I like what you said there, and I agree.* "Everybody is a
Universe in his or her own right" and the past being
discoverable by histories and trusting the authorities who give
us the histories while also trusting our feelings of "this
doesn't seem right/logical/etc" - to help spark an
investigation. Of course, the idea of questioning via skepticism
is a part of our cultural history, so for us it becomes an
expectation of "this is how to do things right". Our received
cultural norms include many of the philosophies of the ancient
greeks, melded together through the centuries and modified in
various ways. Skepticism is a big one.* Modern versions of
Aristotle's logic formulation is another... although that's been
chipped away since the 19th century to include some form of the
"middle", although his Law of Excluded Middle still dominates a
lot of our assumptions (that there's nothing between true and
false - it can be thrown away or negated somehow). My tendancies
are to take the received stories (History), especially those of
philosophies that we have received that have shaped our society
and culture as it is today (sociocultural) - and then apply the
best of our cognitive science if possible (discoveries in
neurology, taking into account historical context of some of the
assumptions of course) - and THEN consider ideas on their own
merits if they survive. I'm perhaps a form of
deconstructionalist / constructionalist - not really sure, or at
the very least, in the school of skeptic.* I don't necessarily
entirely trust empirical data, but sometimes it's the best we
have - as long as we take into account sociocultural biases...*
yet even more prominently I don't believe any of the methods we
use or the ideas that we have about the nature of reality "fell
from the sky" or are "simply obvious" or self-evident. Rather
(going back in a circle here) - they're a product of the
historical context they came out of and can't be divorced from
that entirely.* Otherwise, we can easily get lost in our
armchairs of speculation and get lost in the ether of pure
mathematics, pure reason, pure-theology - whatever the system of
platonic ideals happens to be.
