Eye view philosophy

I recently made a blog comment where I mentioned “God’s eye view philosophy,” which I contrasted with “Organism’s eye view philosophy.”  Here, I want to expand on that comment.

Roughly speaking, the idea of a God’s eye view philosophy, is that we should attempt to look at the world as we might presume that a God might see it.  It is important to note that one need not be religious to hold a God’s eye view philosophy.  It suffices to think of a metaphorical all-seeing God.  There need be no commitment as to whether such a God is possible.  One could be an atheist, and still hold to a God’s eye view philosophy.

With an organism’s eye view, we instead try to look at the world as it might appear to a biological organism.  So what we call “a bird’s eye view” would be a particular case of that, where the organism is a bird.  We humans are, of course, biological organisms.  So, in some sense, it must be that we really are taking an organism’s eye view.

Answering V.J. Torley’s questions

Over at the Uncommon Descent blog, poster vjtorley has posed “Ten Questions for Professor Coyne.”  I am not a spokesman for Jerry Coyne, and I disagree with some of what he writes.  But I thought I would try giving my own answers to those questions.  I’m pretty sure that Jerry Coyne would disagree with me on some of the answers.

Question 1 – Is science the only road to knowledge?

I’ll note that there is some ambiguity on what is meant by “knowledge.”  For myself, I would never claim that science is the only way to all knowledge, though it is an excellent way to knowledge about the natural world.  In any case, vjtorley breaks this question into several parts.

What is knowledge?

I have made no secret of my disdain for the idea that knowledge is justified true belief, as is often asserted in the literature of epistemology.  In this post, I want to say more about my own view of what constitutes knowledge.

I recently posted a parable, “The blind man and the cave” in to illustrate what is required in order to have knowledge.  To my surprise, one of the comments dismissed everything that I thought important in that parable, and insisted that knowledge is just facts.

All the blind man needs to know is WHAT he is measuring (a fact), and then know the measurement (a fact). Then the facts that he gains (height of the cave) will be the newly acquired knowledge because he understands the facts based on previous facts learned.

That leaves me wondering why philosophers seem to miss (or gloss over) what I see as important.

The blind man and the cave

A blind man is dwelling in a cave.  He is not confined to the cave.  He can come and go as he pleases.  He lives in the cave because he has found it to be a rather congenial place, a place of shelter from the extremes of weather.  Yet he is by no means a hermit or a loner.  He enjoys his frequent walks to the nearby town where he can socialize with others.  He is an avid radio listener, and he uses the radio to keep himself well up to date on the local and national goings on.