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HE SMOKED IT TOO!->Did Bill Clinton introduced a Cigar on Monica Lewinsky orifice? - Curb your enthusiasm
Shlomo Shekelstein Published on Oct 13, 2016 All knowledge is derived from perception, and a judgment can be “validated” only by tracing it to its foundations at the perceptual level. Rationalist hold that we can deduce knowledge from concepts acquired without the help of perception, whereas empiricism holds that we can gain propositional knowledge from experience without the help of concepts. Neither is possible, while the senses provide the raw material of knowledge, conceptual processing is needed to establish knowable propositions. The acquisition of knowledge is a process of differentiation and integration of discriminating among objects of awareness on the basis of their differences, and then uniting the discriminated phenomena into a cognitively graspable whole. The process begins at the perceptual level as sensations, when entities are differentiated from their surroundings and integrated as unified wholes Attributes and actions are secondary; they make sense only as actions and attributes of entities. This does not mean, however, that entities are bare substrata underlying their attributes. There is no such thing as existence other than as some definite thing with a specific identity; identity is the form that existence takes. Hence an entity just is the totality of its attributes There are two senses of entity. In the narrow sense, an entity is an object whose unity is independent of our consciousness. The comparison of entities is similar to Aristotelian primary substances and can be regarded as the basic ontological constituents of reality. In the broader sense, an entity is anything we choose to consider apart from its surroundings, even if it has no more unity than what we give it in so considering it as when we attend either to parts of entities or to groups of entities. Entities in the narrow sense have their entity status metaphysically, and presumably intrinsically apart from their relationship to our consciousness. Entities in the broad sense may have their entity status only epistemologically, only in relation to consciousness. Their status as existent however, remains metaphysical. They really exist apart from our manner of considering them, even if they do not exist as entities apart from our manner of considering them. Our perceptual faculties place us in direct contact with reality. The objects of perception are extramental entities The validity of sense-perception is not susceptible of proof, because it is presupposed by all proof, since proof just is a matter of adducing sensory evidence. Nor can its validity be denied or questioned, since the very conceptual tools one would have to use to do this are derived from sensory data and so presuppose their validity. Hence perceptual error is not strictly possible though it is possible to misinterpret perceptual evidence and phenomena that many would regard as perceptual illusions or as correct perceptions misinterpreted like optical illusions) or as non-perceptions mistaken for perceptions like dreams
