[Letum]

Originally Posted by Digital_Trucker

My point was not to infer that belief = truth = reality. My point is also just as irrelevant as any attempt at "solid and rational justification" of anything without all the facts (which we will certainly never attain).

Well, this:

Originally Posted by Digital_Trucker

It wasn't that long ago that reality was the Sun revolving around a flat earth.

Did seam to infer that you considered reality and belief to be the same thing, but I shall put that down to a mix up of words/meanings if that is not what you meant.


I agree that we can have no direct experience of external reality and any
knowledge about an external, non-phenomenal/non-nominal reality requires a
blind acceptance of several axioms needed to provide a foundation for any other
useful "facts". I would also agree with you if you put it to me that many of the
axioms that are taken most for granted (i.e. that our senses are effected by
an ontological world or that space exists in three or more dimensions) are
arbitrary and no more than beliefs as is anything that is built upon them as you
pointed out.
However, I claim there is one foundation we must take as given; our rationality:
our ability to process information in a way that corresponds to reality to some
extent. Of course, you could deny that we can take our rationality for granted or
claim that it has no correspondence to reality, but to do so with a rational
argument would be more than a little ironic, if not paradoxical.
Given that we posses rationality and can apply it to our arbitrary or
hypothesizes, we are able to determine which of those beliefs is most rational
and therefore which corresponds best to reality. In this way our undeniable
rationality gives more (although not, I concede, perhaps total) justification for
the beliefs we hold wich stand up to it.