,</i> <i> and</i> Closer to Truth<i> is my journey to find out.</i> [♪♪♪]
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[♪♪♪] <i> Am I serious about knowing knowledge?</i> <i> If so, I should speak with philosophers</i> <i> who focus on epistemology.</i>
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<i>Pleasantly, several participants in a conference</i> <i> I'm about to attend focus on theories of knowledge.</i>
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<i> The conference is on Theology and the Natural Sciences.</i> <i> It's called the Quest for Consonance,</i> <i> and it's being held at Notre Dame.</i>
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<i>What's more, one of the leading philosophers of epistemology</i> <i> is a professor at Notre Dame,</i> <i> the perfect person with whom to start, Robert Audi.</i> Robert,<i> Closer to Truth</i> is my passion, and for years, we've been exploring cosmos, cosmology, consciousness, brain mind, the nature of meaning, is there a God, with some of the top thinkers in the world. But if I step back from that, there's a deeper question in terms of how do I know what I know? What is knowledge?
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What is a belief in something? You're talking about epistemology as the theory of knowledge. I think it should be construed as the theory of knowledge and justification. Usually, what you know, you're justified in believing, but there are exceptions. In my view, philosophy should, when possible, defend common sense. So, I think I know a lot about my surroundings right now, perceptually. Seems to me I also remember how I got here, and I hope I remember times way before that.
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I think I know something about the future, immediately. I'm going to raise a hand to give an illustration. But even the distant future. So, how do we know? Well, knowledge is belief connected with the fact known in the right way. So, when you see a hand, the hand affects you, and if it does it in the right way, you know there is a hand before you. But it could do it in the wrong way. It should just activate a machine which causes you to hallucinate a hand just like it
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when there's actually a lead shield between you and me. So, we have to know how the world affects us to understand whether we know. I'm taking knowledge to be constituted by belief. Knowledge is always of truths or realities; belief is not. And one of our problems is to decide when we merely believe and when we know. So, if you do know the future, presumably, it's because something that causes the future event you know also causes your belief in the right way.
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You can have knowledge of the future when the evidences that connect causally with the future event also lead you to believe that that event will occur. So, if I intend to raise my hand, my intention is a kind of evidence that feeds right into my belief, making it knowledge that I'm going to raise my hand. Okay. Now, skeptics will say, yes, but there could be some interference with the causal chain. Well, there could be, but normally there isn't. and as I said, I'm defending common sense.
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Now, of course, we have self-knowledge, too, but that can be limited. So, it's one thing to say you can't be in pain without knowing you're in pain. It's quite another thing to say that you're right about all the things you believe. Some people like to whitewash their self-description, so, they take themselves to have all manner of beliefs that we may know from their behavior they don't really have. And one of the things we get at in epistemology
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and philosophy of mind is the limits of self-knowledge. We started with belief and knowledge, and the concept of justification. Justification is what makes the belief into knowledge? Well, no, because you can have justified true beliefs that are not knowledge. Bertram Russell I think had a case of someone entering a room with every expectation that the clock therein was accurate. It happened to be noon, and the clock, which was stopped, happened to read noon.
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So, the person had a justified true believe that it's noon based on that clock, but didn't know, because the clock was stopped. Right. How then do you define justification in this? Ah! Very broadly speaking, justification for believing something is a matter of having some ground that supports the proposition which you can get at through memory, through perception, of course, through reasoning. But there's a priori knowledge, which is roughly knowledge by reflection, by the sheer use of reason,
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and a priori knowledge is what we have when we have logical knowledge, knowledge of pure mathematics, and on many views, including mine, basic moral principles. Now, go to the ethical case for a minute. Everybody agrees that if you're in pain, you've got a reason to change things, to get rid of the pain. And it doesn't take much to get people to agree that once you see that others are like you, you'll see that there's a reason not to cause them pain as well.
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So, that's one of the ways we very naturally move from self-interest to altruism. The idea that there is reason, objective reason not to cause pain and to eliminate pain, that idea does not seem to me to be merely empirical. So, avoiding pain is crucial for moral standards. So, I've argued that principles like that are knowable through the use of reason. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Okay, let's see if I'm getting this.</i> <i> Epistemology is the theory of knowledge.</i> <i> Knowledge is deep truth.</i>
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<i> Belief is opinion.</i> <i> Justified belief means we have good reason</i> <i> to believe what we do, even if the belief is wrong.</i> <i> But even justified true belief may not be</i> <i> the deep truth of knowledge.</i>
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<i> I like the distinctions.</i> <i> They make me think critically about what I think I know</i> <i> or believe.</i> <i> But pursuing knowledge and belief</i> <i> seems a slippery slope to skepticism.</i> <i> I find myself starting to doubt everything.</i>
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<i>As an old neuroscientist, I know that everything we sense, think,</i> <i> or feel are chemical flows and nerve impulses in our brains.</i> <i> Perhaps I ingested a psychotropic drug</i> <i> that interferes with those chemicals,</i> <i> or perchance some evil demon has invaded my cranium</i> <i> and delights in fooling me</i> <i> by manipulating those nerve impulses.</i>
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<i>It's the old skeptical argument.</i> <i> Can I know anything for sure?</i>
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<i> I ask a philosopher of metaphysics</i> <i> who has her own inclination to skepticism,</i> <i> Notre Dame professor, Meghan Sullivan.</i>
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SULLIVAN: I'm very sympathetic with Descartes, and not so much the part where he's wondering if this is all just a vivid dream, but instead, I love this passage where he says, look, I just realized, when I'm honest with myself, there are so many aspects of my life and my thinking in which I'm deeply biased. Like, I believe things. I believe these mathematical truths, but I have no idea how I'm getting access to this information. I have these, in my case, like, things that I want
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or ways I want the world to be, and I have no idea why I want it that way, and I think it could just be because I'm wired in a certain way to form these attitudes, and not because there's anything good about them or I'm getting enough evidence for the things that I'm believing. Like Descartes, he was way too skeptical. It drove him mad. Instead, we should think like, I don't know how I'm able to perceive that you're sitting here with me. I don't know how I know that two plus two equals four.
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But come on. One of the things philosophy pushes us to realize is as we search for more evidence, we don't really have it. We don't find it. So, I find myself taking skepticism increasingly seriously, and I think this has good practical benefits. Obviously, like going full Cartesian is not a practical way to live your life. Like, if you're constantly worried every morning if you've actually woken up, that's no way to live. But maybe I should take a step back and think like,
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what would be really good evidence about what's happening in the world? Or, I study time. As an agent, I care a lot more about things that are going to happen nearby and in the future. I care a lot less about my past, and I care a lot less about things that are far away in time. Is that rational? Is it just a case that like, I think I'm not going to be the same person over time, or the past is really like, worse than the present or the future? Well, no. I don't think I've got any really good
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philosophical arguments for that. I think it's just that I'm kind of myopic when it comes to my life. I realize I've got this kind of bias that causes me to fixate on certain events that are close by and ignore ones that are really important that are going to happen to me far away. So, are these more psychological aspects of how we think, or are they philosophical foundational issues? So, I think a lot of our biases come about from two sources. One source is shortcuts.
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Like, you know, they're dispositions to form beliefs that we need to just survive in this world, and certainly our evolutionary ancestors needed. So, look, if you're constantly like Descartes, taking a step back and doubting whether your arithmetic is correct, you're going to have a hard time counting the number of predators who are chasing you back in, you know, our early formation period. Another way that bias comes up, I think, is through our emotions, especially the kinds of biases
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that have to deal with like, planning for our future or the beliefs that we form about other people, the beliefs that we form about our tribe or our country. And also, there's an evolutionary explanation for why we'd have those emotions. But now, we live in a complicated society where we don't have to make really quick decisions about everything, and these useful emotions or these useful belief-forming mechanisms that were helpful to our early ancestors might not be
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that helpful when we're engaged in really complicated planning problems, or when we're investigating, you know, really complicated truths about our world that just require a bit more distance. You said that you have a predisposition to skepticism, and I would, too. So, what are your techniques as a philosopher to get yourself out of a descent into skepticism? Sometimes you just keep going, I mean... Sometimes just to get on with life, you've got to start trusting your beliefs again.
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When skepticism can become really troubling in your own life is when the skepticism gets its tentacles into you for questions like your religious faith, like, are any of your metaphysical beliefs true? [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Yes, those are the big questions about belief.</i> <i> How can I know anything?</i> <i> How to handle the skeptical argument?</i>
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<i>Strangely, Meghan encourages me</i> <i> by expressing similar skeptical doubts.</i> <i> Her profound philosophical advice?</i> <i> Just keep going.</i> <i> But going where?</i>
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<i> Can narrowing knowledge help?</i> <i> Knowledge in science is tighter, sharper</i> <i> than knowledge in general.</i> <i>I seek a philosopher of science who limits the explanatory scope</i> <i> of scientific knowledge, Bas van Fraassen.</i> There's something paradoxical about knowledge. I would go with common sense and say we know much. But, the more you look at it, the less you see. In a course once, I had a student who said, philosophers are too skeptical.
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And I said, oh, well, you know, I bet you know a lot of things. Tell me, do you know what you're going to do this summer? He said, yes, I'm going to Hawaii for a holiday. I said, okay, and James, do you know that you're not going to die before June? ( chuckling ) And he sat back and, no, anything could happen. I said, well, if you don't know whether you're going to die before June, then you don't know whether you're going to Hawaii. And then I said, look, I played a trick on you,
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because the second question changes the context. You set the bar at a different place. So, what is knowledge appears to be contextual. And so, there's no straightforward question to what is it that we know. So, how do we apply that? Are there things that are sort of intuitively obvious, you don't even have to have any independent demonstration of but you can assume as axioms in our knowledge? Well, I would say that as a philosopher of science, I'm mostly concerned with these questions
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in the context of a scientific inquiry, and there my model would really be probability. What is more likely and what is less likely. You step outside the context of a scientific inquiry, there's a lot you know, and I would say, fine. Then let's go to different terminology. What is this experience of knowing? And it begins with acquaintance. I know you. I'm acquainted with you. All knowledge begins in experience. Secondly, as an empiricist, I put all the weight on the experience
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that gives us our data about the observable level. There you are. Here I am. Here are the pews in a beautiful chapel. This we know. There's no question. And that's where the scientist, too, starts. Yeah, but you can start going down the skepticism path. Well, how do I know that? I know that because there are light photons that are bouncing off this, and everything's absorbed but brown, and the brown hits my retina, and then that goes through the optic nerve and the lateral geniculate body
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and then into the thalamus and then into the occipital cortex, and then floating around the brain. That's how I know this is brown, but, you know, how real is that? Well, you know, if I listen to your reasoning, I think that it begins to throw doubt on the idea that I know this brown piece of wood. But how does it throw doubt on the reference of this word brown piece of wood when you were relying on the reference - in words like photon... - Yes. ...which surely is more problematic.
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How could you do that? How could you throw doubt on my knowledge of this pew by using terms whose reference is much more problematic? That's a good question, but I'm not sure that helps me get to more confidence in the brown. It makes me even more swirling around. Oh, but, you see now, I've just shown there was a problem with your argument, right? It's a problem in the argument. I'm not sure that it gives me any more confidence, because there's a causative trail here,
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that might have been illusion. - It's a false confidence. - Right. But now does that give you less confidence in this talk about photons that you engaged in? - No, no. - Oh, that's interesting. How is it possible for you to have, you know, more confidence that you know about photons than that you know about this thing here? Well, it becomes circular, because I know intellectually that science has told me that I'm not -- that this is not just a homogenous piece of brown wood
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- that is brown in itself. - Absolutely. The brown is something that I am inferring into this. And so, is that agreed that I'm doing it because I have to know what a photon is and how it works, but it seems to now suddenly be circular. Can I break out of the circularity? I'll have to say it from my empiricist point of view. What you've just described is a model that scientific psychology and neurophysiology gives us. KUHN: Correct. But what is this empiricistical take on models?
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That importance is that the real phenomena that we know directly fit in those models. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Probabilities relying on experience.</i> <i> I'm feeling woozy.</i> <i> Some God-fearing friend suggested I shift my gaze</i> <i> and look transcendentally,</i> <i> that the only way to escape skepticism of the physical world</i> <i> is to venture beyond the physical world.</i>
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<i> But what's the evidence?</i>
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<i> I ask a Jesuit priest who focuses on ways of knowing</i> <i> in science, philosophy, and religion, the Dean</i> <i>of the Philosophy Faculty of the Gregorian University in Rome,</i> <i> Louis Caruana.</i>
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As you know, when scientific mentality started growing, of course, the methods of science started having a new source of evidence that came through observation, which was there before, but then you have experimentation and predictability of these observables, and so on. Now, what is evidence? Is evidence just limited to what we can see and touch? I think the problems arise when this need for evidence, as we have in science, is extended over to religion, let's say, and theology.
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So, evidentialism is a philosophical position according to which we should not accept anything that we cannot have evidence for ourselves. And therefore, somehow, religious beliefs and affirmations are undermined in this way. The major problem with this kind of argument is that we forget other sources of epistemological justification. And one of the major sources is testimony. Even within science, you cannot have all the evidence yourself,
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even if you're just talking about perceptional experience. We need to depend on other work in science and so on. So, this idea of testimony is very important in theology. As you know, religious traditions contain epistemological affirmations by resorting to testimony. One interesting point which we need to consider here is what to do when we have counterevidence? And this was discussed at length. Some decades ago, it became quite sensational because people like Karl Popper and others
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were suggesting that in fact, a scientific theory needs to be open to falsification. And if it's not, it's not a scientific theory - unless it could be falsified. - That's the major point. Of course, if you extend that towards religion - or religious affirmation -- - It fails the test. It fails the test, and the usual conclusion there is that therefore, religious belief and affirmation of theology in general is a kind of wishy-washy line of inquiry anyway,
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so, it has to be sidelined or forgotten. Now, this kind of critique of the theological is somewhat naïve. Even within the scientific community, the idea of having just one counter-evidence dismantling a whole theory. So, we need to incorporate, even within science, the idea of holism. That means that within a theory, you have various affirmations that need other theories, and therefore, when one element of counter-evidence hits a theory on one side, you can readjust the theory on other sides
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and keep what you said as intact. So, my point is that this happens also in religion. Holism extends everywhere. So, when a believer says God loves me, and yet there is an element of counter-evidence, let's say, a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Then you say, well, if he were an honest inquirer, that person should actually stop believing in God. However, I think the same dynamics that we saw on the scientific side should in fact apply there as well. And what does the religious believer do?
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Acknowledging a kind of effective link between himself and God, he could readjust his other affirmations and try to understand things differently in his life, without abandoning that original affirmation that God loves him. If I believe in something in science, I should be able to prove it to you, but if I believe something, that God loves me or I had a religious experience, I can tell you, but that doesn't prove it to you. But you're saying the commonality is how robust each needs to be
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in terms of a holistic understanding of the theories, either in science or religion? -They are similar on that front. -On that one front. On other fronts, they are quite different, because in religion, I think affirmations are just an effective link also with the affirmations we make. And do the effective links, do they change the epistemology? Affection or emotion kind of concerns me, because that can be a distortion as well as a confirmation? That's a good point.
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However, I think the problem arises because we think that the standard model of inquiry should be science, and then any kind of other inquiries or affirmations kind of miss out on the standards of science. We should remember that there are other modes that we can use as models. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Assessing evidence in religion can seem like arguing about art.</i> <i> Everyone has an opinion.</i> <i> But perhaps just as science could narrow the scope</i>
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<i> of knowledge, could God expand the scope of knowledge?</i> <i> Take the millennia-long debate about whether God</i> <i> can be known affirmatively or only negatively.</i>
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<i> I asked the Orthodox Philosophical Theologian,</i> <i> the Classicist and Polemicist, David Bentley Hart.</i>
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David, some people tell me the only thing I can know about God is what God is not, the so-called apophatic view. All of these traditions, Christianity included, encompass this affirmation that you really can't know God in the way that you would know an object of experience, but you can know the things that are not true about God, such as composite or evil or blonde. But, you have to make a distinction there, even in these traditions, about what's being talked about.
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What you can know about God is different from knowing God. When it comes to the question of what you can know about God, Christian tradition, like the other theistic traditions, has a sphere of cataphatic knowledge, things that can be positively said. But these positive affirmations are based on the effects of the operations of God. So, you can say God is creator, because there's a creation. But then all of these traditions will say, but howsoever much you can know cataphatically,
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God is infinitely in himself unknowable because, just logically speaking, the infinite is always infinitely more. You can name him his affects and recognize that in God, those names infinitely exceed our limited understanding of them. But that's what we can know about God. All of these traditions have another way of knowing God, which is one of direct encounter, intimate union, which, say, in Christian thought, is understood as in some sense super-intellectual.
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That is, it goes beyond concepts but nonetheless is a real and immediate presence of God to the soul. So, the degree to which we can know God rather than simply know about him is a spiritual condition. The scientific approach to that would say it is not third-person transmittable. No. And it doesn't -- it doesn't pretend to be. I mean, this, the language of mystical experience is a radically intimate language. It's no more transmissible than, say, trying to explain your love for your wife.
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You can put it in words, but you can't directly communicate it. But, so what? I mean, it may be true that at the empirical level, we have these needs as the result of our social, our psychological, or physical constitution. Those are the physical correlates of our existence as spiritual beings. There's no contradiction there. It's simply the mode in which they're expressed at the level of our physical, mortal lives. [♪♪♪]
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KUHN:<i> I seek knowledge of ultimate reality,</i> <i> but what's knowledge?</i> <i> How to tease apart what is actually real</i> <i> from what I believe or hope is real?</i>
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<i> Epistemology provides ways to think about knowledge.</i> <i> What can we know, and how can we know it?</i>
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<i>Knowledge is deep, public truth.</i> <i> Belief is superficial, personal opinion.</i> <i> Justified belief means being rational in personal opinion,</i> <i> even if it's not true.</i> <i> But even justified belief that is true</i> <i> may not be the deep truth of knowledge.</i>
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<i> It gets worse.</i> <i> Skepticism casts doubt on what we can know for sure,</i> <i> if we can know anything for sure.</i> <i> How can skepticism be confronted?</i> <i> Perhaps by empiricism, perhaps by common sense.</i>
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<i>God, the ultimate, the infinite, stresses epistemology,</i> <i> testing the extremes of knowledge</i> <i> and the essence of evidence.</i>
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<i>Knowledge, carefully considered, is not quicksand,</i> <i> but nor is it bedrock.</i>
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<i> Epistemology frightens me.</i>
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<i> And I need to be fearless to get...</i> Closer to Truth. [♪♪♪]
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ANNOUCER:<i> For complete interviews and for further information,</i> <i>please visit closertotruth.com.</i> [♪♪♪]
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