Posted by alexandra_k on November 28, 2004, at 23:30:24
In reply to Re: Faith, posted by Jai Narayan on November 27, 2004, at 8:41:22
Thats lovely Jai.
I guess I was thinking that traditionally philosophers searched for the meaning of notions such as 'truth' 'knowledge' 'faith' etc etc by trying to analyse the concepts into their necessary and sufficient conditions.
But then we got sick of that after a while....
We just couldn't find them for the majority of our concepts, and some of them seem to lack them as a matter of principle (sometimes there is even a genuine indeterminacy there - is a chair with a leg knocked off still a chair (a broken one) - or is a three legged chair a stool?)Everyone will probably be pleased to know that the general verdict seems to be 'who cares?'.
It doesn't matter that we cannot explicitly provide adequate definitions of such notions.
They are good enough for our everyday purposes... Maybe our understanding is implicit rather than explicit...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:419358
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20041120/msgs/421630.html