Thread: Are feelings and intuitions a valid source of knowledge?

Yes, all these things you say are true (maybe not all, I'd need to look it over again to say that) - but you're not answering the question. At least not in a satisfying way. And I don't mean just satisfying to me, I mean to satisfy the actual point of the original question.

The question wasn't "Do you like emotions" or "Are emotions important?"

It was "Are feelings and intuitions a valid source of knowledge?"

You haven't given any reason to consider anything derived from intuition or emotion to be validly considered knowledge. You haven't refuted any of the points brought up in the OP.

I've demonstrated - quite well - the way emotions can be distorted with the person being completely unaware that they are. How do you counter this?

You seem to be consistently trying to redefine either the word knowledge or the words intuition and emotion. They have very little if any overlap. Why is it so important for you to consider your faith and belief to be knowledge rather than just faith and belief? By saying they're not synonymous I'm not trying to degrade the value of belief and faith, Ilm simply pointing out that those things are different from what most people would consider knowledge. If you want to call them knowledge it seems to me you need to somehow present a clear statement explaining how a person can reliably obtain knowledge from such notoriously subjective and distortion-prone sources.

And by subjective I mean this - Let's say Im standing in a group of people and holding a shoe in my hand. Everyone can see it, feel it, and if we discuss it it becomes clear we all see and feel it the same way - the same colors, textures, etc. But a feeling or intuition is not like that. It's something that exists only inside one persons head and can't be shared with others directly, only through explanation.

Your trying to redefine terms without being able to justify it in any way smacks of cognitive dissonance. And the fact that you want so badly to redefine them makes it seem like you don't feel that faith and belief alone are good enough. I always thought religion was faith-based - I don't know why people now seem to want to try to justify it as being something else.

Plato famously defined knowledge as "justified true belief." I don't see how a belief in God can be justified as true since there's no possible way to verify it.


**EDIT

some people believe that objectivity is desirable in debates and is superior to subjectivity, however one way of viewing that point of view is that these people have positive feelings about objectivity and negative feelings about subjectivity.

Objectivity isn't just desirable in a debate, it's pretty much necessary. Not just because of people's feelings about it, but because a debate is the rational discussion of ideas, and if it becomes emotional then it's not a debate anymore but an argument. In a debate you need to present your ideas rationally and be able to defend them rationally. If someone enters a debate and then starts getting emotional they they've failed as a debater.