Quote:
Originally Posted by arkain101
I am not sure why you call this utter nonsense, I would be interested to hear your explanation.
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Concepts are human constructs and, by definition, are meaningful. They are also shared. It is by associating words with the underlying concepts that we communicate. Therefore, concepts are, by definition, knowable. Also it is true, in a sense, WHY they are knowable, because we construct them to be so. So, there is an a priori reason why (using Schopenhauer's terminology) we can say "Of everything that is, it can be found why it is".
However, to analyse the relevance of this statement to physical reality, we need to break it down into two statements:
a) Everthing that exists physically is knowable. And...
b) It is possible to know why everything that exists physically is as it is.
Unlike concepts, there is no a priori reason why statement (a) should be true of physical reality. Also there is no way of knowing whether it
is true, since we can only know that which we can know. I.e. If there were something that exists that
is unknowable, we would not know it! So statement (a) fails.
Statement (b) automatically fails, because it is dependent on statement (a). However, it also fails in its own right... In everyday language the word "why" is often used when we actually mean "how". "How" is a scientific question. We can ask, "how is snow made?", and give a scientific answer. But the answer to questions like "why does the universe exist?" is bound up in our belief systems. By definition, belief systems are unproven, because, if they were proven, they would be facts, not just beliefs. Hence it is impossible to know "why everything that exists physically is as it is".
So both statements fail, both independently and together.
