Walls are solid; fire burns; knives cut

* As we move through our daily lives, we very rarely question the epistemological status of those things we take to be more than just probably true: walls are solid; fire burns; knives cut; jumping of a cliff will cause serious injury; it hurts more to be hit with a rock than with a violet; rain is wet; heat cooks food; aeroplanes fly because engineers designed them according to various physical laws (not magic); there is no little gremlin inside a radio set; and so on.
* We hold beliefs of this kind in a ‘they are true all the way down to the bottom’ sort of way. So for instance if a friend from another culture offers to apply a lighted match to our face, because in that other culture fire does not burn, we will not light up with smiles and eagerly accept. This is not because it might turn out after all that there are facts of the matter about fire and human skin, it is because we already know damn well that there are, and we know it all the way down.
* Beliefs that we think really certainly true, rather than just probably true, trump other fuzzy, may be true, may be false beliefs we hold. Thus, for example, the person who sort of believes that homeopathy might be true in a spiritual kind of way will choose standard, non-‘alternative’ painkillers, for a third-degree burn.

uit: Why truth matters - Ophelia Benson en Jeremy Stangroom


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