Danny:
a) The scientific method explicitly relies on experimental fact to DISPROVE FALSE statements. In science you never have “truth”.
This is moronic. You contradicted yourself in the first two sentences. First you say that science disproves false statements, then you say that in science you never have truth. But it’s a fact of logic that proving a statement false ipso facto proves the negation of that statement true. If you can prove something false, you have truth.
Certainly it is not arrived at by “reason”.
Bullshit. All scientific truth is arrived at by reason. Why don’t we believe that the world is flat? Because we have learned certain facts that logically contradict the proposition that the earth is flat. But we can only perceive that logical contradiction by reason. Without reason, we wouldn’t be able to see anything as proof or disproof of any proposition whatsoever, in science or any other field. All intellectual activity relies on reason.
But hey, maybe you do science without reason. You sure argue that way.
b) Mathematical “truth” IS contingent. It depends on the axioms you choose.
That’s not what it means for a truth to be contingent. The point, which went over your head, is that mathematical truths are not subject to disproof by physical, experimental evidence. There’s absolutely no possibility that 1+1=2 will be disproven by some scientific experiment. That’s because they are arrived at by pure reason.
But hey, if you want to believe that math is “pure cacophony” (the original claim) because you can use different axioms, you’re free to do so. Just keep in mind that the same must then be said of all scientific results that make use of math.
c) We can measure “truth claims” against experiments. Some survive, some don’t.
Like most materialists, you seem to have some sort of mental deficiency that prevents you from being able to easily conceptualize outside the material domain, so you completely missed my point. Let me break it down for you:
It’s impossible to “measure” a truth claim. What does a truth claim look like? What color is it? How much does it weigh?
All meaningless questions, because propositions (which is what truth claims are) don’t have physical properties. They have the property of being either true or false, which isn’t physically measurable. Instead, we must evaluate propositions using our reason.
Therefore, a truth claim like “Truth claims arrived at from pure reason are pure cacophony” is self-stultifying, because in order to make it, you must evaluate all possible truth claims that can be arrived at by reason, and evaluate them by reason.
d) And here we have the full demonstration of your ignorance of logic… not being to say something is TRUE is not the same as saying that you cannot say something is FALSE nor that in that case everything is somehow “equally true”.
See above. You are simply wrong as a fact of logic. Saying that P is false implies that !P is true. Don’t deem to lecture me on logic when you don’t even have a solid grasp on the Law of Non-Contradiction.
And nothing you said here even touches on what I pointed out in point D. The point was that, in order to say that scientific truth claims are better than other truth claims, or that some truth claims are false, or that everything is not “equally true”, or anything else about truth at all for that matter, you have to implicitly assume that there is such a thing as truth.
But truth is just as invisible as God, there’s no experimental evidence for its existence, and its existence is known only by rational intuition.
So here we are treated to the spectacle of Derbyshire, JA, and you all prattling on about how truth claims derived from rational intuition rather than science are relativistic and worthless, even as you continuously talk about truth – the most intuitional concept of all. To someone who actually has the requisite knowledge and reasoning ability to see the error, you look like an ignorant lot of buffoons.
