Question

If someone claims that all empirical and historical knowledge is limited according to one's time and place, is this not itself a claim that has to be true independently of one's time and place? In other words, do people who make this claim not contradict themselves? do people who make this claim not contradict themselves? There is no contradiction. The proposition all empirical and historical knowledge is limited according to one's time and place is at the level that we may considermetahistorywhereas the knowledge to which the proposition refers pertains tohistory. That type of proposition is a statement in a metalanguage used for characterizing a field or branch of knowledge. In fact, the proposition would make no sense if it depended on one's time and place. That is because that notion of dependence reflects that the validity of that proposition is variable, thereby contradicting the quantifier all. One might refute the preceding paragraph by suggesting that the proposition does not constitute empirical and historical knowledge. Such suggestion implies that the set of empirical and historical knowledge and the set to which the proposition pertains are disjoint. In that case, an attempt to derive a inconsistency entails comparing apples to oranges.

Answer 1

The claim that empirical and historical knowledge is limited by one's time and place operates at the meta-level, making it a discussion about knowledge rather than a piece of empirical or historical knowledge itself. It seeks to describe a characteristic of knowledge and is not self-contradictory, as it does not suffer from the limitations it describes.

Step-by-step explanation:

When considering whether the claim that all empirical and historical knowledge is limited by one's time and place is self-contradictory, we can see that this assertion falls into a category of self-referential propositions. This type of claim is more abstract and refers to metaknowledge rather than specific empirical or historic facts. It operates at a different level, akin to a metahistory or a meta-analysis of the nature of knowledge itself, which makes it not subject to the limitations it describes. This metaposition seeks to articulate a characteristic of knowledge in general, rather than being a piece of empirical or historical knowledge that could be proven or disproven with reference to particular facts.

The idea that truth in propositions doesn't have degrees – a proposition is either true or false – is central to the understanding of this topic. To assert that the roundness of Earth or the existence of souls has a singular truth value adheres to a realist perspective. Moreover, the idea that there could be multiple truths for non-physical entities is a matter for debate among different philosophical standpoints, including pragmatism and logical empiricism, which have distinct views on what qualifies as truth.

Therefore, the claim about the limitations of knowledge does not contradict itself as it operates within a different realm of discourse that frames and interprets empirical and historical data, rather than being such a datum itself.