Lost in the sea of post-modern subjectivity bullshit

I recently had a mini-debate on youtube with someone who didn't agree with my definition of the word, knowledge.

I plainly defined it as: 'That which is true.' And basically this person disagreed and said that I proceeded to define what are known as 'facts' but not knowledge. What I find interesting is the choice of words in the little blurb. So 'facts' are known as 'that which is true.' So in an attempt to disprove my definition of the word 'knowledge', this person proceeded to use the word 'known' to express an equivalency between two sets of syllables.

This person then proceeded to express that 'truth' is something that is somehow personal (e.g. A Personal Truth). Now I won't be the first one to admit that it could be true for someone to say, "When I eat chocolate, I break out in hives" and that if I eat chocolate that I won't break out in hives. However, to call this a 'personal' truth seems like an odd thing to say since we already live in a world where we expect variance and use statistical methods to describe a population.

The thing that science provides is a methodology to discover a deeper truth than to simply say "It's true for me that after I eat chocolate I break out in hives." Maybe there is some gene or protein sequence due to geographical adaptations that predisposes certain individuals to break out in hives after they eat chocolate. If it was discovered that it was true that such a relationship existed, that relationship is then a 'universal truth', per se.

However, the idea of 'personal truth' is more embedded as an ideology in western culture due to societal tolerance of multiple religions and cultural backgrounds. It is this idea that if a Christian sees a magnificent view of Mt. Fuji and then ponders all the wonders of the universe and that God had created it, that belief is no more or less valid than if some Indian Hindu attributing the same wonders to their god(s). They are somehow both 'True' and yet 'Personal.' I'd call them 'personal falsehoods.'

This is basically sums up the bullshit I call the 'It's all relative, subjective philosophy.'

There's no such thing as 'your philosophy' or 'my philosophy.' There's just philosophy. It means 'the love of knowledge.'

Which takes us back to defining what knowledge is. If you accept the definition of 'That which is true,' then you have to create a construct in which things are allowed to be true and false. The only tools we have at our disposal is sensory perception. Unfortunately, most people cannot simply adhere to that. What most people do is implicitly accept the constructs of sensory perception and then abandon those constructs in defending their beliefs.

The reason why I know this is because people who engage in a debate cannot do so without using their sensory perception. They must first hear my arguments in order to respond. They must see my emails or postings on a server before then can write back. This is the contradiction that the "It's all relative" and "Reality is subjective" camps fail to see. They fail the consistency test. Of course, this doesn't bother them since they already believe in that everything is subjective. But then they'd have to abandon the idea that anything can be known and therefore be true. Everything would have to be both true and false.

I really have to blame Kant for this mess. He argued that all that can be known is 'phenomena' and not the 'noumena.' In other words, he said that all we can really know is the experience of things and not the things themselves. So take a desk, for example. All we will ever know about it is how it feels, how it looks, smells and how it sounds if you knock on it. But the desk, in and of itself, can never be known. This idea gave birth to the subjective experience as the only thing as true. It's unfortunate that these ideas gave birth to numerous political philosophies that killed over 100 million people by their own governments outside of warfare. How's that for protecting the general welfare?