Re: Knowledge and Belief

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

lojbab:
>Furthermore, rationality might lead to one conclusion that we are unwilling
>to accept.  I can thus know something by one epistemology, while still
>believing it to be false because it seems simply unacceptable to my mind.
>Einstein's famous "God doesn't play dice" was an expression of belief or
>rather of disbelief (belief in negation) of something he found true by some
>other epistemology.

Einstein was speaking metaphorically here. He was resisting the idea that
randomness explained the observed unpredictable variation of certain
events. He was implying that quantum mechanics is incomplete, not implying
that it was wrong. Recently, Stephen Wolfram in his book, "A New Kind of
Science", asserts that the apparent randomness is actually a consequence of
complexity, not randomness per se. If true, then Einstein was correct.

co'omi'e la stivn


Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria