On this website (erisisch.de) you can find people, who'd say about themselves that they're not in the possession of truth about anything. Here you can find people, who face this world with sincerity, kindness, energy and engagement, yet aren't all that sure about anything.

We Erisians believe in nothing, we have working hypotheses, because “the knowledge […] is assumed knowledge; it's keen guessing.”¹⁾

We call our epistemological position erisianism. It manifests in model-agnosticism. That means, we have many theories about the World, some of them are more important to us than others, but we have no „right“, „correct“ or „true“ theory. This is, at the moment, the fundamental difference between the erisianism and the wide-spread religious and philosophical teachings, which see themselves as a way to gain knowledge, if not even the as the only way to find truth.

To help you gain a better understanding of the erisianism, here are the names of some philosophical positions which resemble it:

In the following, we will try to explain to you, how we come to this position. If you have questions or suggestions, you're welcome to post them in our forumour forum any time.

Sure this question has been posed to you at least once. And in most of the cases it was followed with a reference to the „only true knowledge“. A knowledge which you just didn't realise as such and which is really important for you; If you don't want to suffer from eternal agony and endless pain, that is.

How does a scientifically orientated human react in such a case? He informs himself, forms his opinion and thus becomes an agnostic.

But hasn't he missed the actual core of the question? What else falls into the realm of faith? Isn't he still, perhaps without knowing it, adherent to a subtle form of religion?

Find it out: Are you a devotee of naive realism? (translation of the quiz is in progress.)

«Who is the Master who makes the grass green?» - A Zen Koan

Do I see the same green as you do? Even more: do we see grass at all or just something that seems as such?

Maybe its like in Platos Allegory of the Cave: we're chained to a stone so that we allways look at a certain wall. There are shadows being cast on the wall. The shadows are created by things which are being carried through the cave. So we only see shadows and soon we mistake these for the things as such.

A statement about the future in the form of an enumerative induction:

Read: If the first test result to the n-th test result matches my expectations, then the next, the n+1-th test result will also match my expectations.

The problem with this is that an induction is not logically compelling. There is no evidence that a certain event will occur except the event itself. Thus there are no „determined“ rules for the induction. This is called the information additive character of the induction because the information, that the next event will match the expectations is added to the conclusion by the observer.

The clockwork analogy

Another way of illustrating this is provided the following analogy: If you presume that everything works according to logical understandable laws you could presume that the world is a big accumulation of gear wheels. With experiments and theories we try to grasp the meaning of every gear wheel. We already have some good, understandable theories but we cannot rule out the possibility there might be a gear wheel somewhere which suddenly changes the functionality of all the other wheels or even starts a replacement process.

The button-display parable

Imagine a room. There is only one button (action) and a display (reaction). We press the button and notice that the display flashes. We press again and again: the display flashes.

How certain can we be in this moment that the next time we press the button the display will flash again?

So we press the button several thousand times. And like before the display always flashes.

Can we now be certain?

We meet other peoples in this room and they tell us that all their lives the display flashed when they pressed the button. We find books which mention that even thousands of years ago the display flashed after one pressed the button.

Can we now be certain?

We start to investigate how the button causes the lightflash of the display. Again we perform experiments but this time we use instruments to measure what happens in the moment of the event. It seems that there is energy flowing from the button to the display. It seems that the amount of energy can be calculated. Based on that formula we make predictions about the amount of energy that floats if we press with a certain force. In all following cases the formula predicts the correct values.

Can we now be certain?

…quote…

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Because of the infomation addive character of the induction, we can't outrule the possibility, that from one moment to the other the earth becomes a cube or that germany suddenly lies on the moon with all its citizens. Objectively nothing can be excluded.

Now some may want to argue that it is more likely for germany to remain in its place. But probability calculation, too, assumes that the proportionalities and processes behind everything remain constant. It's an enumerating induction: if Study 1 to study n show that X percent of objects have attribute Y, then then next study n+1 will show the same thing. In short: an object will have the attribute with a probability of X percent. That means I can't work with probability. However, I can work with evidence, if I give up my objectivity: „My experiences doesn't suggest that germany will suddenly lie on the moon any time soon.“

… translation in progress … … meanwhile you can try the automatic translation by yahoo

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