My thoughts on epistemology
Here are my amateur thoughts about how we come to "know" things, and what it means to say that you "know" something is true.
I have "thoughts," and I have a "memory" of what I think of as being "the past." I have perceptions, information coming "in" by sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. That appears to be all that I have.
It seems that my project is to come up with some hypothesis which explains my thoughts, my memory, and what my senses report.
I cannot assume that my senses give me some accurate reports about the outside world. My senses report what they report, I have to figure out what to make of it, not just take them at "face value."
So what sort of explanations can I come up with to explain my memory, and my perceptions, and how can I tell a good explanation from a bad one?
One thing which should be noticed here is that my perceptions, my "sense data," and my memory, since they are all that I have -- there is nothing else which I have in my possession to consider -- are not reliable but they are authoritative. My project is to come up with an explanation for these things.
"Reality" is to me the sum total of my thoughts, memories, and sense data. There is no other reality which has some meaning. (If there is, I have no access to it, so it is a bit pointless to talk about it, until it impinges upon me through my senses, and it is only at this point at which this previously unknowable external "reality" began to adheres to my already stated definition of "reality.") What that means is that if there are posited some things whose very existence is unknowable, then for any meaningful sense of the word "exist," these things do not exist. Some critics may suppose that it is possible that there is some external inaccessible truth which my epistemology discounts as "non-existence," but this complaint is mere complaining. If those things are "un-get-at-able," then we can never know about them, and positing the possibility gets us nowhere. We must work with what we do have, and all that we have is our sense data, our thoughts, and our memories.
How to tell a good explanation of my "reality," from a bad one?
A good explanation should provide good predictions of future sense data, and should not provide wrong predictions about future sense data. That is it.
One explanation stands out as being particularly good at predicting future sense data. That explanation is the near universally accepted one, which is that there is a "real" world "out there," made of matter and energy, of which we are made.
What is the point of all this? Some would accuse me of having
faith -- of believing to a degree of certainty unwarranted by the
available evidence -- that there is a "real world" out there, and that
solipsism isn't true. To them, I say my senses are authoritative
not reliable, as they are all that I have to go on. I hold
the notion that there is an outside world, and that I'm not a brain
in a vat only provisionally, and because the "outside world" hypothesis
is more parsimonious than solipsism, which posits another different
outside world which contains a simulation of my posited "outside
world."