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stumblewiggins t1_j6yhsqe wrote

Reply to comment by tominator93 in “All knowledge must be built upon our instinctive beliefs. If these are rejected, nothing is left. We can organize these beliefs and their consequences, modifying or abandoning them until they don’t clash, forming a harmonious system.” | Bertrand Russell on Epistemology by dbrereton

Yes and no. But thesis-->antithesis-->synthesis is (in my possibly flawed recollection) more about how ideas interact with each other and the world to progress human knowledge, Russell seems to be talking more about the roots of our knowledge, that at the base they aren't built on what we would call knowledge epistemologically, but on the raw and naive "instinctual" beliefs that we have.

Seems to me that Russell's point is that while these are not immutable, we can examine them and modify them, they can't be wholly removed.

In this reading, I would say it's not a bad analogy to invoke Hegel, but it is a bit reductive.

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tominator93 t1_j6zf41j wrote

Yeah, agreed that the entire article can’t be reduced down to Hegelian dialectics. Just that the last line in the header quote seems deeply dialectical in nature.

Hegel himself described his dialectics as the “speculative mode of cognition”, which seems quite close to what Russell is describing there.

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stumblewiggins t1_j6zu97w wrote

>Hegel himself described his dialectics as the “speculative mode of cognition”

Fair enough; like I said, it's been awhile.

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