If it provides evidence of how to make arrows and whether this is a good idea - eg like gun stats showing you're four times more likely to be killed by one if you own one - and what ways of living in tribes work best, it is scientific. If it doesn't, it isn't.
OK? So what? Where is this going? If you mean that sometimes people can find information and data in myths, I agree and have never claimed otherwise. This is not the point of the disagreement.
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Maybe a myth mentions that a certain war happened in a certain place and archaeologists use this as a starting point for seeking evidence for it. This is not what is being criticised as 'the affective reality of the mythic world,' is it?
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I'm saying it isn't just a question of information that may or may not be verified (scientifically), but of knowledge that may or may not be true (where truth is not just scientific). The opposition between the true and the meaningful cannot be consistently maintained.
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I don't know what that means but I am bored now so I will leave it here.
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My initial point was that Dawkins defines truth narrowly as verifiable information, and that it is only by keeping that narrow definition that you can oppose truth and meaningfulness. Truth, though, does not just refer to scientific verifiability. But OK: I'll stop boring you.
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Well, yes. You can assert that 'truth does not just refer to scientific verifiability' and other people, like Dawkins and like me, will say that is the whole problem. Calling things which have not been established by evidence 'truth.' That is what we are criticising,
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If you say you use the word 'truth' to describe things which have been established to be true by evidence and to describe things which have not been established to be true by evidence, I can only ask you to consider not doing so, particularly with post-truth problem going on.
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Your point that Dawkins calls things true when this has been established by evidence did not really need to be made because that is not at all ambiguous. The difference is that I think he is right to do so and you think he is wrong.
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He's not wrong. I believe in science. The discussing you and I are having isn't scientific but philosophical, yet it's still a question of evidence, but not scientific evidence. And we are concerned with agreeing or disagreeing not about what is meaningful but about what is true.
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I really can't put my position across any more clearly than I have. You can either address it clearly as it is or not. You have chosen not and I have things to do.
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