Jun 9, 2012 -- 9:57AM, StephenK.Adams wrote:

Jun 8, 2012 -- 4:53PM, cherubino wrote:

"Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which can not tell us why we should accept them."

~Michael Polanyi

I've often wondered how to respond to that above quote, which you have put forward many times before, without success thus far.  Perhaps if you can put it in different words,( which probably means simpler words for me), I can find something from which I can respond cogently to .

Here it is in context:

"In the beginning many words were held to be sacred. The law was respected as divine, and religious texts were revered as revealed by God. Christians worshipped the word made flesh. What the church taught required no verification by man. When accepting its doctrine man was not speaking to himself, and in his prayers he could address the very source of the doctrine.

"Later, when the authority of laws, churches and sacred texts had waned or collapsed, man tried to avoid the emptiness of mere self-assertion by establishing over himself the authority of experience and reason. But it now turns out that modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man's highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies.

"What then can we do? I believe that to make this challenge is to answer it. For it voices our self-reliance in rejecting the credentials both of medieval dogmatism and modern positivism, and it asks our own intellectual powers, lacking any fixed external criteria, to say on what grounds truth can be asserted in the absence of such criteria. To the question, "Who convinces whom here?" it answers simply, "I am trying to convince myself."....

"We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.

"While our acceptance of this framework is the condition for having any knowledge, this matrix can claim no self-evidence. Although our fundamental propensities are innate, they are vastly modified and enlarged by our upbringing; moreover, our innate interpretations of experience may be misleading, while some of our truest acquired beliefs, though clearly demonstrable, may be most difficult to hold. Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which can not tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent that there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so. Otherwise, they are not even beliefs, but merely somebody's states of mind."

From Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, UChicago Press, 1958. pp. 265-7.

"This is all a question of mind over matter. We don't mind, you don't matter."

- Gunnery Sergeant Tom "Gunny" Highway (played by one Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge)

Why ask why?

It only leads to more questions.

Jun 11, 2012 -- 4:21PM, danman916 wrote:

They came to my rectory once. Sent in their head guy. I said, "I am delighted to see you. Come in if you like and we'll talk. But I warn you. By the time you leave you will be praying the rosary."... -  Cestusdei on Jehovah's Witnesses  knocking at the door of the rectory.

Haha! I remember Cestusdei and it wouldn't surprise me if they left praying the rosary.  ;)