DoctorDick, assume that you are a chess master and I am a novice. My ability to play the game is directly related to the depth of my understanding of the pieces, how they move, how they relate to one another, and how they can be used to attain the goal. I appreciate your confidence in me but I'm afraid you are asking me to go bowling with a 100 pound ball. We either need to make the ball lighter or I need to build muscle mass. Have patience.
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The first step is to understand that any explanation of reality amounts to an internally consistent epistemological construct based on a finite collection of ontological elements. The question is what can we say about these epistemological constructs without knowing anything about the ontological elements. There are two “rational” statements I believe I can make without knowing anything about either the epistemological construct or the ontological elements. These are issues any “map” of the circumstance must be able to represent.
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ok. We build something epistemological from blocks made of ontological elements. It may be obvious to you, but I need an example. You will need to use an epistemological construct to describe an ontological element, right? It's pointless to proceed unless I get this straight.
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The question is what can we say about these epistemological constructs without knowing anything about the ontological elements.
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Oops, I missed that. So my previous question can't be asked or answered. And I guess that makes sense, sort of. Although, the implication is that we DO know something about the ontological elements: they are used to build epistemological constructs. We just can't describe them using something lower down in the food chain because we are assuming they are at the bottom of it. And that's another thing we know about them.
And that there is a finite number of them and that there might be more than one.
