Knowledge

If I say my hand is a parrot, is there anyway for you to prove me wrong with 100% objective data?

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I just posed this question on your behalf to a colleague of mine. Here's what he said he'd tell you:

"No!!! But you're wrong..."

I suppose we could add: it depends on what you mean by "prove," "objective" and "data." In this case, it also seems to depend on what the meaning of "is" is. (Your hand is a parrot?) but I think at the end of the day, my colleague's answer would still be more or less right. (Not that I think you really believe your hand is a parrot...)

The more serious point: there's no airtight refutation of skepticism, or so many philosophers would agree. But many philosophers would also agree that this doesn't give us a reason to worry about skepticism. As my one-time colleague Dudley Shapere once put it, the possibility of doubt isn't a reason for doubt.

That's interesting. I would be inclined to say that necessarily nothing can both be a human hand an a parrot, so even if the skeptic is right, we can still know that the hand in question is not a parrot. Rather than skepticism, I think the worry would be how we can know that the concept of human hand is incompatible with the concept of parrot.

I agree with Allen, however, that in order to answer this question we'd have to get clearer on the notions of "objective" and "prove" etc. But parrots are a kind of bird (the quickest web definition states: "usually brightly colored zygodactyl tropical birds with short hooked beaks and the ability to mimic sounds") and human hands aren't birds at all. So either you're wrong that you're talking about a human hand, or you're wrong that it is a parrot. And even a skeptic could grant this....

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