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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Knowledge of an object is not lost when the object ceases to exist, though the nature of that knowledge shifts from predication to causal knowledge.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Knowledge is constitutively relational: it requires an actual truth-maker, and when an object ceases to exist, the proposition loses its referent.
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    • 2.Bertrand Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description entails that causal inference yields only propositional description, not genuine object-knowledge.
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    • 3.What the argument calls 'causal knowledge' is therefore a category error—it is modal hypothetical reasoning, not knowledge of the object that no longer exists.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Aristotle's Posterior Analytics grounds scientific knowledge (episteme) in the necessity of its object; contingent, destructible particulars cannot anchor demonstrative knowledge even while they exist.
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    • 2.If genuine knowledge of a particular requires its necessary existence as an object, then the 'shift' described is not a transformation of knowledge but its replacement by a distinct epistemic state about universals.
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    • 3.The original claim therefore conflates knowledge of a particular individual with knowledge of its kind, dissolving rather than preserving the personal identity of the cognitive object.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.An object must be extant for us to acquire knowledge about it.
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    • 2.Once acquired, knowledge does not require the continued existence of its object.
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    • 3.When an object no longer exists, knowledge about it becomes knowledge of which causes would produce such a thing if it came into being.
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