An answer just occurred to me. Certainty is to epistemology as pleasure is to ethics. Ethics is the orderly pursuit of pleasure. Epistemology is the orderly pursuit of certainty. We might speak of the discipline of certainty and the discipline of pleasure.
Pleasure without discipline leads to impotence. Certainty without discipline leads to ignorance. Power results from the orderly pursuit of pleasure, knowledge from the orderly pursuit of certainty.
Ethics is not simply the avoidance of pain. Nor is epistemology, of course, the mere avoidance of doubt. On the contrary.
Friday, April 03, 2009
On Certainty
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1 comment:
Give us a more concrete sense of the context in which you're applying these terms, and I might know what you're talking about.
The problem with communists is that they rarely have their feet on the ground.
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