[Confession] Inside the Mind of a Conspiracy Theorist

There is a branch of philosophy that deals with the question of 'How do you know what you know?' It is called epistemology. You can know something because it is dogma. Dogma is belief (truth) dictated by authority (the Pope in the past). You just accept it and go on your way. Today it is dictated by official stories--like the 911 official fabrication. The other way you know things is by collecting facts and putting them together yourself using logic and reason. We now call that process 'conspiracy theorizing'. It seems that we haven't progressed much farther than the dark ages, or maybe we have in the past, and now regressed back to that period.


Hatha

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Originally Posted by Hatha Sunahara

There is a branch of philosophy that deals with the question of 'How do you know what you know?' It is called epistemology. You can know something because it is dogma. Dogma is belief (truth) dictated by authority (the Pope in the past). You just accept it and go on your way. Today it is dictated by official stories--like the 911 official fabrication. The other way you know things is by collecting facts and putting them together yourself using logic and reason. We now call that process 'conspiracy theorizing'. It seems that we haven't progressed much farther than the dark ages, or maybe we have in the past, and now regressed back to that period.


Hatha

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We do call that process 'conspiracy theorizing' today, but I'm hoping that from this point moving forward, we can more formally simply call it 'abductive reasoning', because that's what it is. This is a relatively new yet rigorous method of thinking. However instead of being simply an idea within philosophical circles, we can now say that we put it to use every day, in a concrete manner. This is legitimate and practical, but until now it seems no one has explicitly stated such.

Regarding the other part of your post about belief in dogma, and how we haven't really progressed since ancient times, I'm a little more optimistic. That goes back to the other paper about the different ages. I think currently people do in fact use deductive reasoning, whereas in ancient times they did not. The pope didn't have to provide 'reasons' necessarily. Today, it is necessary to provide 'reasons'.

The issue is that the assumptions of those reasons are not questioned. As I mentioned, this is the application of deductive reasoning while ignoring the premises of that reasoning. So it is a little better than ancient times, but it's now necessary for everyone to take the next step: questioning assumptions behind one's reasoning. See the diagram below:

http://s1.postimage.org/g0549udz3/paper.png

bump........