*SD* said:Leroy said:Granted, however it is still a fact that you can know something even if you cant show it to be true. For example It is completely reasonable to grant something as real on the basis on a memory or a personal experience.
As much as it pains me to agree with Leroy on pretty much anything, I do wholeheartedly agree with him on this point (and this point alone so far) and this is something I've brought up before.
Can you show it to be true?
To me, with no disrespect to your good self, it looks like the obfuscation of undergraduate philosophy. It's a turtles-all-the-way-down statement.
In reality, you can very strongly believe something to be true in the absence of being able to show it to be true, but you can't *know* it in any way that could convince someone else to a reasonable degree of doubt.
For example, LEROY claims that you can 'know' something is real on the basis of a memory, whereas cognitive psychologists have shown how easy it is to contrive false memories wholesale and convince the subject that they possess those memories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
Further, a personal experience is fraught with complications. One can be mad, one can be hallucinating, one can be simply wrong.
Real knowledge has to be intersubjective, in that other people can also observe the phenomenon independently and agree, at least, that it exists. It's often been noted that were there only one remaining person on Earth, science would become impossible to conduct, because that person could suffer from delusions and confirmation bias, unable to detect errors in their thinking producing false outcomes.