>hasn’t Einstein been largely proven correct? Like every time?

Like, every single mother effin' time, even after almost a century.

Agreed, I began by merely pointing out something that I assumed was a typo or unintentional mistake, didn't really expect it to go any further than that

Scientific progress in ethics? Um... what? Last I checked ethics was a sub-field of philosophy, not science. Someone hasn't been reading their Hume, apparently.

Oh, wait, its the Ayn Rand Institute (lol), that explains a lot.

(see also: Hume, David)

>If you were to simply acknowledge that you are expressing your opinion, I think we'd have less disagreement.

I'm trying to find anything in my previous comments in this thread that constitute mere opinion, and drawing a blank, so I'm afraid I can't do that.

And I'm suspicious whether we have any substantive disagreement, it mostly looks like you're trying to argue for the sake of arguing (especially since my point was straightforwardly tautological).

>At the object level, how do you determine that you have it though? Belief is powerful, but it has limited ability to transform reality itself, it only changes perception of reality.

An interesting and productive question, certainly... but one entirely outside of the scope of my comments or the point I was making in this particular thread (which was pretty straightforward)

Sure, but once again, the point is that the case of a belief supported by sufficient evidence but for which conclusive logical proof is impossible is not an interesting or controversial case, since being supported by sufficient evidence means that the belief is epistemically justified )on any evidentialist account of justification at any rate).

What is (purportedly) tricky about, say, the problem of other minds, is that it is in dispute whether we are in possession, or could ever be in possession, of sufficient evidence nevermind conclusive proof.

>Philosophical skeptics may argue that there are no inductive beliefs (knowledge outside deductions or our direct sensations) that can be justified. For example, we don't know that we aren't brains in vats, so we can't say we are justified in believing that we are not.
>
>I argue that this level of skepticism is unwarranted if we have reasonable certainty.

Right but once again, the point of contention isn't so much whether belief is justified provided one has reasonable certainty, its what constitutes reasonable certainty in the first place (especially since "reasonable" or "rational" are often synonymous with "epistemically justified/warranted" in epistemology)- the skeptic agrees that a belief is justified if one is reasonably certain, but claims that inductive or empirical/factual beliefs can never be reasonably certain (since, for instance, we could just be brains in vats or in an ancestor simulation or whatever).

And just as an aside, epistemology seems to have mostly moved on from its obsession with answering the radical skeptic; this was the preoccupation of English-speaking philosophers in the early 20th century- so, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc- who were responding the idealists and neo-Hegelians who had immediately preceded them. But I think most people consider the radical skeptic to have been well answered, by arguments like Witt's in On Certainty for instance, and so have tended to move on to other problems.

That's not to say there's any harm in rehashing this issue, but it does seem to me that the problem you're attempting to solve has already been adequately dispensed with.

>For all propositions that exist, is there unanimous agreement on the necessary level of evidence required to meet epistemic justification?

Almost certainly not, but as I pointed out already, it doesn't matter whether there is or not.

>It is a crucially important component of your claim, so yes you do if you want your claim to be epistemically sound.

It isn't. The proposition in question is the conditional statement, "IF there is sufficient evidence for a belief, THEN that belief is justified", which doesn't require us to take any position on what constitutes sufficiency.

Since justification just is having sufficient evidence, then whatever sufficiency might be, IF you have it, THEN belief is justified, regardless of what constitutes sufficiency. Assume sufficiency to be whatever you like; no matter what you pick, it will always remain the case that if you have sufficient evidence (whatever "sufficient" might be) then belief is justified. Its just straightforwardly tautological, no subjectivity involved whatsoever.

>Moreover, the standard isn't whether there is "sufficient evidence" for a belief the standard isn't whether there is "sufficient evidence" for a belief but whether we can validly conclude a belief, which in philosophy, for inductive knowledge, we cannot.

Sure it is, at least on the dominant philosophical account of epistemic justification (which I've just been assuming for the sake of discussion).

The idea that we can only justifiably believe a proposition if it is the conclusion of a deductively sound argument is essentially epistemological infallibilism, which is highly problematic (and not widely held or respected by professional philosophers, from what I can tell) since it entails that we can never be justified in believing any matter of fact, since matters of fact can never be established as logically necessary, and would mean we are only justified in believing the tautologies of mathematics and logic and that we cannot reasonably believe any substantive propositions about the physical universe.

Which is... not a great result, especially since this constitutes precisely the sort of radical skepticism you keep mentioning that you are arguing against.

>Yet this goes at the problem of induction and skepticism in general, which argues that we should be mindful of our lack of certainty outside of a priori knowledge.

I don't really see how; the proposition in question ("if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified") is tautological, or at most definitional- it merely sets out what we mean by "justification"- and so doesn't contradict any particular view or proposition.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind, if you'd like to clarify.

>tautology: a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form
>
>The proposition is subjective - subjective matters can be framed in a tautological manner, but this does not seem to be an example of that.

There's nothing subjective about it; epistemic justification for a given belief just is having sufficient evidence for it (at least, on the prevailing theory of epistemic justification, evidentialism, which I'm assuming for the purposes of this discussion). So if you say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief" this is to say that this belief is epistemically justified, since having sufficient evidence =/= the belief being justified/warranted.

What may be "subjective" (or, at least, open to disagreement) is what one considers to constitute "sufficient" evidence for a given belief... but we don't need to adjudicate the proper criteria for sufficiency for our purposes here; if we say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a belief" then we are by the same token saying that the belief is epistemically justified, regardless of what particular criteria of sufficiency we happen to be using.

>If there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief, so much so that one can act intuitively as if it is true, then demanding impossible evidence is unreasonable skepticism.

Well, sure. But this is basically just a tautology; if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified, period. This isn't interesting or controversial.

The more interesting case is a belief for which sufficient evidence (evidence to sufficiently justify/warrant belief) is impossible to obtain- for instance, arguably, the existence of other minds.

But if sufficient evidence is impossible to obtain, then it is impossible for that belief to be epistemically justified/warranted- and if sufficient counter-evidence is also absent/impossible, then it seems only suspension of judgment is justified.

It seems to me that if the evidence required to properly justify belief in a given proposition is impossible to obtain, then the only epistemically justified position wrt that proposition is suspension of judgment, not belief (or disbelief either, assuming there isn't sufficient counter-evidence against the proposition to warrant disbelief/rejection).

On the other hand, belief in the existence of other minds strikes me as a pretty good candidate for foundationalist or hinge epistemologies, so it may well be that certain propositions (such as the existence of other minds) which cannot themselves be epistemically justified are nevertheless necessary for rational/epistemic activity in general (either as foundational beliefs at the bottom or origin of a sequence of inference/justification, or as something like Witt's hinge propositions).

>Not everyone has a moral obligation to look at all bodies of evidence for all scientific theories.

Sure, but that's not what I'm suggesting. The question is whether one has an epistemic or intellectual obligation to accept a given scientific proposal (or any proposition, in general) provided there is sufficient evidence supporting that proposal and one is aware of the evidence. The hypothetical obviously doesn't apply to situations where one isn't aware of the relevant evidence.

So again, the question is whether there is such a thing as an epistemic duty or obligation: are we under any normative obligation to accept a proposition (or scientific proposal) when we are in possession of sufficient evidence for that proposition? Or does anything go, as far as the morality or normativity of belief is concerned?

Sure, but isn't there also some intellectual or epistemic normativity involved in what scientific proposals/models one accepts, depending on the strength of the evidence and whether the subject is aware of that body of evidence?

In other words, if you're presented with a body of evidence sufficient to establish a given scientific proposal to an acceptable degree of probability or certainty, do you then have an epistemic obligation or duty to endorse/accept that proposal (albeit provisionally, pending future evidence, as with any empirical or scientific matter of fact)? Put more succinctly, are there such things as epistemic duties or obligations? I don't think its self-evident that there are not or cannot be.

Are we sure about that? Isn't there an element of epistemic normativity (both in general, and in science in particular), i.e. a duty to follow the evidence and accept the proposal or model most consistent with the relevant evidence?

So it wouldn't be a moral duty or virtue to accept any particular theory (e.g. a duty to accept, say, general relativity), only to accept theories well-supported by the evidence (and conversely, to reject theories that have been empirically falsified).