"In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers."

-Aron Ra

I don't know.

Smug answer out of the way, I think we can have certainty when it comes to abstract concepts (I'm absolutely certain that if A=B, and B=C, then A=C). I don't think we can have absolute certainty about the external world because we can always collapse into solipsism.

Does anyone "Know" anything with absolute certainty?

Yes, I know one thing:

But isn't the whole point we can never know A?

Let alone B & C

The only thing I can know for certain is that I'm a conscious, ie. aware, being. Its possible that I'm the only conscious being in a self created virtual reality simulation called the universe. Although I don't believe this is true, I can't say for certain that its not. In that regard, the only thing that is so called real is my own aware presence, ie. soul, spirit, consciousness, etc.

I can if A has some esoteric definition that I give to it. It's when I choose to apply those definitions to something in the external world that I'll lose certainty.

I agree with everyone in the thread. Only analytic propositions can be shown to be absolutely true, no synthetic propositions can.

What is the difference between something being true and absolutely true? Also there is a difference between something being certain and us being certain regarding it..

I suppose there is no difference. But, using absolute implies your convictions are without error.

Then you are using certain as a psychological rather than epistemic term. It is whether the subject is certain P rather than it is certain P.

Also there is a difference between something being true and us being justified in believing it is true, lots of synthetic propositions are true, the question is to what extent our belief in them is justified. I think the quote from the OP reflects the kinds of mistakes that people make when making claims about knowledge who rely on an intuitive analysis of knowledge rather than one that actually considers the wider conversation.

Also people getting hung up on whether they can be certain that something is so is pointless when they rely on something being so all the time.

There are no synthetic propositions that you can demonstrate to be true in this context. You have to make some sort of assumption on any claim you make and you could always theoretically be wrong. This is about some ones degree of certainty not if they are justified in believing something.

You may want to be clear, a persons degree of certainty is not an epistemic state but a psychological one, this does not speak to whether a proposition is in fact true.

However if you set the context so high that I need to exclude all ordinary contingent propositions then you regress into scepticism but if I can't be certain that I have hands for instance then epistemic certainty becomes uninteresting.

Consider the law of non contradiction, this is an analytic truth right either P or ~P has to be the case, what happens when you apply this to ordinary propositions, either a proposition is true or it's negation is true, so the proposition has a truth value.

I know the Chicago White Sox won the 2005 World Series. Can that be disputed in any way?

Yes some radical sceptical hypothesis could be so constructed that your recollection of the event and evidence of it is all some elaborate trick being played on you by some evil demon or mad scientist.

I suspect a lot of people who make claims such as those made in this thread regarding what we can and can't know haven't really considered the implications of their position nor the wider conversation of scepticism.

I don't know why some evil demon or mad scientist isn't tricking me into thinking I binked a slot machine for $500,000. I'd rather be living that false reality than my present one.

Guys did you know that our brains work as a receiver? I just saw it in a documentary, I'm not gonna try explaining because the video does a better job at it but think about it.. If our brains are receivers then where are we getting the magic from? Think about how super advanced our bodies are, the cells and sub-atoms and how everything depends on eachother and that's it's a mathematical impossibility that we should exist if it was by random chance... There most definitely is/are gods out there and they might just be walking on our earth among us if you think about all the weird things happening thoughout history.

Whether it matters that I can be certain of something is different to whether I can be certain at all.

I agree that it doesn't matter because the world I experience may require me to act as though I have certainty. In this regard, I consider it similar to free will discussions (I act and feel as though I have free will regardless of whether I do).

I would define certainty as something like "A proposition which is both true and for which I can have no doubt". As I said before, as long as we face the problem of hard solipsism, we can't reach this standard for propositions about an external world. No, this doesn't trouble me in daily life.

I don't think the world you experience does require you to have certainty, but I think it's important to differentiate certain in its psychological form from its epistemic one. Consider the relationship between a subject S and a proposition P

S is certain that P refers to S's psychological state
It is certain that P refers to the epistemic status of P

When you define certainty in terms of

"A proposition which is both true and for which I can have no doubt"

If we can't be certain how can we know it is true? The first clause looks circular. If we look at the second clause the I it is a reflection of your psychology. So you need to depersonalise it and drop the first clause so something like.

"Something is certain if it is beyond doubt."

But then it's not clear that this only applies to analytic propositions, if we can legitimately doubt there is any external world then we can doubt whether or not the laws of logic are in fact indubitable. This may be controversial but then we have examples when philosophers have denied that logical propositions hold. Consider that the law of transitivity and the principle of closure for knowledge have both come under attack from philosophers.

via Imgflip Meme Maker

now the White Sox scoring 19 runs tonight vs the Jays is a mathematical impossibility.

idc how bad their pitching is.

Your white sox example requires assumptions. So yes, there is a chance you could be wrong. For example, you have to assume you're not living in some kind of simulated reality, you have to assume your senseswork correctly.. etc..

The law of non contradiction is a analytic proposition. not a synthetic one. So it doesn't matter how you apply it to existential reality because all you are doing is ruling out examples based on what you already believe to be true.

I can give you examples to where the law of non contradiction could apply to an analytic proposition and still be wrong to a synthetic one.

my White Sox example was a joke.

It wasn't you I was addressing. Sorry, I should have put "" tags.

thanks for clarifying