How should we define 'knowledge'?
The most common definition is "Justified True Belief", but there are examples called Gettier cases that show that one can have a justified true belief that is not knowledge because the justification for the belief is false. A suggested solution is the infallibility proposal, but this has been criticised for ruling out scientific knowledge.
So what is the perfect definition of knowledge?
So what is the perfect definition of knowledge?
Comments (209)
It is raining - is one such a proposition and constitutes knowledge.
The Yankees suck is opinion and is subjective and does not constitute knowledge.
If however, one looks at the mlb rankings and realises for example that theyre losing more often than other teams in the current season then such an opinion is true as it reflects the state of things.
Knowledge is unfalsifiable information that is all.
The above might help. I think Ive confused the term. It appears that unfalsifiable information is in fact utterly useless.
Correction: Unfalsifiable Info might actually be useful.
As for science Im not sure how to apply the production of useful knowledge from theory that describes some aspect of nature or models them for the sake of prediction.
I think you draw a good distinction between scientific knowledge and everyday easily accessible knowledge about the world.
Take for example the common knowledge that the earth is round. It can be falsified by the possibility of it being flat. However empirical and scientific evidence is strong enough for the theory that it is round to be accepted.
The reason for such rigour when it comes to scientific claims (knowledge) is that they must be tested by experiment.
The confusion appears for want of trying to apply it to science. However the definition still holds true as falsafiabilty only applies to the scientific method and not the information or knowledge that is derived from it.
@Cidat
I, and many other people, think justified true belief (JTB) does not reflect how people know things or use the knowledge they have. As someone who had to deal with data, information, and knowledge for 30 years as an engineer, I think JTB is just silly. The one question that's important when dealing with information isCan I use this information to decide on what to do next? You can't wait around to be sure something is true, you only have control over the level of justification you can provide.
Agreed. Knowledge is all about useful information. What other possible meaning can it have? Can't get more pragmatic than that.
Quoting Fooloso4
The first question to ask is: what do you what from your definition? Do you want it to reflect current use in ordinary language? That is what dictionary definitions do, so the obvious thing would be to consult a good English dictionary. Or do you want a specialized definition for something specific? Then you should be asking a more specific question.
Generally, just inquiring after a definition out of context is not very productive. Words are tools, and as with all tools, we fashion them for a reason.
(This is just to expand what @Fooloso4 said.)
My answer here.
In sum, we create identities through our experiences of the world, then try to match those identities either deductively or inductively to later experiences. When you can deductively match that identity to an experience, you know it. When you inductively do so, you believe it. However, different ways of inducing can result in beliefs that are more logical to believe in than others.
Humans have knowledge when they demonstrate the application.
For example, Do you have knowledge of riding a bike. Well yes I do let me show you, and the human proceeds to ride the bike.
For example, do you know the theory of special relativity. Well yes let me explain it, discuss the implications, and set up experiments to show you the data.
Quoting Richard B
I would go one further and say that we have knowledge when we meet the criteria for someone to say we have the knowledge (criteria as the term is used by Wittgenstein in the Investigations). One difference being that there are different kinds of "knowledge" and so different criteria. One overlooked use is as acknowledgement. "I know you are in pain" being a recognition of your pain, your plight, your claim on me morally to react to your situation, etc.
Calling all knowledge belief justified to be true is an imposed (made up) criteria, desiring certainty before looking at how various kinds of knowledge actually work. Science is not justifying beliefs; it is a method. A fact is something you or I or anyone can replicate through a competent experiment. We know that oxygen has a weight of X because when anyone yada yadas it, it always comes to X. The reason for the desire for something certain and the invention of abstact criteria are more complicated, but one reason is that we create "justification of truth" as a way to avoid our responsibility for offering ordinary reasons and standing behind them.
EXPERIENCE.
NB: Information constituting well-tested, explanations is scientific knowledge.
Most likely one of them solipsistic types by the looks of it.
Perception is experience knowledge and meaning all of this is biologically dependent upon the biology having the experience/knowledge/meaning. If one alters any biology and you alter the experience/knowledge/meanings of the individual.
If you find fault with the reasoning, by all means enlighten me.
I thought you were the enlightened & wise one, Im but a peasant
The value of Truth is not absolute because new facts can and have changed the truth value of previous claims. So a true belief can be proven not true...while an instrumentally valuable statement can always be used as knowledge.
My point is that truth and knowledge are observer relative evaluations, limited by our current observations. Something that is (probably) not true (i.e. Relativity) can be used as a knowledge claim to produce further knowledge.
A good post. Like you, I take a pragmatic view of knowledge.
This made me think of one of my favorite quotes from Stephen Jay Gould, a great science writerIn science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'
@JamalI am so f...ing tired of this em dash, but I don't seem to be able to stop using it.
I don't think there's a perfect, single definition of "knowledge". However one tries to create such a single definition, one will necessary leave out things. It can only be defined in a context.
Moreover, the word "perfect" alone makes such an attempt impossible. Perfect means or implies "absolute" and nothing can be considered "perfect" or "absolute". We can only use such words figuratively and for description purposes. There's no actual "absolute zero", even if this a scientific term. It refers to measurement and thus it depends on the method, conditions and means with which we are measuring it.
Quoting T Clark
Gould spoke where I went to school at Willamette about rapid evolutionary changes. When someone asked about creationism, he started yelling at them (as if they were perverse). The point about science is that it does not need assent. The method could be done by anyone and the results are the same. Your moral claim on me needs to be acknowledged by me (or rejected). You swear allegiance to a country. But we do not agree about science (disagreeing with someone's science is to say it was done poorly). Now you can ignore science's facts or exagerate their significance, but those are political moves, not scientific ones. Gould is right in saying science is confirmed; and this just means we've done the same experiment enough times to be sure it wasn't a fluke, not that we are confirming our hypothesis against anything--"the world" or "reality".
So, again, to say my belief (opinion, theory, etc.) is justified (say by the facts of science) does not make it a higher order of belief, now deemed "knowledge". It's just a statement of fact; the only relationship to belief which it has is the kind of belief that is a guess, to which the fact is an answer with certainty--"I believe it's raining out" "Well, let's go and look and we will know". But there are other senses of belief that are not just uncertain guesses, such as "I believe in my son".
I am a big fan of Gould's, but I understand he was something of a jerk sometimes. Being something of a jerk myself, I don't hold that against him.
Quoting Antony Nickles
That's the thing about knowledgeif you can't use it, it ain't really knowledge. In order to use it, you have to assent with it, accept it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm taking a pragmatic approach to this, while you seem to be taking formalistic, linguistic approach. Information has to be known, factual, justified, understood, believed, assented to before it can be used. The only interesting thing about knowledge is that we can use it to make decisions.
Definitions do not work in that way.
You know that there are two ways to approach definitions, by stipulation or by description, and that definitions by stipulation set out how one ought use a term, while definitions by description set out how one actually does use a term. That difference in approach is found between Webster's and The Oxford dictionaries. Which is perfect? Well, it depends on what you are doing; hence, neither is quite perfect.
The "justified true belief" stuff comes from Plato, but even he wasn't happy with it, ending the Theaetetus in aporia. Still, some folk like it, and as a working definition it has its uses. The Gettier examples serve to show that treating justified true belief as a stipulated definition is fraught with difficulties.
The most common problem hereabouts comes from those who confuse what we know with what we believe. It should be apparent that we can only know things that are true, whereas we can believe things that are false.
So one cannot know something that is not true. Additionally, if you know something, you know that it is true, which is just another way of saying that you believe it. One cannot know something one doesn't believe to be true.
On this last, one might well express surprise or incredulity by saying one knows such-and-such, but "I don't believe it!" That's a turn of phrase rather than a counterexample.
So if one knows something, then that something must be both believed and true. Hence the "True belief" part of the justified true belief account.
The "justification" part comes from our not being able to know stuff that does not fit in with our other knowledge. What we know has to be consistent - and if it isn't something has gone wrong.
So 's amusement is to some extent misplaced. Perhaps coming from outside of philosophy he doesn't see the issues that the JTB account is actually addressing.
And it's not hard to see problems with defining knowledge as "useful information". We all know stuff that is not useful, unless one is going to specify utility in such broad terms that anything is usefulat which point being useful becomes moot. And there is useful information that is false - Newtonian physics, for example.
Philosophy is, generally speaking, a lot harder than it perhaps seems.
A last point to note is the difference between what knowledge is, as given by this or that definition, and how we "find a solid way of forming knowledge". JBT is not a method for deciding between competing beliefs.
Anyway, that might go some way towards broadening the discussion here beyond mere utility. Cheers.
Quoting Richard B
And another mistake is to suppose that we cannot be certain of anything. On Certainty shows this clearly.
I don't see how to make sense of this.
If we decide that something is true on the basis of some observation, and subsequent observations show that it is not true, then we were wrong.
Our observations do not generally change what is true, but what is believed.
Here I think being simple-minded or naive may be of some help. What definitions, outside of those given in mathematics, is a complete or at least satisfactory definition of any word?
What is a chair? What is life? What is an animal? What is a thing?, etc.
We soon realize that we can quite significantly expand most definitions way beyond anything given in a dictionary. And more curiously still, we frequently are aware when a person is misapplying a word.
To that extent, what's the use of defining knowledge? Does something significantly change in your view of the topic if it is defined one way as opposed to another?
Given that sticking to JTB's cause more trouble than clarifications, I think the ordinary phrase "he/she knows a lot about X", where X can be almost anything: farming, cars, history, laptops, etc., is quite comfortable and does not bring forth much problems, so far as I can see.
I didn't say it is amusing, I said it is silly. Not the same thing at all.
Not so silly? But amusing, if this thread continues.
As is your [s]wont[/s]modus operandi, when I contradicted your statement and provided evidence, you changed the subject.
[Edit] Note change in text.
Your post was your usual passive-aggressive snot, as is this one.
As I wrote previously, I think JTB is silly, but I do believe my judgement of your post is true and that I'm justified in believing it.
This is fun, but we're unnecessarily cluttering up this thread. I'll let you have one last at bat if you'd like. That's baseball terminology. You can ask @Noble Dust for an explanation.
Something else worth considering in looking in on the definition of knowledge is the various different sorts of knowledge folk have noted.
The first obvious distinction is between practical and theoretical knowledge, between knowing how to do things and knowing that something is the case. Knowing that a bike has two wheels is knowing that a specified proposition is true, while it's not immediately obvious that knowing how to ride a bike is knowing something about a specific proposition. That knowing and how knowing seem to be distinct.
Some folk have supposed that "knowing how" reduces to "knowing that", that for instance what knowing how to ride a bike involves is knowing that if one pushes on a peddle the wheel will turn moving the bike forwards and that if a lean in one direction can be countered by moving one's weight in the other direction, and so forth. Ryle argued against this, that the two are indeed distinct.
A further type of knowledge that might be distinct from both of these is knowledge by acquaintance. That you can recognise your brother, that you know who they are, is perhaps different again from knowing some proposition or knowing how to do something.
Presumably, a perfect definition would give an account of these three species of knowledge.
This is an important point for me. What you write about knowledge is thought provoking and reminds me that I am an outsider to philosophy.
Quoting Banno
Would you say that knowledge then is similar to truth in that it is not a property which looks the same in each example? (sorry for the clumsy wording)
Quoting Banno
Indeed. I generally hold to the 'is useful for certain purposes' and while some would possibly call this a type of pragmatism, I consider it more of a lazy, 'common sense' construal of knowledge that is certainly fraught for reasons you describe.
Given these variables in our understanding of knowledge, if you had to provide a brief working description of knowledge, is there one you could contrive on the fly or a basic account you could recommend?
The following three questions probably best represent why I entered this site in the first place
How do we identify truth?
What is knowledge?
Are there moral facts?
Which I think is a nice example of knowledge not necessarily true. IOW I don't think our hindsight about Newton's work means that people were wrong to consider it knowledge. I think it was knowledge. (theoretical) Knowledge would be rigorously arrived at beliefs and I think we could still consider someone knowing what to do with some of Newton's laws as having practical knowledge. It'd be useful for certain jobs. They know stuff. Even if ultimately it is based on approximations and perhaps some incorrect ontological assumptions.
There is no perfect definition of knowledge, and if you're trying to find a perfect definition you're going to be disappointed. Look at it in terms of use, how is the word knowledge or know used across a wide spectrum of subjects or contexts. In one case someone might say "I know..." to emphasize a conviction, which is simply a subjective point of view, or simply an expression of their feelings about a particular belief. In such a case the person may not have good evidence or reasons, and so their belief isn't justified. In fact, in this e.g. one could even challenge this particular use as being knowledge at all, as Wittgenstein did in his notes called On Certainty.
Another use of know that is stressed by philosophers is acquiring knowledge through correct reasoning or the use of logic (inductive and deductive reasoning), which is also used in science. Much of science is based on inductive reasoning as a result of experimentation or observation.
A third use of know refers to knowledge gained by testimonial evidence. This is used in courts of law where the testimonial evidence is challenged or accepted depending on its strength. People often forget that this kind of evidence comes in the form of lectures, books, friends and family, etc. Without testimonial evidence much of what we believe would simply collapse. Being able to evaluate good testimonial evidence is a skill, because testimonial evidence can also be very weak. However, on the other hand it can be very strong depending on the circumstances.
A fourth way of knowing is pure reason or pure logic, viz., I know based on the logical structure. An e.g. is a tautology, "Either dogs are animals or they are not animals" is a tautology. It has the form either X is true or Y is true (X or not X).
Another use is that which is known by sensory experience. For e.g., "I know the orange juice is sweet because I tasted it."
Another use of know is linguistic training, i.e., I know is based on the correct public use of words or concepts.
In many of these uses there is considerable overlap. For e.g. in science sensory experience is part of observation.
So there are a variety of uses of know depending on the language-game, as Wittgenstein would say.
Since to know something is to know that it is true, the philosophical issues around truth carry over to knowledge.
I'll go over my views on truth again, since you asked how it relates to knowledge. First i think there are two questions that sometimes get conflated; the first is, what does "...is true" mean? The second, how do we tell if some sentence is true?
Now I think Davidson's account is as good as we have gotten so far on the meaning of truth. It's the T-sentence, that a sentence "P" is true if and only if P. so "The kettle is boiling" is true iff and only if the kettle is boiling. It seems to me that this account brings together the coherence, correspondence and redundancy of truth, ideas to which philosophers keep returning.
But of course while this tells us the meaning of truth, it does not tell us which sentences are true and which are false. And I don't think, given the wide variety of sentences we can use, that there can be any such broad account. Each of the main contenders correspondence, coherence, pragmatism and so on have issues and limitations. Certainly there can be no algorithm into which we can feed a sentence and get a result of "true" or "false".
And I think this algorithmic view mischaracterises what is going on here. When we move from what "...is true" means to which sentences are true, we've moved away from truth and towards belief. The question "which sentences are true?" has much the same extension as "Which sentences ought we believe?". So we are now treating with belief.
Now while truth is about sentences, belief is about what people think of sentences. This is where the distinction between what is true and what is thought to be true comes into play. Whereas truth is monadic, being about some sentence, belief is dyadic, being about both some sentence and a believer. That is, the kettle is either boiling or not is about the kettle, while that one believes the kettle is boiling is about both the believer and the kettle. This is of importance because idealism and anti-realism work by denying this distinction between truth and belief. For them something is true only if it is believed (or perceived, or whatever) to be true.
Anyway, none of this is without detractors, but that gives a bit of an indication of what I think, and yes, knowledge is not the sort of thing for which we can give a single complete account.
And that's the answer to 's post.
Given what I said above, I hope it is clear that I do not think there can be what I've called an "algorithmic" account of truth, and hence of either what we should believe or of what we can know.
I'll just note that, somewhat surprisingly, "How do we identify truth?" becomes a normative, even an ethical question, being much the same as "What ought we believe?". It is about our place in a community, especially a language community. So despite my rejecting the antirealist move against there being true statements independent of the attitude we adopt towards them, I do think that what we say is true or false is to a large extent bound to the way we are embedded in a society. I agree more or less with their conclusion, but not with their argument.
So for example I am certain that this post is in English, and it is true that this post is in English, and that this is a result of my being a member of that community.
And this feeds in to your last question.
OF course, I might be wrong.
We can give other examples of useful information that is false.
Got it.
Quoting Banno
Does this privilege forms of truth involving empirically verifiable matters? How do we deal with issues such as, for instance, the band Cream was formed in 1966?
Quoting Banno
I'll need to mull over this.
Quoting Banno
I think this is clear.
Quoting Banno
Jeez, there's a lot bound up in all this. But you wouldn't subscribe to a 'intersubjective community of agreement' style account of truth that has 'truth' shift about in a relativistic manner across different world views and value systems as per post modernism, right?
Quoting Banno
Ha! Well if it gets back to anyone, you said it..
Thanks for this.
That's your fault; you asked the big questions.
"Cream was formed in 1966" is true if and only if Cream was formed in 1966.
How you decide to believe that Cream was formed in 1966 is over to you - you were there, your friend told you, you read about it on the back of an LP, you recall it from somewhere but are not sure where...
'intersubjective community of agreement' strikes me as muddled. It places too much emphasis on the subjective, the subject.
Do you use the term justification for this process?
May as well.
There are counterexamples. I am certain, for instance, that this post is in English, and my certainty is not a theory that I could revise if further evidence came along.
I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves.
But the idea that folk can be wrong has fallen into disfavour, and it seems it is now considered no more than bad manners, even in a philosophy forum, to point out people's mistakes. Oh well.
Of course, if folk are never wrong, then they have no need to correct themselves, and hence no way to improve their understanding.
But I might be wrong.
I get you. I believe I recall you saying that you found the approach of fallibilism problematic. Although from my perspective it seems we often have no choice but to operate in much this way holding tentative accounts of 'the world' which are based on the best available evidence or reasoning, but are subject to revision over time. I question how useful the word knowledge is much of the time.
Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe (the certainty that this sentence is in English)? We seem to spend most of our lives in belief-land - some more than others.
We find people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? A belief? To call it a false belief would imply that we already have decided that knowledge of god is not legitimate. Or it begs the question that we can tell if someone has knowledge of god.
Thoughts?
That's perfectly true and it is good to discover someone else believes it. Fallible knowledge is just belief under another name. There's no point to the concept of knowledge if it is fallible.
I've coined a slogan. Knowledge is never wrong. People often are.
Quoting Tom Storm
Having said that. I do agree that "ordinary speech" is quite lazy about knowledge, treating more as an honorific than a serious category. So i do accept that it is appropriate for the term to be applied a bit more strictly in philosophy than elsewheere.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm an agnostic with atheistic leanings. I've no problem categorizing "knowledge" of God as belief. I'm not sure that it is appropriate to call it false, though. "God" (or even "gods") is not simply a fact, It is a way of looking at, or thinking about, or approaching the world. It's not in the realm of ordinary truths and falsities.
Quoting Cidat
I'm surprised if he did say that we should throw away certainty. He seemed pretty certain that falsifying a theory could be a certainty. Indeed, that's why he proposed relying on it. It is true (though I don't think it is exactly his idea) that "we are justified in believing something if it's the most probable belief given our current data". Wouldn't we need to be certain of our data, though?
I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. I don't even think it's a valuable goal. Most uses for knowledge don't require certaintyonly a balance between level of certainty and cost of justification.
Quoting Tom Storm
I use personal introspection as one of the sources of my knowledge. I think that's legitimate. When I present that as evidence or think about someone else's experience, there are three approaches that make sense to me before rejecting it outright 1) Compare it to my own experience 2) Pay attention to who has had similar experiences and who hasn't 3) Take it as an interesting fact about different ways people experience the world.
It's funny. I strongly disagree with this:
Quoting Ludwig V
And strongly agree with this:
Quoting Ludwig V
I thought you asked about a definition of knowledge and meant to receive answers. So, I replied. But maybe it was just my idea ...
Well, I guess one agreement out of two propositions is not bad.
Quoting T Clark
I have a couple of questions about this.
I agree that pragmatically we tend to strike a balance between the level of certainty we can achieve for an appropriate cost of achieving it - mostly with a strong inclination to put in as little effort as possible. That's a good strategy in most situations.
I agree that we often call the result knowledge. Knowledge has much more prestige than belief and consequently a claim to knowledge has considerable persuasive power among those disinclined to skepticism.
I agree moreover that such "knowledge" is often good enough in practice.
Could you explain to me exactly how "knowledge" of this kind differs from justified belief?
Do you have any idea why knowledge carries more prestige and persuasive power than belief?
I agree with all this, although I wouldn't put quotation marks around knowledge.
Quoting Ludwig V
The first time I heard about JTB I thought it was wrongheaded. It doesn't reflect how people use knowledge to make decisions. I've thought about that a lot and come to the conclusion that knowledge is adequately justified belief for the specific purpose needed and the consequences of being wrong. So, yes - knowledge is justified belief with the condition that the justification is adequate.
Can you outline what you have in mind here? Do you mean using experience to make assessments and decisions?
Quoting T Clark
Does this depend on the area? Surely certainty is important to logic, math and in your game - engineering? I have never understood math of any kind so for me it is like an arcane type of mysticism. :wink:
Much of what I write here on the forum comes from personal experience, introspection, rather than reading philosophers. The philosophers I like are those who's general understanding is consistent with my own, but who can help me to expand my understanding and figure out which way to go next. That's why Lao Tzu means so much to me. A lot of people come to the Tao Te Ching with an understanding based on a formalistic, logical reading. For me, Lao Tzu is pointing us toward an experience, trying to show it to us. The words are just the tools he has to work with and he acknowledges upfront that they are inadequate.
Also, for 30 years as an engineer, I used information from many different sources to help decide what needed to be done and the best way of going about doing it. One of the first jobs on any project was to put all the information from all the sources together into what we called a site conceptual model (SCM). Nowhere in that process or in the results were there any propositions that were true or false. A SCM is not true or false, it is valid or it's not. And it's validity doesn't depend on one piece of information, rather on all of it together. I think that's the way humans deal with knowledge on a real day-to-day basis.
Quoting Tom Storm
I guess in math and logic, as long as you leave out any contact with the real world, you can get certainty. As for engineering, as I described above, we have to work with limited amounts of expensive information. We have to do the best we can with what we have. Civil and environmental engineering always involves data with lots of uncertainty. That generally gets handled by putting big fudge factors, called factors of safety, on all our calculations. There may be other branches where that is less so.
Quoting T Clark
I'm always envious of people who have models or texts they admire and are guided by. I've never really had that. I enjoy essay writers, but mainly because of their capacity to use language, not so much as a guide or inspiration.
Is the process I described all that different from how you decide things in your life and work? In engineering we tend to be more formal, with required documentation, but for me, the overall process of knowing and deciding is the same one I use in my life outside work.
You've written about how much some music means to you. I don't have that. I do like music, but not to the same degree.
Of course. This works well when one is actively problem solving, as in science or engineering. Less so in social work, were it is sometimes necessary to stipulate explicitly rather than observe tentatively. Sometimes saying it is so makes it so. Falsification (the logic behind fallibilism) works in some situations, but not all, and itself takes some things as granted, as certain. It is applicable in some situations, but problems arise when it is taken as a universal answer to the OP's question.
Again, it's complicated.
Quoting Tom Storm
There's a distinction to be made between the stuff we don't question, but might, and stuff that we don't question because it forms the background against which we can question things. We have to hold some things certain in order to be able to cast doubt on other things; doubt only takes place against a background of certainty.
Quoting Tom Storm
One of the things I hope might be clear from this discussion is that knowledge is social, it is had by a community more than by an individual. Foremost, That Knowledge (to borrow a term of art) is by it's nature propositional, and hence embedded in the language of a community. Additionally, knowledge is justified, meaning that in some way it fits in with what you and those around you hold to be the case. And of course knowledge is useable, and so has a function within the community.
The notion of personal knowledge is therefore somewhat oxymoronic.
[hide="Reveal"]Consider Wittgenstein's example of whether one can properly claim to know one is in pain.[/hide]
Religious beliefs belong less to the sort of thing that can be falsified and more to those that set out and constitute a "form of life", to borrow another term of art. A direct experience of god is presumably overwhelming, and undeniable, and so not the sort of thing that might be falsified. For the person experiencing it, it cannot be false.
Putting these two approaches that knowledge is social and that some of out understandings are indubitable together, religious and such spiritual stuff is more about membership of a community and what counts as certain in a group than it is about truth and falsity.
And again, there is much more that could be said.
Yes, but no. Counterintuitively, Popper argued that the less likely a theory, the more scientific it is.
Quoting https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProbKnowVeri
Nice.
We might consider this in a bit more detail.
Certainty is the flip side of doubt; if something is undoubtable, then it is certain. And there are innumerable things that we take as undoubtable. I've already given the example of this post's being in English; to bring that into doubt is to bring into doubt the very basis on which one can doubt. There are simpler examples - One can't play nought and crosses if one doubts that three in a row is a win; One can't doubt that the brakes will work on one's car if one doubts that it has wheels.
So maybe we don't try to achieve certainty, but we do try to remove doubt, which may be much the same sot of thing.
Again, doubt takes place against a background of stuff that is taken as undoubted.
So, in constructing a site conceptual model one does not doubt that there is a site...
Yes, I'm afraid I wasn't consistent enough in writing that. I wanted to distinguish clearly between knowledge and fallible knowledge, which, as you may have noticed, I do not consider to be knowledge. One of the reasons for that conviction that if knowledge (as distinct from people) can be wrong and still called knowledge, the distinction between knowledge and belief disappears. That's the main reason that people like to claim knowledge when they don't really have it and prefer to gain knowledge rather than belief.
Quoting T Clark
Well, we're agreed on that, then. However, I'm not sure I would consider JTB a definition in the strict sense. One of the reasons is that the Justification condition is very, very hard to articulate in the way one would expect for a definition. In my own mind, this condition is more like an area to check out and consider rather than a criterion to be applied.
Quoting Banno
Yes, I'm in complete agreement with that. It seems to me that community involvement is built in to the concept, in two ways. First, that anyone who passes on knowledge has to endorse it. That's the consequence of the Truth clause in the JTB account. Second, the authority of the source can be a justification for passing on - and therefore endorsing - knowledge. Authority may be first hand, but it may also be second hand, which is a bit less satisfactory to philosophy. But if we can't claim knowledge at second hand, most of what we know isn't knowledge. Awkward.
Quoting Bret Bernhoft
Yes. That's why Russell thought that knowledge by acquaintance was important - and different from knowledge by description (i.e. at second hand).
Odd, though, that direct experience of an event is well known not to make one a reliable witness. Perhaps it is over-rated?
Quoting Tom Storm
See above on knowledge by acquaintance. But one has to acknowledge that experiences of God are overwhelmingly important to their subject and seem to be self-certifying. However, it also seems pretty clear that not all such experiences are actually from God, and that validation of them by others should depend on what comes from them in everyday life.
Quoting Banno
Yes. I like the way you put that.
The issue with this is that people perceive things with certainty through their senses all the time and yet are mistaken in their conclusions. Given this, I am skeptical that we can readily identify how we can tell when someone knows something this way. Something else needs to be present.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. Can we point to a single verified example of someone having an experience directly from god? I know you are not saying this, but I don't see how a person's own feelings of certainty can assist us with this.
Your three examples are trivial. Of course I can doubt if my post is in English. Of course I can doubt that three in a row wins in tic tac toe. Of course I can doubt if my car has wheels. I can doubt anything. I'm not going to waste my time doubting them because my level of certainty is adequate for the purposes at hand. When she was taking French in school, my daughter sometimes spoke French in her sleep. When I try to talk French, sometimes German words end up in the mix. If I didn't know that naughts and crosses is the same as tic tac toe, I would doubt that three in a row wins.
Quoting Banno
It is quite common when we start a new project to have a new survey prepared. When we do that, it is not uncommon for us to find that the limits of the property are not where we thought they were. Sometimes when we investigate a property, we find there is no contamination. A property with no contamination is not considered a site under site cleanup regulations.
Nothing is absolute. There can always be doubt. It only matters how uncertain things are.
You and I seem to agree on most everything except this one linguistic issue. I don't think our differences are substantive except in one sense - My way of seeing things focuses on the most important thing - the adequacy of justification.
Quoting Ludwig V
I guess I was unclear. I do not consider JTB as useful definition of knowledge. I do not think knowledge has to be true, only that I believe it is true and am justified in that belief. Those are the only things I have control of.
Perhaps! But I still think that first-hand experience is the best way to learn something and therefore the best way to obtain knowledge. To learn about something through a textbook or through another person is never as useful as to have experienced it yourself. But of course, this is just my perspective.
Yes, good point. It is difficult to know how reliable our senses can be sometimes. To gain true certainty of our senses, we need to think critically and logically about what we are experiencing. This is what I would consider true knowledge. This type of knowledge is not just a "gut feeling" or random, irrational thought. Instead, it is a logical conclusion that we arrive at based on experience. When we think critically and logically about what we experience through our senses, then we can gain a greater degree of certainty about our experience.
You could have woken up from a dream or a coma years later. Note: I am not arguing you should go around doubting such things.Quoting BannoI can certainly live with this version and in many ways do. I suppose it depends on how long I worked with the 'knowledge'. The notion of absolute space and time, it seems to me we can place in the history of knowledge. If it was more hypothetical or worked for a very short time, then no.
I suppose what I am suggesting is that we don't give knowledge some utterly distinct ontological quality, especially in the present. If it's working really well, great, call it knowledge. Quoting BannoI didn't undersand this. I do think people can be wrong. I am not saying that we don't make mistakes or we don't have mistaken theories, even, let alone hypotheses that seem to work for a while, but are false.
Quoting BannoAgreed, again. I can see, I guess how what I wrote might seem to mean that we are always right. Hm. My point is more that we don't need to go back and say X wasn't really knowledge. I am looking at the term 'knowledge' as a term meaning here's stuff we categorize as very trustworthy because of Y (our batch of rigorous criteria). So some now no longer consider true theory from the past is still part of our history of knowledge. The stuff we arrived at rigorously. Oh, it wasn't really knowledge. No, it was. Now we know better.
And this may seem like some petty or even self-contradictory idea, but my concern is not so much about the past, but the present. Oh, this is knowledge, it's true...period. That's the kind of thinking I think is problematic. Just because it passed rigor now it is seen as immaculatley in a different category. Rather than as the best we can do now.
So, in terms of JTB, I've often been bothered by the T part. It seems both hubristic and redundant. We have a very well JB. It isn't falsified so far (so a neo-Popperish criterion). There'e no better or more parsimonious explanation (a neo-Occam's Razor) and we'll keep it until it doesn't work or there's something better to replace it.
I'm sorry. I wasn't clear about this. For some, the question may well be "Did this come from God?" How that should be assessed is not for me to say. (But I do know that the Roman Catholic Church does have procedures in place - which is not altogether reassuring!) For others, such as me, the question is whether this person is a danger to themselves or others.
Quoting T Clark
You speak as if you had been practicing and become a champion doubter! Or is it that you can ask yourself of any empirical proposition whether it could possibly be wrong and answer "Yes" just because it is not self-contradictory to do so. That wouldn't prove that p was subject to rational doubt. You would need some evidence that it is false for that.
Quoting T Clark
So when you create a site conceptual model, you must be certain that there is some contamination. Right?
Quoting T Clark
Well, no-one can ask more of you that you believe it to be true, so long as you stop believing it to be true when you have sufficient evidence that it is false. Then you will also also know that your justification was insufficient and will stop having faith in it. At that point, you will want to say that you did not know, after all. Fair enough. In practice we agree.
All that anyone can ask of you is that you do your bit, and you clearly do that. But I don't think it follows that the outcome (success/failure) is always defined by that. Sometimes success or failure is assessed by other people. You can try your best to win the race. Whether you do win or not is not in your control. For me, knowledge is a success and other people are entitled to assess that for themselves.
Look, @Banno is right that there are lots of things out there we take for granted, and with good reason. But that doesn't mean they are absolutely certain. I gave a couple of examples where that might be the case. You can't use any real world event or phenomenon as an example of something that is absolutely true. This is not a new idea. Maybe Descartes took it a little too far, but he wasn't wrong, just a bit overexcited.
I don't doubt that we are all writing in English and I don't think about it except when prompted by philosophical questions, but I know all truth, all knowledge, is contingent.
I don't think there's anything very new about people accepting they can be wrong. Think what happened to Socrates.
Quoting Bret Bernhoft
I agree that first-hand experience is often the best way. But sometimes text-books and classrooms are useful. It depends what you are trying to learn.
Quoting Bylaw
Sometimes going back and correcting knowledge claims is pointless and irritating. But it can be important if the knowledge is going to be relied on in the future or is still important in influencing people in the present. I agree that people are far too quick to pronounce that Aristotle or Newton were wrong. They were right, up to a point, and up to a point it is not wrong to say they knew a thing or two. New theories must explain more than the old ones, but also need to explain everything that the old ones explained, because the data they were based on is still true, irrespective of the theory.
It may be we are not far off the point where our disagreement becomes just a question of vocabulary. But I'm going to stick to the JTB as I understand it (for the time being).
You caught me seconds before I logged off. I have to go soon.
In philosophy, "contingent" doesn't mean "open to rational doubt". It means it is not self-contradictory to assert the opposite. Which is quite different. When I say that something is certain, I just mean it is not open to rational doubt. Descartes' arguments for scepticism consist of an invalid argument and a paranoid fantasy. That's about it. It's not enough to establish what he wants to establish.
There is a category of doubt that Hume calls "excessive"; for Hume it was invented by Pyrrho, the ancient Greek. It's very liek Cartesian doubt. He recommends ordinary life and concerns as the best cure for it. He also identifies "moderate" doubt, which I would call a healthy scepticism. Hume thinks it is an excellent policy in general life.
Certain? Sure, I guess. I generally worked on sites that had been investigated before, so there was existing data. But when I'm looking through the data I'm given for a site, I definitely look at all the data to verify that levels of contamination in soil and groundwater actually exceed regulatory levels.
Many real estate transactions require what is called a preliminary site assessment at properties where no previous environmental investigations have taken place. For investigators who are first on the site, they have to identify locations where there might be contamination, but they don't assume there has been any.
Quoting Ludwig V
You say the justification was insufficient. I don't say "sufficient," I say "adequate." "Adequate" means known at an appropriate level of uncertainty. I'll say again - knowledge can never be 100% certain. From an engineering perspective, we never just know something, we know it with a given level of uncertainty. Maybe that's the solution.
Quoting Ludwig V
If I'm taken to court as an engineer, I'll have to show what I did was in accord with appropriate engineering practice, including the quality of the data I used. I don't have to show I was absolutely certain. That's the best that it's reasonable to expect.
Yes, my use of the word "contingent" was based on everyday usage. Here are some definitions from the web:
The bolded one is closest to what I was trying to convey.
Quoting Ludwig V
I guess it comes back to this - doubt isn't the question. Calling it "moderate doubt" doesn't always work in real life. When possible consequences are significant, you need more. You need knowledge of the likely facts and understanding of the level of uncertainty. There, there's your definition of "knowledge" - Understanding of the likely facts and their level of uncertainty. Here's one of my favorite quotes. I use it all the time. It's from Stephen Jay Gould and I've already used it once in this thread - "In science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'"
Quoting Ludwig V
As I noted, he was a bit over-excited, but not wrong.
Agreed! Textbooks and classrooms can be incredibly useful in providing a more theoretical view of a subject and giving us the tools we need to understand our own experience. For example, when we read a textbook we can learn about the anatomy of the human body and how it functions. This allows us to better understand and process what we are experiencing. So both first-hand experience and the theoretical approach are essential for learning and gaining knowledge. There is no one right answer.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yep.
You've made use of justified true belief here in order to paint a picture of knowledge as a communal activity, In a somewhat different way to my approach. Nice.
Quoting Ludwig V
And that's the problem with Justified true belief. One wants the justification to be strong. But logical implication is too strong, leading to an oversupply of justifications. And mere opinion appears too weak, being little more than one's personal belief. So instead we have something like a general acceptance by a community, without the rigour for which one might have hoped.
Quoting Ludwig V
Oh, nor do I. Accepting that one is wrong and seeking correction is the beginnings of rationality, and of philosophy, as you point out. Rather, it seems to me that in recent times it has become less acceptable to point out that someone is wrong. But that might just be my curmudgeon speaking.
Quoting Ludwig V
Waggishly accurate. :smile:
I don't think that captures the subtlety of what knowledge is. Hallucinations are an obvious counterexample, but they keep the discussion on the level of perceptions. I see @Tom Storm has already made a similar point. I think knowledge needs to get well beyond that. See the discussion of the knowing's social aspects elsewhere.
Quoting T Clark
Engineers and scientists need to be careful and accurate. Lawyers, with their concept of "beyond reasonable doubt" are similar. I don't have a problem with philosophers adopting the same policy. Ordinary life will no doubt continue with its rather slapdash ways.
But if there is some poisonous chemical contaminating your site, do you say that maybe it isn't a poison after all? You would be asked for evidence. You don't have any. You know that compound XYZ is poisonous, and you would have a bad time in court if you messed about with the process of removing it. Of course, you wouldn't ever just say it is poisonous. You would say it is poisonous at such-and-such a concentration and you would have evidence what the concentration is. If there was doubt about it, that would have to be mentioned and rationally justified as well. All those things are things that you know. Perhaps the problem is not that knowledge is uncertain, but that it is complicated.
Quoting T Clark
I agree that's the definition of contingent. And when the conditions or circumstances are met, the contingent statement is true. And when you know they are met, you know that statement is true.
Quoting Bret Bernhoft
Quite so.
Quoting Banno
But surely, it is better for a philosopher to admit that rigour isn't available when it isn't. It would not be philosophical to pretend otherwise.
It looks like you've missed the point. Slapdash ways are appropriate when the consequences of being wrong are minor. Engineers often work in situations where the consequences are significant, so more stringent justification is required. It's not the difference between engineering and everyday life, it's the difference between minor consequences and significant ones.
Quoting Ludwig V
This whole part of our conversation started because you said:
Quoting Ludwig V
I just explained why it wasn't as simple as that. So, yes, it's complicated, but it's complicated because of the uncertainty in our knowledge.
Even if this post were but part of a coma-induced dream, in that dream the post is in English. I don't agree that the coma and dream arguments are as strong as many folk suppose. We do understand the difference between dreaming and reality. One can tell one form the other, which is why we different words for each.
Quoting Bylaw
Sounds fine. Knowledge is a composite notion, having a family resemblance of uses. No one definition will do, which is where we came in. But most especially, knowledge is not just useful information.
Quoting Bylaw
The comment was just this curmudgeon grumping about the apparently thin-skinned. Nothing too significant.
Quoting Bylaw
It's interesting that "true" and "trustworthy" have the same PIE root "*deru-" ...as does "tree". All good solid upstanding words. So to Foucault's brilliant analysis of truth and power. Curious that he has not been mentioned here until now, since his work is important - yet overly emphasised in some circles.
Sure, there's a long, worthy criticism of the notion of truth, especially when folk unwittingly prefix "absolute", as if that added anything. "hubristic and redundant" indeed. It's had the unfortunate result that it is now popular to suppose that there are no truths, that nothing is true, or everything can be doubted, or a bunch of other memes.
I love the graffiti, writ large on a tunnel wall, "Question everything!", to which someone had added the small tag "Why?"
Universal skepticism undermines itself.
But if we keep truth small and simple then it is undeniable that there are true statements. Like that you are now reading this.
That's one of the lessons learned, and subsequently taught, by the natural language approach.
Of course they are that's what makes them good examples. You can pretend that this post is in French, but it will remain no more than a pretence, and be contradicted by your replying to it. If you doubt that three in a row wins noughts and crosses, then you haven't understood the game, and you stand outside the community of nought and crosses players.
Two points. We cannot doubt everything, because doubting requires a background against which the doubt is formulated. And the compliment of this: some things must be taken as indubitable in order to proceed - that three in a row wins, that this sentence is in English, and that there are sites on which engineers may do their stuff.
All this by way of pointing out that some sentences are true.
Quoting T Clark
In engineering, yes. But not everything is engineering. Philosophy, like life, is complicated.
We have at absolute pressure; that's something.
Problematically there are religious thinkers who would say god is a basic or properly basic belief - I guess it's the 'foundation' from which all other beliefs are built up from. In your view is it possible to not hold any such axioms as a foundational starting point? Personally, I don't see how we can argue that god has the same epistemic status as the universe. The latter is hard to doubt, but the former, it seems to me, can only be arrived at though intellectual calisthenics...
Quoting Banno
And perversely such doubting has become a form of certainty.
You and I never seem to have productive discussions. Our posts don't seem to be very responsive to each other. I think we just think about things too differently. The things you think are important I don't and those I think are important you don't.
See PM. All of this has a so far ignored ethical dimension.
It may be just a linguistic issue, but I prefer to say, not that knowledge is uncertain, but that we know less than we think we do.
Quoting Banno
Is the natural language approach the heir of the ordinary language approach? If so, that's me.
Quoting Tom Storm
The endless and fruitless search for foundations of knowledge certainly looks like a misapplication of an idea like the format of Euclid's writings about geometry.
Quoting Banno
If there are any propositional foundations for knowledge, these small and simple truths must be them. But the deeper foundations are the skills that we begin learning as soon as we are born (and possibly before that.) In my opinion.
And the justification for the skills, is, in the end, pragmatic. Evolution takes care of that.
As I noted previously, you and I seem to agree on most of the substantive issues, [joke]so I'm going to forgive your misconceptions about the language.[/joke]
I'm grateful. Arguing about such an issue is no fun, just annoying. So I reciprocate. :smile:
Could be. It's probably down to the notion of god which has historically been posited as the foundational grounding of human knowledge. So we get the inevitable question - how can knowledge be true or objective or foundational if god does not guarantee it? And then you get arguments like the evolutionary argument against naturalism by people like Alvin Plantinga.
What works, what is useful, what is pragmatic; or just that it's what we do? I'm not sure that the use of "pragmatic" isn't a bit too teleological, giving the impression of serving an 'ends' that isn't there.
And in these fora, evolutionary explanations abound. I tend towards Mary Midgley's mistrust of their overuse.
But you might be right.
So, why speak about propositional knowledge at all then, why not speak about more or less justified propositional belief instead, thus dissolving all the attendant paradoxes, and saving us from going over and over this same old boring ground ad nauseum?
I don't see that. Rather, you said JTB was silly and I showed a few ways in which it is of interest to philosophers because it displays some of the characteristics of knowledge. You didn't much take to my comments,
You also claimed that we cannot be certain of what we know, to which I gave a few counterexamples.
I'd like to think that where we stand now is in a broad agreement that neither JTB nor pragmatism give complete, nor even sufficient, accounts of knowledge.
No, I don't think so. For me, any definition or description that doesn't take into account how people use knowledge on a day to day basis is misleading. You call it pragmatism and I'm ok with that.
I think it is very hard to let the idea of knowledge go, because it carries a promise of certainty. Even if we did speak only about justified belief, we would still argue about what counts as justification. It is not an unimportant idea.
Sadly, every philosopher has to be convinced of everything for themselves. It's foundational that one cannot trust anyone on any subject. Perhaps it's overdone, but I don't think there is any cure that would not be worse than the disease.
Quoting Banno
At some point, there has to be a point when justifications come to an end and "it's just what we do" kicks in. I'm not dogmatic about where that point is, and I suspect that every generation will throw up people who can't resist asking questions and pushing beyond.
I agree with you that appeal to evolution should always be cautious and tentative. There are some dreadful cautionary tales. Fortunately, I'm not competent to go beyond gesturing in the direction of evolution without offering any specifics.
:up:
Is knowledge playing the role of an abstract hero here ? I think (?) you are looking into what kind of claims should be respected and trusted. As you say, we can't limit ourselves to infallible claims. In my view, it might be better to discuss the ideal philosopher or the truly rational person. I apologize if I'm way off on what you are ultimately getting at.
:up:
This makes sense, because it costs to doubt. Smooth operation is paused. I have to stop and make sure, 'waste time' questioning this or that, when I could be steaming ahead. Then there's the cost of feeding a complex nervous system, of calculating a massive model when a cheap model might be the better deal, all things considered.
Knowlege is experience, through which meanings are gained though fallible. Which can only be found fallible through another biological experience.
Whether we are dealing with the former or latter depends on the relationship between truth and justification, according to the user of the definition. Either, a justified proposition is always true (1), or it is not always true (2). In the latter case, justification may have the capacity, if sufficiently strong, to prove a proposition true (2a), or it may never have this capacity (2b). In the event of 2b, justification like plays the role of increasing the probability of a proposition being true; it's simply that this probability will never reach 1.
NB: In this section, I will simply assume justified propositions are beliefs.
_______________________
In the case of 2b, truth is an undecidable property, and thus makes knowledge a category of propositions of which we know no elements. In this case, knowledge becomes a pretty useless word; we can only speak of certain aspects of the elements of the set of knowledge, but we can not directly speak about any elements.
If one has this account of truth; a property that can never be certainly proven to apply to a proposition; then one is likely to speak of "probably true propositions"; and likely, one would adopt this set of propositions as one's set of knowledge. Thus, this account of truth calls for a different definition of knowledge; the JB definition. Likely, there'll also be some minimum threshold of justification required to for the status of being knowledge, so to call it the JB definition is a simplification.
In the case of 2a, an identity is, to some degree, drawn between proof of truth and justification. Put precisely, a proposition is proven true iff a proposition is sufficiently justified. Thus, such an account means knowledge could simply be defined as JB, though, there would need to be specified a threshold of justification. Note that TB would not necessarily be definition of knowledge under these kinds of epistemtic accounts, because unprovable truths may exist within some of them.
The possibility of 1 is drawing a complete identity between proof of truth and justification. Thus, the definition can be reduced to JB.
_________________________
Thus, in all cases, the criterion of being true within the JTB definition is either redundant, or, it makes the definition quite useless. Do not get me wrong, the concept of truth is important even for a radical skeptic; but most skeptics refer to facts and logic in their daily lives. By defining truth and knowledge in the way as proposed in response to 2b, one can continue to be skeptical about truth, and yet also retain the practicality of referring to knowledge.
Now, this critique has not even touched on the B of JTB. I find it somewhat problematic, given that it can pose a pointless obstacle in situations of non-skeptical accounts of truth. Let us say one's account says that the ZFC system is true. Now, let us say you go through the proof of the Banach-Tarski theorem, understanding everything. At the end of it however, you are not convinced (along with many others, hence the Banach-Tarski paradox). Now, you are in possession of a justified and true proposition, yet it is somehow not knowledge, just because it conflicts with your primitive, monkey-brained intuitions? Some may say my retort is a straw-man; to them, the purpose of the B is to include a phenomenological aspect of knowledge. However, the J is capable of doing that in a far less problematic way, granted one defines justification as something that is consciously applied to propositions.
If this feels reductive, one can always just define justified as the property of being consciously justified, and justifiable as the property of having the capacity to be justified. Thus, every justified proposition is justifiable, but not vice versa.
That's right. And ordinary or natural language has a way of dealing with claims that are not true. We are expected to withdraw them, on pain of lying or misleading people. That applies to knowledge claims just as much as plain assertions.
Quoting boagie
I think that the practice or skill of drawing conclusions from experience, which I call reason, plays a part. Don't you think?
Experience isn't a given, as it usually seems to be. There is a great deal of (unconscious) interpretation that has gone into processing the data before we are aware of it and more can be (consciously) done after we become aware of it
Quoting Ø implies everything
I don't find much wrong with your analysis. Considered in the abstract, justification and truth are connected, so it seems that only one process is needed. But you are forgetting that in the third person, there are three people involved in the definition - subject, speaker and audience. If I say that she or he knows something, I need to know that it is true; but I also want to know that she or he is not guessing or basing the claim on some false or irrelevant evidence. This point gets obscured because we so often fall into thinking about "I know". Certainly justification and truth overlap in that case, which is why "I know" has little more than rhetorical impact.
"Know" as differentiated from "belief" has a very useful function, which "believe" cannot fulfil. It passes on information with an endorsement and a source, so there is some reason to trust it. "Believe" cannot do that, because (in the second or third person) it is compatible with the belief being false and so does not endorse it.
Belief can depend on justification. Justification can depend on truth.
Example: I believe in moneys value (belief) . This is justified because others agree and behave in the same way (justification) . It is true because we all transact and buy things. (truth)
Justification can depend on belief, belief can depend on truth
Example: money can be used to buy things (justification) because people believe in its value (belief). They believe it because money bought stuff for them in the past (truth).
Truth can depend on justification. Justification can depend on belief.
Example: I bought an apple (truth) because money has been known to buy things (justification). It's value comes from the fact that everyone has agreed to believe so (belief).
Truth can depend on belief. Belief can depend on justification.
I bought an apple (truth) because everyone believes that is possible with the use money (belief), and that belief comes from the fact that it has been done before (justified).
No matter what dependency or inter-relationship there is between the three, the final result is the same.
However if we remove any of the three. The sequence fails.
We have three humans, H1, H2 and H3. P1 is the following proposition: "H2 knows P2."
P2 is the following proposition: "H3 knows P3". P3 is an arbitrary proposition.
Now, when does H1 know P1?
Well of course, that depends on your account of truth. If a proposition is (sufficiently) justified iff it is proven true iff it is knowledge, then:
(H1 knows P1) iff (H1 is justified in P1) iff (H1 is justified in thinking that H2 is justified in thinking P2) iff (H1 is justified in thinking that H2 is justified in thinking that H3 is justified in thinking P3).
At what point does the criterion of truth become necessary?
And what about the skeptical account of truth, where we may only approach in probabilistically and knowledge is defined as "sufficiently probable to be true", a property which we then call being justified?Well, then the same chain iffs is true.
This would make sense if real people making real decisions argued about things like this, but it's only philosophers. Philosophers have lots of time to waste. Pausing smooth operation is what they, we, do.
Good points ! We are like wicked children, who question what they are told, because it feels good. But we are also anguished adults, truly troubled about whether X is right and whether Y could be true.
Right. Amplifying: I say that Sally knows P if
(1) Sally believes P
(2) Sally can justify her belief in P (according to current norms)
(3) I also believe P
I think we agree that this is an idealized definition. In other words, real life is messy and inconsistent. People use 'know' without much precision. So philosophers write a dictionary for the Utopia which will never arrive, which is probably good for their own thinking even in this world.
Well, I am neither wicked nor anguished. I guess I'm just opinionated and stubborn.
Welcome to the forum.
Oh, but I include 'opinionated and stubborn' under 'wicked.' (My point is that sometimes we just like to play with thoughts, while at other times it's no longer play but all too serious.)
Thanks for the welcome!
I don't follow your iff sequences at all. Let me explain how the third person is relevant.
Let S be a person who knows something. Let p be the something that S knows. Let R be a person who wants to report to a third party that S knows that p. Let the third party be A.
S = subject (of S knows that p). p=proposition, known by S. R = person reporting that S knows that p. A = person to whom R is reporting (Audience)
"S knows that p" informs A that 1) p is true; 2) that S has the information and reason to believe it; and 3) that R accepts that both 1) and 2) are true.
OK?
Quoting green flag
I'm afraid that doesn't quite cut it, because if P is false, (1), (2), and (3) will still be true and hence it will still be true (on your definition) that Sally knows that P. Clause (3) has to be "P is true". It may make no difference at first sight, but this clause means that anyone who claims that Sally knows that P has to withdraw that claim if P turns out to be false.
Quoting Ø implies everything
One can be justified in believing something even if it is false. The criterion of truth prevents that weakness from being passed on to knowledge.
Personally, I'm OK with that. I think it's too restrictive (possibly completely paralyzing, so that we couldn't honestly use the word) to require perfect certainty with the use of 'know.'
But let me reiterate that we are cowriting the dictionary of a utopia that will never arrive. The 'real' or 'more real' meaning of 'know' is a tangled mess to be empirically investigated.
A much better definition is awareness of present intelligibility. To know something, it must be able to be known, aka intelligible. Objects typically make themselves present by acting on our senses. It frequently passes without notice that a sensed object modifying our neural state is (identically) our neural state being modified by the sensed object. In other words, our neural representation of an object is its action on us. It is by this action that the object makes itself present in us, awaiting our awareness. When we become aware of the neurally encoded information, we know it. Such awareness is knowledge as acquaintance.
As I explain in my recent article (discussed in a different thread) propositional knowledge derives from knowledge by acquaintance via abstraction and recombination.
Scientific knowledge is partly observational and so a case of sense based knowledge, or it is hypothetical, and so not knowledge as defined above. Still, "knowledge" is analogously predicated when we assert that well-confirmed theory as knowledge. (A is analogous to B if A is partly the same as, and partly different from B.) It is partly the same because it is founded in, and descriptive of, a broad range of sensory experience. It is partly different because it is not based on sufficient experience to preclude the need for further refinement or correction.
Let's have a few then...
Quoting Dfpolis
How does that work? Take me through the neurological processes you envisage bringing this about. Let's say you see a tree. We have some photons hitting the retina...what then?
Hmm. That's a pretty broad notion of "will", there. I believe I'm a tad hungry, but I'm not willing myself to be hungry. Quite the opposite, since i need to drop a kilo or so.
Nor is an act of will involved in my committing to the proposition "I am hungry". It's more a recognition of a fact. I'm not saying "I choose the words "I am hungry" to set out how I am feeling", so much as a recognition that these are the right words here.
It appears to be contradictory to say "I know such-and-such, but I don't believe it". Of course, we might use such an expression, not to set out our state of mind, but to give voice to how startled we are that such-and-such is indeed the case. However saying we know something and yet do not believe it looks like a misuse of one term or the other - either we don't actually know it or we don't actually believe it.
When one suspends belief, as in the Descartes example you give, one does not thereby commit to the alternative being true. One might, for example simply be saying "yes, I know I'm in a nice warm room, but what if I weren't?"; or any of various other ideas usually associated with the philosophy of fictional writings. It's a long stretch to claim that since we might engage in a few modal musings, we don't believe what we say we know.
And Present ineligibility looks a but fraught. I know stuff that is not present to me... that Paris is in France, for example which is on the other side of the world from here.
Anyway, that might do for a bit. I'm not in agreement with you, shall we say.
Donald Trump in his claims that he had the largest crowd at his inauguration and that he won the 2020 election. Also, all who chose to believe him, knowing that there was no basis for doing so other than their own desire that it be so. People who know, but will not believe, that they have insufficient funds to buy what they want, and act on this commitment by buying it because they want it.
Quoting Isaac
The object acts to scatter light into our eyes, activating its rods and cones. Some of these activate the optic nerves which convey the information through the ganglion axons to the optic chiasm where information from both eyes is combined. The signals then pass to the lateral geniculate thalami. Other neurons connect to primary visual cortex for processing, extracting features such as edges and colors. Thence, information is conveyed to the visual association cortex for integration with prior experience.
This complexity of visual precessing does not change the fact that without the action of the object, none of the consequent changes of neural state, which are our visual representation of the object, would exist. So, again, the action of the sensed object on our nervous system (as complex as it is) is identically our neural representation of the object.
To make a commitment is to will. In choosing, we are not merely more motivated toward one alternative than another, we commit to a line of action. We know there is a commitment when we act on the false belief as though it were true. We buy things we cannot afford or commit to the idea that a politician is really a moral person and so vote, when we know he or she is not.
Being hungry is not a commitment. It is a physiological state, and perhaps our awareness of that state. If will enters, it is only in choosing to attend to or ignore the neurally encoded information informing us of this state. Choosing how to respond to this information is the province of will.
Quoting Banno
But, it is. I may pretend, to myself, that I am not hungry, even though I know that I am. Such a pretense is committing to, believing, the false proposition that I am not really hungry.
Quoting Banno
As I have defined these acts, no contradiction is involved. Descartes knew he was in his chamber, but chose to suspend his belief in it. In watching a movie or play, we enter a state aptly described as "a willing suspension of disbelief."
I agree that people often use "know" and "believe" interchangeably. I have given technical definitions to distinguish my use of the terms in this discussion from their common use. Clearly, those to propose to define knowledge as "justified true belief," or "causally justified true belief" must mean something different by "knowledge" and "belief." If they did not, the definition would be circular. Such a definition assumes that there can be false beliefs that are not knowledge. There is no reason that knowledge and a commitment to a contradiction of knowledge cannot co-exist.
Quoting Banno
Agreed. But, if knowledge were a type of belief, we could not know without believing. Believing would be a necessary condition to have knowledge. That we can continue to know while suspending belief shows that belief is not a necessary condition for knowing.
Quoting Banno
If you think about it, this knowledge depends on a chain of action that can be traced back to the city acting on a subject's senses. If your knowledge is true, that sort of action is in you indirectly. If that action were not in you, at least indirectly, you might have an unjustified belief, but it would not be knowledge.
This means that we cannot always know that we know. This is not problematic, because we know we can be and have been deceived.
Quoting Ludwig V
This is the very notion I argued against with my first comment on this thread. You did not express any disagreement then, except for in the third person case, which I still do not see how you've shown makes truth a necessary condition.
If you read my first comment on this thread, you'll see how adding the criterion of truth introduces a different, more damaging weakness, in the event one has a skeptical account of truth.
Quoting Ø implies everything
But I don't have a sceptical account of truth!
Your first comment, if the software is working correctly, includes:- Quoting Ø implies everything
I inferred from the first sentence that you were considering "I know.." as a speech act. It seems that I was wrong to conclude that. We both agree, I think, in the first-person statement, the truth condition is clearly redundant. "I know.." is cognitively identical to "I believe..". It's meaning, if any, is purely rhetorical. But if we abandon the truth condition, as you seem to want to do, "know" becomes indistinguishable from "believe".
In the case of third- and second - person uses, there is a point to the truth-condition. Without it, "know" again collapses into "believe", as I pointed out here: - Quoting Ludwig VIt is true that, in a sense, the most that I can convey is that I (the speaker) also believe that P. But the truth condition is also a commitment to abandon my claim if p should turn out to be false.
Quoting Dfpolis
Theres a great deal packed in to your first post. But your starting-point is Quoting Dfpolis So I shall start with that. There are a couple of points from your second post at the end.
Im not a fan of the concept of the will. I dont understand what it means. It seems to be an attempt to sweep up into one category all the various beginnings of action. But our actions are very various and have many different beginnings. Moreover, while it seems reasonable to suppose there is a beginning to most beliefs, it isnt clear to me that that all actions have the same beginning or that the beginning can be called an action of the same kind as cooking a meal or starting the car.
Coming to believe that p is often simply accepting or recognizing that p is true. Nothing more is needed. It is true that other considerations may affect that process, usually sub- or un- consciously. As you note, Sadly, what we know does not always elicit belief. There are many examples of people committing to what they want to be true, rather than what they know to be true. But you are taking a partial view here. There are also many examples of people accepting a situation that they very much do not want to be true.
Coming to believe something is very seldom like making a commitment, in the way that choosing one sandwich rather than another or accepting God into your life or getting married are commitments. We can, it is true, decide to believe p rather than q. But that is only an appropriate description if p and q have the same or similar weight of evidence. Deciding to believe would be a misdescription when I find out that p or notice that q.
Descartes is astonishingly casual in introducing his suspension of belief, and Im not at all sure that I really understand it. Clearly, he did not suspend his belief that he was holding a pen and writing on paper. We have the evidence of the text he wrote.
However, it is true that sometimes people dont accept the conclusion of what looks like a conclusive argument or conclusive experiences. It is a paradoxical situation. Perhaps we could say that the scintilla of doubt that there might be some mistake or get-out clause is relied to delay acceptance of the inevitable.
Quoting Dfpolis
No brain state is our visual representation of the object. We can't see it, and if we did, we would not know what we are looking at.
Quoting Dfpolis
Suspending belief isn't the same as ceasing belief. I'm required to suspend disbelief while hearing or reading or watching a fictional story. That doesn't mean I stop believing anything, any more than it means I start believing that the story is true. One interpretation of the phrase that has been suggested elsewhere, (but I'm afraid I've forgotten where) is that we are asked to consider "what if.." Alternatively, Banno suggests that Descartes' project consists of Quoting Banno
If you do not have a skeptical account of truth, that means (sufficient) justification is an undeniable proof of truth. Thus, if you know that John knows P, you also know P, because if P were false, then John does not know P, which means you do not know that John knows P, which contradicts the premise. This can be expanded to the case that involves three people, four people, etc.
If you disagree, could you formalize the event in which (sufficient) justification is certain, yet being (sufficiently) justified in knowing someone else is (sufficiently) justified in knowing P can somehow coexist with P being false?
Thank you for commenting.
I do not see will as the beginning of action. Physical action can be traced back to the Big Bang, and if multiverse theories are true, perhaps prior to that. More proximately human, humans are psychophysical organisms and have multiple, incommensurate needs. Some, like breathing, are normally dealt with automatically, others, like that for social relationships, require thought. Employing the strategy that AI researchers call "generate and test," we imagine several possible, but mutually incompatible, lines of action to meet our needs. These we subject to conscious reflection.
Because our needs are incommensurate (e.g., we cannot trade off between our need for oxygen and our need for calories or vitamin C), we cannot decide on the plan to be implemented based on the maximization of some utility (as utilitarians believe).
Metaphysical naturalists (who are not naturalists, but physicalists who seem to believe that intentional acts are un- or supernatural) would have us believe that this intentional issue is resolved by a purely physical process. I pointed out in my recent JCER paper (https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/1042/1035) that physical operations have physical, not intentional, effects. Committing to a line of action is an intentional act in Franz Brentano's sense, because we do not simply commit, we commit to something. So, commitments exhibit aboutness.
So, we are left with multiple possibilities and the need to actualize one in light of conscious reflection by an intentional act. Since we resolve such issues daily, we have the power to make such commitments. I am calling this power (which is not a thing) "will." It is different from our capacity to know (the "intellect") as we can know without committing.
Quoting Ludwig V
I distinguish accepting from recognizing. Acceptance is the result of a choice, in which not accepting is a possible result. In recognition, there is no alternative. There may be a prior choice to attend to or ignore information, but once we attend to it, we are aware of it, which is no different from recognizing it. So, if you say that believing is accepting, we agree. If you say it is recognizing, you are speaking of what I am calling "knowing."
Quoting Ludwig V
Advancing evidence that supports a conclusion is not taking a partial view, unless one ignores evidence against the conclusion. I agree: many people align their beliefs with their knowledge, however painful they may find it.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, because such acts describe knowing p or q. Suppose that I find out that the perihelion of Mercury precesses at a rate that is incompatible with Newtonian mechanics. I can decide to maintain a prior belief in Newtonian mechanics, or say it is inadequate. My commitment will affect my subsequent acts. Some may be private, in how I think about nature. Some may be public, in my teaching or work.
Quoting Ludwig V
My distinction between knowing and believing allows us to understand what he did. He knew he was in his chamber, writing, but chose to believe he might not be. The same applies to what you describe in your next paragraph.
Quoting Ludwig V
I make this very point in my paper in discussing David M. Armstrong's proprioception theory of consciousness (p. 98). Still, I hope to be forgiven for using conventional language in order to simplfy the discussion. I cannot address every point in a single post, a single article, or even a single book.
My preferred language is to call the neural modification induced by the action of the object on our senses a "presentation." A re-presentation occurs when we recall the experience. It is "enhanced"/modified by the memory and recall process. Neither is a representation in the sense that a picture or a text is. They are instrumental signs, which must be recognized to be what they are before they can signify. Our neural encoding need not to recognized to be neural connections and/or activation rates before it can signify. Nor is its whole existence (all that it can and does do) to be a sign, as would be the case if it were a formal sign. So, it is sui generis.
Quoting Ludwig V
You are quite right. I overreached for another example.
Still, it shows that beliefs are commitments with behavioral consequences that bare knowledge does not have. It is because of the suspension of belief that we can respond emotionally to a story. Commitments have behavioral consequences knowledge does not have.
But if I know that John knows that p, I do know that p is true. If p had been false, I wouldn't have known
that John knows that p. What's the problem?
Quoting Ø implies everything
Then either you are changing the definition of belief. The differential of belief and knowledge is normally thought to be that a belief is still a belief even if it is false. This is perfectly compatible with some beliefs being justified and some not. Emotion does not justify a belief unless the emotion is justified. If that is the case, the justification of the emotion also justifies the belief. You are also changing the definition of knowledge, by allowing that it might be false and still be knowledge. Your argument about John presupposes that if p is false, p is merely believed, not known.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I think you misunderstand "God exists". It is what is called a hinge proposition, like an axiom. Everything is interpreted in the light of this. Justification starts from that, and it would be inappropriate to try to justify it.
I'm sorry if I led you to believe that I thought that "will" is a thing (object/state?). But my criticism was not about that. Your belief that all actions of whatever kind stem from a single power is a distortion through over-simplification. Your description of how we need to balance our values shows that there are different kinds of action which stem from different needs and wants and desires - and habits and customs.
Quoting Dfpolis
I find it hard to see why you want to call something a presentation when it is never presented to anyone or anything.
Quoting Dfpolis
If Descartes thought he might not be in his chamber writing, one might have expected him to be rather alarmed and to stop writing while he worked where he was and what he was doing. But he never stops believing that he is in his chamber writing.
I thought I dispensed with that misunderstanding. I pointed to multiple motivating factors from which action stems. Still, given multiple conceptual possibilities (lines of action), one needs to be actualized. That actualization is a specific kind of intentional act. Do you disagree? It would violate the principle of parsimony to posit multiple powers doing the same sort of actualization (committing to a line of action).
Also, since a power is not a thing, but a capability, either humans have the capability of actualizing one to the lines of action we contemplate, or we don't. If we don't, we could never pass from the contemplation of diverse plans to the implementation of one. So, we have the power I am calling "will."
Quoting Ludwig V
I already said that.
Quoting Ludwig V
Because objects act on the senses to inform the nervous system, thereby presenting themselves for possible attention. When we choose to attend (focus awareness on) to them, we actualize their intelligibility, knowing them.
The actions by which they inform our senses are not the only ones they are capable of. As a result, our knowledge is partial, not exhaustive. Still, we know that they can act as they do act on us.
Quoting Ludwig V
Thinking he was not would be alarming. Thinking he might not be -- not so much.
He tells us he has doubts. Doubts question his commitment to the truth of what he continues to know and believe. If the doubts prevail, he will continue to perceive, and so know, that he is in his chamber, but he will no longer be committed to the truth of what he knows. So, there is a difference between knowing and believing as I have defined them.
Yes, what is the problem? That's what I've been asking you. If I know (have a justified belief) that John knows p, then I know (have a justified belief) that p. The need for requiring truth in the definition of knowledge does not enter in these second, third and nth person cases. If you agree that for non-skeptical accounts of truth, truth is a redundant criterion of knowledge in the first person case, then you also agree that it is redundant for the nth person case.
Quoting Ludwig V
No, whether or not knowledge can be false depends on whether one finds justification sufficient for the status of knowledge to be fallible; i.e., whether one has a traditionally skeptical account of truth. Now, as for my definition of belief as emotional and knowledge as justified belief; what else do you propose?
Could you please explain how that the requirement of a specific kind of intentional act before any action doesn't give rise to an infinite regress?
Quoting Dfpolis
I've no doubt that there is a causal chain from what is called the external world to our brains. I agree that sometimes we choose to attend to things. But I also think that sometimes we do not. When I burn my fingers on a hot stove, I do not choose to attend to the pain.
Quoting Dfpolis
Ah, so knowledge does also require commitment. Thank you for clearing that up.
Since both knowledge and belief require commitment, how is it possible to continue to know or believe things that one is not committed to? Do you really mean to say that one knows something that one doubts?
That's right. And so is believing that your are hungry.
How does what you are calling "will" differ from what philosophers call "intentionality"? Or does your theory not make such a distinction?
Quoting Dfpolis
I can believe that I am hungry yet muse about not being hungry, without contradiction. No contradiction is involved. And thinking about what I might do were I not hungry is not the same as believing that I am not hungry when I am.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yep.
Sure. The need is to reduce the many potential plans contemplated to one line of action. The act doing this is not the result of contemplating its own meta-options, but of relating to the same options differently.
First, some options are imagined. This is the generate portion of generate and test. Second, we judge which are in our power. This is a recursive process, Aristotle's proairesis, in which we work from high level ends to lower level goals considered as means to those ends until we come to means in our immediate power. This winnows the imagined plans down to possible plans. The final step, that involving will, is valuing the plans. As Aquinas noted, the intellect is directed to truth, and the will to good. So, while many plans may be feasible, only one is most valued and therefore implemented. Since valuing is not judging feasibility, no regress is involved.
The above is somewhat simplified, as valuing also occurs in the proairetic process of working out the structure of intermediate means and ends.
Quoting Ludwig V
I am not sure that you did not, at least implicitly. Far greater wounds are suffered in battle and may pass unnoticed because attention is not focused on one's body, but on something else. So, I would say that by not fixing on another focus, we default to focusing on our body state.
Quoting Ludwig V
That is not what I said. I said doubt can affect commitment. I did not say that commitments can change what we know. Doubts can only affect our commitment to the truth of what we continue to know. Of course, we can refuse to look, but that is a different issue.
Quoting Ludwig V
I mean that if one really knows, doubts cannot change that knowledge to ignorance. They can only lead us to suspend our commitment to the truth of what we know. This can happen as the result of social pressure or brainwashing. Discrimination can convince people who know their self-worth to doubt it.
Believing it adds a commitment to its truth. Suppose a child is hungry and says so. An abusive parent says, "You're not hungry, you just want to complain." The child might believe this, even though she continues to know she is hungry.
Quoting Banno
Will is a power that allows us to value and so choose. Intentionality is not a power, but a property of certain acts, in virtue of which they point beyond their own existence. E.g. we do not just know, we know something. The same for hoping, fearing, loving, hating and so on. This is often described as possessing "aboutness." Valuing and choosing are instances of intentionality, as there is no valuing or choosing without something valued or chosen.
Quoting Banno
Musing is not doubting. It is imagining. Doubting questions our commitment to a proposition. Musing does not.
This is somewhat different to the way it is sometimes used in common parlance, such that it involves commitment. That's the sense it is used in church. Philosophers do not much go to church.
The sense of belief in JTB does not involve commitment.
I'm sugesting that the way you are using belief is somewhat different to the way it is used by epistemologists in general.
We obviously misunderstand each other. This is starts from the grammatical structure of verbs. There are only three persons in the singular and three in plural forms of any verb, including "know". "I know that p", "You know that p" and "He/She knows that p". The plural forms are "We", "You" and "They", but we don't need to consider those for present purposes.
We need to consider three roles in speech situations - the subject, that is, the person who knows, or doesn't, the speaker, who asserts that the subject knows and the audience, who are being addressed by the speaker (or at least are within earshot).
In the case of "I know that p", since the speaker and the subject are the same person, the truth clause is redundant (with some potential qualifications).
In the case of "You know that p", the audience and the subject are the same person. The truth condition is not redundant, but conveys the information that the speaker endorses the subject's belief that p.
In the case of "She/he knows that p", speaker, subject and audience are all distinct from each other. The truth condition is not redundant.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I propose to continue to use both terms with the meaning attributed to them by any good dictionary.
Quoting Dfpolis
Could you clarify whether this is an action and, if so, a rational action?
Quoting Dfpolis
I would agree. But I would not believe that I chose to focus my attention elsewhere.
Quoting Dfpolis
How does doubt affect our commitment to the truth of what we know if it does not undermine it.?
Quoting Dfpolis
We have the power to value and to choose. Why do you posit anything over and above those powers?
How does that contradict what I said? I am simply further specifying the "attitude" as commitment. Isn't "taking" p to be true the same as committing to the truth of p?
Quoting Banno
I beg to differ. Commitment is indicated by consequent behavior. If A believes p, then when asked "is p is true?" A will say, "Yes." That verbal behavior signifies commitment.
Quoting Banno
I agree. I do not see it as a genus in which knowledge is a species. This is because I take a narrower view of what constitutes knowing.
By 'further specifying the "attitude" as commitment'.
Quoting Dfpolis
An odd phrasing, but sure. But "taking p to be true" is not the same as "willing P to be true".
Quoting Dfpolis
Fine then, I'll leave you to your variation.
Yes, generating initial options for consideration is an action, but it need not be rational in the sense that the options result from judgement. Judgements come later, after there are options to judge. I see it as akin to Humean association, which results from neural net activation processes.
Quoting Ludwig V
Choices need not require long reflection. I have not been in battle, but I have been in life and death situations, and I know I chose my responses in under a second. Teachers of meditative practice train their disciples to focus their minds, excluding distractions from the chosen object. In my paper, I cite numerous philosophers' examples of consciousness focusing on one thing, while generating complex neurophysical behavior or responses to unrelated stimuli.
The point is that physical stimuli cannot make themselves known. We must choose to attend to them. How conscious that choice is varies among individuals. By default, we choose to attend to our body as presented by sensation, perhaps unaware that other options are available.
Quoting Ludwig V
It does not. The truth is unaffected, which is why the Cartesian meditation does not undermine cognition. What is affected is our commitment to the unaffected truth. Our commitments are reflected in our willingness to act on the truth we know. The abused child who has been told she is not really hungry, but only seeking attention, may cease asking for food and feel guilty about seeking attention -- all the while knowing she is truly hungry. When asked if she is hungry, she says, "No, sir" instead of "Please, sir, more gruel."
Quoting Ludwig V
Did I? I only named that power "will."
I do not understand the contradiction.
Quoting Banno
Of course, it is not. We do not will p to be true. We will to act as if p is true (or false). While commitment is an intentional act, it has behavioral consequences. (See my response to Ludwig V above.)
I am glad we agree.
What makes you think he committed to that? He said it. He probably lied.
Quoting Dfpolis
What do you mean 'no basis'? Trump said it. That's basis for someone who trusts Trump.
Quoting Dfpolis
Again, this doesn't mean they believe they have sufficient funds, it just means they're going to do it anyway. They might believe they'll get away with it, they might believe some money will come their way, they might believe they're going to win the lottery. Without actually asking you just come across a really arrogant, assuming you know what's going on in other people's minds.
Quoting Dfpolis
Apart from the clear involvement of priors in the primary visual cortex, I don't have any objection to your description, but nowhere in it does the object even make an appearance. So far we have photons and then either electrical or chemical activity in a complex set of feedback loops. "the Tree" hasn't even got in there yet, nor will it until much after the visual cortex has finished with the processing. In fact, nothing we could call "the Tree" arrives in the whole process until at least the inferotemporal cortex near the end of the ventral stream.Until that point, the photons from beside the tree and the photons from the tree are processed exactly the same way, no distinction is made.
And even in the inferotemporal cortex we have inputs from the A36 region are unrelated to the visual information and associate more strongly with language centres, emotional states and memory.
The idea that objects are recognised as a result of some unique 'signal' sent from them is not supported by the science on the matter.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is also untrue. Hallucinations are an obvious example of objects having the appropriate neural state associated with their presence being created, without their actually being there.
He certainly lied. The sign of commitment is subsequent behavior, not a clear conscience. I could distinguish sincere and insincere commitment, and say that the intentional state we call belief requires sincere commitment. I am unsure precisely how to define sincere commitment. Using behavior as a criterion is pretty clear-cut. Suggestions?
Quoting Isaac
I mean no basis in reality, of course.
Quoting Isaac
We are saying the same thing in different ways. You call the awareness of their state "believing." I find that confusing because people also believe things they have no knowledge of. So, I choose to call awareness of reality "knowing." Further, if you are going to do something that rationally requires p to be true, I call that committing to the truth of p -- and we agree that people do that knowing that p is false.
Quoting Isaac
If I accused a particular person, that would be arrogant and presumptuous. To say that it happens without accusing a specific person is not. It is a generalization based on experience.
Quoting Isaac
Of course, it does. The action of the object on the sensing subject effects the changes described.
Quoting Isaac
You are confusing having sense data, with the classification of sense data. To apply the term "the tree" we need to classify the "this something" (Aristotle's tode ti), a particular sensory complex, as an instance of a sortal. That comes later. The perceived interacts with its environment in specific ways, one of which is to scatter light capable of being focused into a retinal image into our eyes. That image, together with data from other sensory modalities (perhaps the smell of pine or of orange blossoms), combines into what Aristotle called the phantasm (cf. the binding problem), which we now know to be a modification of our neural state.
We identify organic unities because it was evolutionarily advantageous to do so. If it were not, we might well model the world differently. If "this something," the preceived unity, turns out to be a tree, it will be because it has an organic unity and function that qualifies it as an instance of the sortal or universal concept
Once we have a sensory "representation," Humean association comes into play. I think of it in terms of the activation of specific nodes in our neural net. An "image" of the setting sun may activate nodes representing other experiences of the sun, together with those of beach balls, golden orbs, etc. None of these associations is a classifying judgement. They are merely candidates for comparison. Still, their activation is the result of the sun's action on, the sun's dynamic presence in, the sensing subject. This is not to deny that they are also the inheritance of prior experience.
Quoting Isaac
While it is of great neurophysiological import where and when various stages of sensory processing occur, it is really of little philosophical interest. What is of interest is that they do occur, and occur in and can be explained by, our neurophysiology.
However, I think we still need to be careful in identifying the experience as (as opposed to associating it with) a tree. As Paul M. Churchland notes, no neural structures correspond to propositional attitudes ("Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," [i]The Journal of
Philosophy[/i] (1981) 78, pp. 67-90.)
Quoting Isaac
I do not recall asserting this. In a recent article, I argued the opposite (http://gilsonsociety.com/files/847-891-Polis.pdf p. 855 in discussing the definition of man).
Quoting Isaac
You are mixing cases. I am speaking of the normal perception of an existing sense object. I am not discussing pathological conditions. Please deal with the case at hand. In the case you describe, there is no sensed object, only a neural disturbance.
In normal sensation, the sensible object informing our nervous system is identically our nervous system being informed by the sensible object. These are alternate formulations of one and the same process.
But you can't identify from the behaviour what the belief is that it is a sign of. If I want a drink and head to the end of the road, you might think that indicates a belief that the pub is at the end of the road. But I might be going to end of the road hoping someone there will tell me where the pub's gone. I might be going to eliminate a tiny remaining doubt that the pub has, in fact, been turned into a car park. I might go to the end of the road because I'm nervous of taking the short cut to where the pub actually is...
In your example, lying about the crowd size is 'acting as if it were bigger'. It's acting entirely consistently with two other beliefs. 1) the crowd size was smaller, and 2) if I say it was bigger nonetheless, some people might believe me and I might be more popular. It Trump believed (1) and (2), he would act as he did. His 'commitment' to those two beliefs would be demonstrated in his claiming "the crowds were the biggest".
Quoting Dfpolis
Trump is a part of reality. we all gain the vast majority of our information about the world from other people. I live in England, I wasn't at the rally. So my information about it comes entirely from other sources and so is dependant entirely on who I trust. It's perfectly rational to construct a system of beliefs where one cannot trust the media representations, the Democrats, the 'fact-checkers', but one can trust Trump. I mean, I wouldn't personally advise doing so, but there's nothing in such a belief system which is contrary to that same person's knowledge.
Quoting Dfpolis
That's begging the question.
Quoting Dfpolis
Nothing in the actions you describe requires p to be true. Trump does not require it to be true that his crowd size was biggest in order to say that his crowd size was biggest. He can lie, and knowingly lie, for political advantage. He's not committing to be it being true, he's committing to it being false and acting to cover up that fact.
Quoting Dfpolis
No. The information from assumed external states effects the changes described. All external states. The entirely of the heterogeneous soup of data states that the hypothesise as being external to our system. No 'objects' are defined prior to our defining them.
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't think the evidence supports this model either. Very different groups of people have different rules of distinction. Take colour, for example. There are several different ways of dividing up colour responses in different culture. the evidence seems, rather, to point in the direction of language and culture being at least substantially, if not mainly, responsible for the 'dividing up' of our sensory inputs into objects.
Quoting Dfpolis
This would be to privilege one neural response above others. without begging the question, you've no grounds on which to do that. All we have is some sensory arousal. that sensory arousal causes a set of subsequent neural activity, some of which results in identifiable behaviour (like saying the word "sun"), others result in less identifiable behaviour, but that which we can identify with neural probing (like activating neural cluster previously strongly associated with beach balls). None of these responses is the 'real' one (with others being merely peripheral). Only our culturally embedded values can determine such a thing. Scientifically, they're all just equally valid responses of a system to stimuli.
Quoting Dfpolis
Exactly. And no neural structures correspond with 'tree' either (or at least not consistently). for a representationalist account we need consistent neural clusters to be associated with the objects of language, and they're just not.
Quoting Dfpolis
It's not 'pathological'. We hallucinate, for example, the content of a scene which is behind our punctum caecum. We hallucinate a stable scene despite regular changes in the angle of perception. We hallucinate dimensionality from flat images. We hallucinate colour changes where we expect them to be (not where they actually are). We also hallucinate the absence of unexpected objects despite the photons from them clearly hitting our retinas. There's nothing pathological about hallucination, it's how we see. we 'hallucinate' the scene we expect to be there and then we organise our saccades to test that hypothesis, only discarding it if it is overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary.
I'd characterise this differently. The child, ex hypothesi, believes they only want to complain; they do not believe they are hungry, and hence can not know that they are hungry.
Quoting Dfpolis
I think that wording is misleading. You'r over egging the cake.
Quoting Dfpolis
A little slide from "belief being an act of will" to our acts being indications of our beliefs. There's a difference between something's being believed because one wills it and someone willing some act as a consequence of their belief.
I agree that this is possible and likely. Still, the possibility that Trump may have convinced even himself (self-deluded) is all that I need to show that knowledge is not a species of belief. In that case, he may well have seen the pictures comparing his to the Obama inauguration crowds, found them so distasteful that he put them out of his mind, and comforted himself with the belief that his was crowd was bigger.
Quoting Isaac
The question is not if it is rational, but if it is possible, to construct beliefs. One cannot construct knowledge out of whole cloth, only make explicit what was only implicit in what we already know. One might construct a belief that was adequate to reality, but unless it was informed by the reality it was about, it would not be knowledge. Its adequacy would be accidental -- a coincidence.
Given that such a construct is a true belief, adding rational justification cannot convert it into knowledge, unless that justification is being aware of the relevant intelligibility. This is the same point made in a different way by Al Goldman's response to the Gettier problem (A Causal Theory of Knowing, Journal of Philosophy (1967), 64, 357-72.) Knowledge, in the strictest sense, requires a causal chain of action linking object to subject in which the former informs the latter. This is not to deny that in both common and technical use, what is called "knowledge" turns out to be "justified" belief -- for example, the "knowledge" that the world is determined by Newtonian mechanics. This was simply an over-commitment to a theory with a limited range of application, i.e. believing in Newtonian mechanism.
Suppose I am lied to by a usually reliable source. I am morally justified in believing what I am told, but the belief is false. (The justification is surely moral, rather than logical, because it is based on an estimation of character.) On the other hand, if my source is reporting what actually she actually experienced, there is a line of action from the objective event to my information-bearing neural state. So, I know (by my definition). This leaves us with no infallible test for knowing, vs. merely believing, p, but there is no reason why we should have such a test. We can only know and believe as humans do, i.e. fallibly.
We can only act on rational beliefs, but now we are talking about the basis of action, not simple knowledge. Our willingness to act on p is what I am calling commitment to the truth of p or believing p. It is different from knowing it is the case that p. We can know p, but lack the confidence to commit to the truth of p, and act on it.
Aquinas offers a related insight in the Summa Theologiae in discussing commitment to God as our end, which he calls "intentionality toward God." He writes that we know we are committed to an end when we will the means to that end. In other words, when we "walk the walk" instead of merely "talking the talk." That is why I offer action premised on p as a sign of commitment to the truth of p.
Quoting Isaac
I would suggest that with over 13,000 lies in office, it is virtually impossible to follow Trump and not to know he routinely lies.
Quoting Isaac
How can being confused be begging the question? My only assertion was that "people ... believe things they have no knowledge of." Are you denying that?
Quoting Isaac
Again, it need not be true in every case. If there is one case in which a rational actor knows p is false and acts based on the belief that p is true, by the modus tollens, knowledge is not a species of belief.
Quoting Isaac
It is my opinion, based on listening to Mary Trump, Donald's niece and a clinical psychologist, that Donald could never commit to his crowd size being less than that of an African American. He would see it as being utterly demeaning and so impossible.
Quoting Isaac
Information is an abstraction, not encountered in a disembodied form. Rather, there are informing actions: sending a message, forming an image on the retina, causing cochlear cilia to vibrate, etc. Sensible objects are agents that effect changes in sense organs, and it is those changes, specified jointly by the nature of the object and of the organ, that embodies information.
Claude Shannon defined information as a reduction in possibility. Of all the possible ways in which the sense organ could be affected, it is affected in a way specified by the action of the sensible object. The object's essence is the specification of its possible actions. So, the actual action of the object on the organ informs us about the object's essence/specification -- the way it acts on us is one of the ways it can act.
External states are not "assumed." They are consequent on how we structure our experience. In other words, "external states" is the name we give to the source of certain experiential contents, as "internal states" is the name given to the source of other contents or aspects of contents. You can deny that experienced contents have a source, but if you do, you are a solipsist, and we have no basis for further communication as, in your view, I may not be real.
Quoting Isaac
This is not a sentence.
Quoting Isaac
I find this unintelligible until you define "'objects.'" There are sensible existents with organic unity prior to being perceived. I could argue this, but the burden is on you to clarify and possibly justify your claim.
Quoting Isaac
I have no problem with projecting experience into different conceptual spaces. I raised the issue in my first (Metaphilosophy) paper and discussed it in my last three articles. However, the existence of diverse conceptual spaces does not entail the non-existence of organic unities, aka organisms. Further, your dismissal of my evolutionary explanation suggests that you not only reject organisms, but the modern evolutionary synthesis that explains their genesis.
I note that language expresses thought, making thought ontologically prior to language. We often struggle to find le mot juste to express our thought, showing that thought is not totally dependent upon language.
I agree that culture can and does shape our conceptual space, but it typically does so through the medium of language. Since language does not preclude thought that cannot be linguistically expressed, there is no reason to think that culture is the only source of one's conceptual space. In confirmation of this, we see that new concepts constantly come into being.
Quoting Isaac
Of course, I do. Experiments show that some stimuli activate specific neural net nodes while others do not. Those that activate nodes might be called "privileged" (your term, not mine).
Quoting Isaac
You are mischaracterizing my position. I do not deny that any neural response is real. Still, some activate nodes formed by prior experience, and some do not. Those that do not lack discernible immediate consequences. They may not even activate the next neuron.
So, our evolution and experience make certain stimuli "privileged" in your jargon. Evolution plays a role because other organisms can be predators, sources of nourishment, and/or otherwise dangerous or useful -- making it advantageous for them to be "privileged." Thus, there is good reason to think that nature rather than nurture makes ostensible unities (Aristotle's tode ti = this something) "privileged." We relate to the world precisely as humans, and not as abstract data processors. Still, we would not have adapted to privilege organisms were there no organisms to privilege.
Quoting Isaac
I am not a metaphysical naturalist, but I think this claim is unsupportable. The neural net model seems a reasonable first approximation to how information is categorized. If so, there ought to be nodes assocated with each sortal in our conceptual space and activated by its instances. Thus, there ought to be a "tree" node, which is activated by encountering trees. Further, its activation should be consistent, though not infallible. If not, we would have great difficulty in predicating "tree" of an oak we have encountered.
Quoting Isaac
I am not sure what you mean by "valid" here. Are all responses equally logical? No. Equally adaptive? No. Equally effective in activating sortal nodes? No. They are only equal in all existing. That does not make them "valid" in any sense I can think of.
Quoting Isaac
To hallucionate is to "experience an apparent sensory perception of something that is not actually present." I am discussing the case where an object is actually present. Thus, what you are describing does not meet the defintion of a hallucination.
Still, I agree: we fill in data. I discuss filling in motion between cinema frames in my book. Neural data processing is an adaptive resonse to the action of the object. Just to be clear, I am not claiming that the "image" we see in our minds corresponds one-to-one with the object seen. It does not.
My claim is that our intellect being informed by the intelligible object is identically the intelligible object informing our intellect. That claim is incontrovertible, as it merely identifies alternate formulations of a single event. It also implies that knowing is not purely objective, as some believe, but a subject-object relation. Thus, it is as inescapably subjective as it is inescapably objective.
None of the filling-in of data we are discussing would or could occur were there not objective information to supplement in what has proven to be a normally adaptive response -- and there is no response without something to respond to.
The problem with this is that the sequence begins by the child knowing they are hungry. Being convinced they are not is an abusive consequence of that.
Quoting Banno
I think the difficulty is that in common use, believing and knowing are often used interchangeably. The question is, is there a difference between being aware of a state and being willing to act (even mentally) on the fact of that state. I am saying there is.
Quoting Banno
I would say that if you claim to believe something, and are unwilling to act on that "belief," you do not really believe it.
One might will oneself to believe Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs will win against the Sharks, but one does not will oneself to believe that this text is in English.
While one might be said to will oneself to act in a certain way based on one's beliefs, one does not in every case will oneself to believe this or that.
But you seem to be arguing for this last, using the first.
I missed this response previously.
I draw a distinction between feeling certain and being certain. We can feel certain about many things, and be mistaken, but by definition if we are certain about something then we cannot be mistaken. And this is just what knowledge is generally taken to be (even if some usages of the term might belie this): being certain.
We don't need knowledge to carry the promise of certainty because belief already carries this intimation of certainty in two ways. Firstly, we can simply be convinced by our beliefs, that is feel certain about them. Of course we will then take beliefs that we feel certain about as knowledge, but if we cannot actually be certain about them then they are not knowledge, and we are deceived. Secondly belief carries the potential to become knowledge, which is certainty.
For example, say you believe your partner is having sex or planning to have sex with a particular person; you cannot be certain (although you might feel certain) until you catch him or her in the act at which point you know and become certain, and doubt and belief are longer relevant.
Is there anything we can be certain about? If so, we possess knowledge and if not, then we don't possess knowledge.
The JTB formula allows that we might know things we don't know that we know. This seems absurd to me, if you don't know that you know, then you don't know.
I also think that the things we do know are simply things that we can see, and belief is redundant in those cases. I look out the window and see that it is raining; I go outside to make sure it is actually rain, and I see that it is; no need then to speak of belief. It should not be "seeing is believing" but 'seeing is knowing'. It seems to go against the inherent logic of believing to say that you believe something of which there could be no doubt.
Of course we can always raise the spectre of universal doubt, which just shows that all propositional knowledge is contextual; there is no absolute propositional knowledge, and thus there is no absolute certainty.
Perhaps not, but either atheists will themselves to believe there is no God, or theists will themselves to believe there is a God. Both cannot know the truth of the matter, despite claiming that they do. So, there must be another source of their commitment. I claim that it is will.
Quoting Banno
I agree that generally these acts are spontaneous rather than the consequence of deep reflection. I do not think that willing requires such reflection. I think that in most cases it is a spontaneous and unreflective valuing.
Returning to your example, it takes no "will power" a la William James to commit to the truth of "This text is in English." We spontaneously value (are drawn to the goodness) of truth, and that valuing results in commitment. So, believing what we know is the normal response.
Well, no. Atheists believe there is no God, or theists believe there is a God. Will has little to do with it. Quoting Dfpolis
Why? As in, why must there be a commitment? Why not just a belief?
Quoting Dfpolis
And when you take this far enough, will becomes no more than intentionality - directedness.
Again, this begs the question. If you assume the possibility, you are not investigating it, you're simply declaring it.
Quoting Dfpolis
There's obviously a difference between mere belief and actual knowledge, but that difference is not sufficient to justify a claim that people believe something despite knowing its opposite.
The points (as yet unaddressed) are that;
1) people acting as if p is not an indicator that they believe p, it is an indicator that they believe acting as if p is in their best interests. It might be in their best interests because they believe p is the case, but it might be in their best interests because it benefits them in some way that people see them act as if p, or that there's some peripheral benefit to acting as if p.
2) (and I'm having to say this a worryingly increasing number of times lately) stuff you believe is true is not necessarily true. Just because you personally believe Trump didn't have the largest crowds, doesn't mean he didn't. you didn't personally count them, you didn't personally see them. You are told and shown the evidence by others. It is perfectly rational behaviour to not trust those others and so not believe the evidence they are presenting. I could, for example, imagine all the news footage was doctored by CGI. Believing implausible things is not the same as believing something you know to be false.
Quoting Dfpolis
Case in point. who told you he told over 13,000 lies? Did you count them yourself? Did you investigate the truth in each case? No. You simply believed what you were told. Other people do not believe what you believe. Other people do not trust the sources you trust.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes, but without begging the question, you've yet to demonstrate that there is any such actor.
Quoting Dfpolis
That may well be true, but you haven't demonstrated that he, at the same time, knows it to be true that his crowds were smaller.
Quoting Dfpolis
My apologies, it should read "The entirely of the heterogeneous soup of data states that we hypothesise as being external to our system"
I'm arguing that there is no ground for saying that external objects (with properties consistent to that object) exist outside of our definition of them. There is ground for saying that sufficient heterogeneity exists (otherwise we'd have to assume that our astonishing consistency in object recognition was a mere coincidence), but there's no grounds for assuming that it could not have been otherwise.
Like the constellation Orion. It definitely is in the shape of a man with a belt and a bow. We're not making that up. But it is also in the shape of dozens of other things we've chosen to ignore.
They both cannot know what they claim, so what kind of act do you see engendering belief? And, when they each believe what they believe, is that not the same as being committed to that position?
Quoting Banno
If you engaged in a discussion of God's existence, you would quickly find that theists and atheists are strongly committed to their positions. So, it is a contingent fact that firm belief is inseparable from firm commitment.
Quoting Banno
Almost. It is the cause of intentionality in the sense of directedness.
Not at all. I am articulating a common and accepted view, viz. that people are capable of self-deception. Cf. Zengdan Jian, Wenjie Zhang, Ling Tian, Wei Fan and Yiping Zhong, "Self-Deception Reduces Cognitive Load: The Role of Involuntary Conscious Memory Impairment," Frontiers of Psychology 10 (30 July 2019) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01718/full.
What they are calling "a contradictory unconscious real belief" I am calling "knowledge."
Further references:
Z. Chance, M. I. Norton, F. Gino, and D. Ariely (2011). "Temporal view of the costs and benefits of self-deception." Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 108, 1565515659.
W. Hippel and R. Trivers(2011). "The evolution and psychology of self-deception," Behav. Brain Sci. 34, 156.
J. Liu, W. Zhang, Y. Zhan, L. Song, P. Guan, D. Kang, et al. (2019). "The effect of negative feedback on positive beliefs in self-deception," Front. Psychol. 10, 702713.
M. Ren, B. Zhong, W. Fan, H. Dai, B. Yang, W. Zhang, et al. (2018). "The influence of self-control and social status on self-deception," Front. Psychol. 9, 12561267.
I could go on, but this should suffice.
Quoting Isaac
I am not saying it is sufficient. I am saying that it is an accepted psychological fact that some people self-deceive as described by Jain et al. above.
Quoting Isaac
I would say that it could indicate either. I only claimed that acting on a belief was a sign of commitment, not that it necessarily entailed commitment. Smoke is a sign of fire, but that does not mean that every instance of spoke entails an instance of fire.
Quoting Isaac
We agree entirely on this.
Quoting Isaac
I saw the picture of his crowd next to the picture of Obama's crowd. You could pettifog with various objections, but that is a rational basis for my conclusion on crowd size.
Quoting Isaac
Hardly! It is paranoid behavior unless one has specific sound reasons for distrusting. I suggest you consult DSM 5.
Quoting American Psychiatric Association, 2013
Quoting Isaac
Pettifogging. You are creating a diversion instead of addressing my point that no rational follower of D.T. could fail to notice many of his lies.
Quoting Isaac
I am not seeking metaphysical certitude with my examples. I am merely suggesting directions to look in order to see what I see. So, raising possible alternatives in specific cases misses the point. The point is that this type of behavior occurs, and it is useful to reflect upon it. It is not that my example is infallibly a case of such behavior. I am morally certain it is -- certain beyond a reasonable doubt. Aides normally inform presidents of such things. I am not metaphysically certain that it is -- my conclusion lacks absolute necessity.
Quoting Isaac
"No ground"? In that case, you have a long way to go. It seems clear to me that many of our perceptions have specific, enduring sources, and that specificity grounds our property concepts.
Quoting Isaac
I agree that sensible objects have no intrinsic necessity. They are metaphysically contingent. Beyond that, I have no idea what you mean by thinking it could have been otherwise. Do you mean that ants might not have evolved? Or that we might not have noticed that ants are organic unities, and so might not have formed the concept
Quoting Isaac
Quite true, but, I think, entirely irrelevant. In thinking of an ant, we are not saying this little six-legged thing in the sugar bowl is like something else. We are saying it is an ant. It is also like many other things -- say, a moving speck of pepper -- but that likeness is irrelevant to calling it "an ant." We call it "an ant" because it has the objective capacity to elicit our concept
Quoting Ludwig V
So, you are saying that the truth criterion of the JTB definition is evaluated from the standpoint of the speaker, regardless of the subject of knowledge? That is, if I say that someone else than me knows something, then the truth criterion applies to the proposition that I am stating? More formally, it seems you are saying the following:
He knows p = He is justified in believing p and this proposition is true/known by me
That would be absurd, given that the truth criterion is written into the JTB definition of the verb to know, and I am not the subject of that verb in the 2nd and 3rd cases; whomever I am speaking of is.
Which brings us back to the fact that the proposition thus has not only the same truth-value, but also the same informational value, with or without the truth criterion, if we have a non-skeptical account of truth. Now, use the assumption that has been present throughout our discussion: I know p = I am justified in believing p = It is proven true to me that p. With this assumption, please tell me what the informational difference between these sentences are:
You know p versus You are justified in believing p versus It is proven true to you that p
And
They know p versus They are justified in believing p versus It is proven true to them that p
Right. Your terminology is bizarre. You're referring to the fact that people can simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs and that one of those beliefs may turn out to be true (and the other false)?
That is a really heterodox use of the word "knowledge" in the psychological sense you were using it. when we use the word "knowledge" we're typically referring to self-aware knowledge (beliefs we have sufficient confidence in). You're transporting what I suspect might be a philosophical definition (I couldn't be sure as I'm not a philosopher), into a psychological phenomena (I am a psychologist).
What there's no evidence for (though I'm sure there are theorists who are working on the hypothesis) is having two contradictory beliefs - at contradictory confidence levels.
Risk-reward behaviour is not illogical, nor irrational because it is affected by values. If I believe (with low confidence) that there is a million pounds inside a box and also hold the contradictory belief (but with high confidence - what we might call knowledge) that there is a trap in the box, it is not irrational for me to act on the low confidence belief. It depends on how much I value a million pounds and how high a tolerance for risk I have.
Unless the second belief is held with absolute 100% confidence, then it is not necessarily irrational to act on the contradictory, low confidence belief if one has a high tolerance of risk and values highly the outcome if that second belief turns out (against the odds) to be true.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes, but without support. Beliefs are not these rigid binomial settings you seem to think they are. I don't either believe or not believe most things, I hold some things to be true with a high degree of confidence and their opposites to be false with a high degree of confidence. I am absolutely 100% certain of a few fundamental things. The crowd numbers at Donald Trump's inauguration is not one of them. If you are 100% certain of such things, it is you who are the unusual case and your assumption that others are just like you is what is causing this confusion.
Quoting Dfpolis
Having a rational basis is necessary but not sufficient. There are several theories which have an equally rational basis, As Quine (and others) have expounded on, most theories are underdetermined.
Quoting Dfpolis
Exactly. Your 'sound reasons' are not the same as other people's 'sound reasons'.
Quoting Dfpolis
It's not a point. It's just a declaration without evidence. On what grounds could "no rational follower of D.T. ... fail to notice many of his lies."? That you think they're lies? That the New York Times says so? People do not do primary research. they trust others, and different people trust different others.
Quoting Dfpolis
Without demonstrating it in any given case you can't claim it occurs.
Quoting Dfpolis
Since when does "it seems to me" constitute grounds?
Quoting Dfpolis
It's not a matter of 'noticing' that ants are organic unities. Again, you're begging the question. what I'm asking you to demonstrate is the grounds for believing that ants are in fact organic unities absent of our declaring them to be.
Quoting Dfpolis
In what sense is that a property of the ant (absent of humans)?
The "grounds" that support what seems to you are the "grounds" that seem to you to be such. It is the same with everyone; you're nothing special.
Yep. I was asking what those grounds actually are, in this case. I'm aware they will only ever be those grounds which 'seem to one to be grounds' but I haven't had any such grounds yet.
Saying "it seems to me" only tells me that there exist such grounds (in a rational person), it doesn't tell me what they are.
Quoting Ø implies everything
The answer to the first question is Yes. The answer to the second question is No. The truth criterion applies to the proposition known - to the "that.." clause.
You say: - Quoting Ø implies everything
I say: - He knows that p = He is justified in believing that p and p is true.
There are two issues in what you say after that.
First, you assume that "justify" means "conclusively justify". That's not obvious and not universally accepted. I waver somewhat on this.
Second, you are assuming that there is only one proof for each proposition. That's not the case. The justification (whether conclusive or not) available to the S (the person who knows or doesn't) may not be the same as the truth-conditions available to the speaker. In any case, in practice endorsement by the speaker provides additional reassurance to the audience. Even if the S's justification and the truth-conditions available to the speaker are the same, endorsement by the speaker strengthens the testimony. "Believes" can never do this.
Here is the exchange in question:
Quoting Isaac
The point made by Dfpolis seems reasonable enough. If you disagree with the actual point why not say why? Then you might have a discussion.
Okay, I suspected this a while ago, but it was just so foreign to me that I dismissed it. Now that I finally understand your stance, I will hopefully not talk past you.
Quoting Ludwig V
I guess I got lazy with my writing. Previously in our correspondence, I have been writing (sufficiently) justified to mean that the justification is sufficient to prove truth. Whenever I write justified from now, that is what I mean.
Now, I think I get what you mean. When I write "he is justified in believing p", all I say is that I have a proof that he has a proof of p". When I write "he is justified in believing p and p is true", I am pointing to the fact that I might have a distinct proof of p. However, the latter proposition is still true even if all I have is a proof that he has a proof of p, meaning the two propositions have both the same truth-values and informational content (given a non-skeptical account of truth, of course). Thus, the truth criterion remains redundant.
No, I don't think you get what I mean. 1) You are interested in propositions. I do not know what they are. I am interested in statements. I couldn't give a formal definition of those, but they do include the idea of speech-acts as an important part of understanding "he knows that p". 2) you are interested in truth and falsity and "informational content". I am also interested in what a speech-act does or conveys.
"He is justified in believing that p" does not convey that I have proof that he has a proof. It does not convey that p is true, only that it might be true. It conveys that I have evaluated his justification and believe (but do not know) that his justification is, indeed, a justification, but not necessarily a sufficient justification. "He is justified in believing that p and p is true" nearly conveys that he knows that p, but, by using "believe" rather than "know" I do not commit to his justification being sufficient.
When one witness says that p, one has evidence. When two witnesses independently say that p, one has more (stronger) evidence. And so on. When the police turn up and provide forensic evidence, the game changes and the evidence gets yet stronger. My endorsement of our subject's claim adds to the evidence (provided that it is independent), even though it does not necessarily change the truth value of p or its informational content; it gives reason for the jury to trust the evidence.
-Your last statement helps me understand why you can not make sense of my thesis.
You are committing a fallacy of Ambiguity. You are using "truth" as an ideal (absolute) while
I am only referring to truth as our every day practical evaluations of our claims/statements in relation to current available facts/observations.
So you are talking about Absolute/Ultimate truth and I am talking about Practical Truth.
The first is only useful as an ideal goal but useless in the evaluation of our real life truth statements. The second has an instrumental value(evaluates claims in relation to facts) while acknowledges our inability to have absolute truth statements about reality.
So our observations can not change the (Ultimate) unknown truth....and its NOT their job after all.
Our methods and observations are limited and our Ideals can only direct us to a goal but they can never affect our evaluation methods(Logic does that). Whether a true statement can be absolutely true, that can be possible when a statement is descriptive of a simple observation which isn't affected by an underlying, unknown ontology. i.e. The statement "you can't run through a brick wall" is true independent of the actual ontology of reality.That statement is verified every single time we test it.
So Truth as an ideal value and Truth as an evaluation unit are two different things.
This is a great example on how abstract ideals derail Philosophical conversations.
I am not interested here in propositions regarding people with insufficient justification. That's why I said I (from then on) would only use justified as meaning sufficiently justified. I guess I'll stop being lazy and just write sufficiently justified from now on to avoid any and all confusion.
Quoting Ludwig V
If we change it to He is sufficiently justified in believing that p, then it does convey that I have proof that he has proof. That then also conveys that p is true. Thus, the truth criterion is, in cases of sufficient justification, redundant.
Of course, my proposition (1) = He is sufficiently justified in believing that p could be false; however, its truth-value will always be the same as (2) = He is sufficiently justified in believing that p and p is true (2). That is, (1) [math] \iff [/math] (2).
Quoting Ludwig V
I think that explains a lot of our misunderstanding. The intuitive content of (1) is different from (2), even if they strictly speaking carry the same information. To use an analogy; the propositions He thinks his shoes are cool and He thinks his shoes are cool and someone thinks his shoes are cool have the same informational content, yet the second inspires an imaginative leap; is that someone perhaps someone else than 'him'?. By adding that p is true, that (in normal conversation) inspires one to think that the speaker holds additional knowledge regarding p, outside of their knowledge that the subject knows p.
Do you think that explains our misunderstandings?
"He is sufficiently justified in believing that p" conveys that you believe he has sufficient proof and that you are not convinced that p is true, which suggests that you think that he does not have sufficient proof. So it is self-contradictory. If you really believe that he has sufficient proof, then you will say that he knows that p.
Again, if I say that you believe he has sufficient proof, I am suggesting that the proof is not sufficient. If I believe that his proof is sufficient, I will say you know that he had sufficient proof. It all depends a) on who is speaking and b) whether p is true (and sometimes p = "the proof is sufficient.")
Quoting Pantagruel
No, I don't think there is. What counts as proof and what counts as sufficient proof depends on the context - i.e. what kind of proposition you are talking about.
It is also true that there may be an element of what is called judgement that enables people who have the skill and talent to leap over lack of strict deductively complete proof. The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the eating. It is not impossible to spend years making judgements and getting them wrong. So the record of a diagnostician is critical to assessing whether they have good judgement or not.
I'm not clear what you mean by substantive-performative knowledge.
As the diagnostician, empirical-situational and implementable in some way. Instrumental knowledge.
That made me laugh.
Quoting Nickolasgaspar
What is that, if not an absolute definition of truth?
Or this:
Quoting Nickolasgaspar
Seems to me you have your diagnosis arse-about. Its not I who is working with an "absolute" truth. Pretty unimpressive.
In real life ONLY claims and Arguments can be true or not. (Oxford Un.Logic 101). Changes in our observations affect their value.
In your idealistic view of reality you see "truth" existing independent of our claims or limitations in our observations...but you ignore that its only an observer dependent evaluation.
Since you use hindsight (we were wrong about something) to promote an unchangeable nature of "truth"....you bet you are working with the version of an absolute truth.
Take care.
Statements are the things that can be true or false. Arguments are valid or invalid.
I've no idea what the remainder of your post says.
Do not attribute to me arguments I have not made. I have written extensively on this forum about the logic of truth, defending Davidson and Tarski and attempting to articulate their approach with WIttgensien's meaning as use. If you wish to continue such discussions, have a look at what I have actually said.
Do you always do as you are told? Old Nick definitely won't.
Bicycle wheels can be true. Forum posts can be thoroughly buckled.
As a proposition, the sentence does not convey that I am convinced of anything. As a statement, one could argue that the omission hints at a lack of personal conviction. However, any such argument would be based on subjective experience; i.e. how a person subjectively reads into the omission of details. Personally, I would disagree, but as said, this is subjective.
...If it is unvalid...
Quoting Banno
Never accused you for an argument. I don't even know what you are arguing about because your responses are short and irrelevant to my points.
Quoting Banno
I will need to revisit my critique on you. I am sure I address something different. I give you the benefit of the doubt and I will return by quoting my critique on your specific statement.
I want to be sure we are on the same page...because it doesn't feel that we are now.
OK. I see.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I agree that the sentence/proposition/statement "S believes that p" on its own does not convey that you are convinced of anything. But If you have decided that S has sufficient justification, you convey that p is true. By conveying that, you convey that you know that p. That's the point. One can say something false by omission, as well as by assertion.
Let me help.
Quoting Nickolasgaspar
This is your comment with which I took issue, way back. The problems I see:
First, there is a sense in which knowledge is observer-relative but truth isn't. Both knowing and believing something can be represented as a relation between someone and a proposition: Nick knows that Paris is in France; Banno believes that apples are a fruit. But truth does not have this relational characteristic. It's true that Paris is in France and that apples are fruit. Statements of truth differ from statements of knowledge or belief in this important regard: Knowledge and belief are always relative to the one who knows or believes. Truth has no such constraint.
And second, truth is not always fixed by observation. Specific things can be true, or false, regardless of their having been observed. Now to be sure we might only know that something is true as a result of making an observation. The observation can serve as the justification for our claim to know or believe what is observed. But the observation does not generally fix the truth vale.
Truth is an evaluation term of a quality we apply on claims based on our current available epistemology(knowledge). (Do you agree with the definition that Truth is an evaluation term of a specific quality? if not pls provide your definition)
If our claim is with agreement with current facts then we accept it to be true.
If our knowledge changes (i.e. Heliocentrism vs Geocentrism or Pluto as a planet or a dwarf planet) then our truth evaluation has to change too (tentative nature of knowledge and truth).
You are making an argument from Hindsight and you advocate for an idealistic nature of Truth.The Truth is only an ideal goal we strive for. Sure we can apply this version of "truth" on our past claims, but it is useless when we want to know the real truth value of current knowledge.
Quoting Banno
- Of course it is fixed to an observer, any evaluated quality is. Without an observer you don't have an evaluation to begin with...or the actual statement to evaluate.
Maybe your definition of Truth differs. Maybe truth is not an quality value for you!
Pls share your defintion.
***Specific things can be true, or false, regardless of their having been observed.***
Specific statements can be true or not true regardless of their having been observed...So a statement that isn't supported by data can not be an evaluated for its truth value.
In my opinion this is the problem when idealistic thought allows abstract concepts to gain an autonomous presence in our world.
I don't think folk can provide a definition of truth, at least not one beyond the simple T-sentence: "P" is true IFF P. This is so because of the special place attributing truth to a statement has in language.
Is "...is true" an evaluation? well, it's a predicate ranging over statements, if that is what you mean.
But if, as it seems from the remainder of your post, "evaluation" is to be understood as a relation between a statement and someone, then as explained, that's not truth, but belief.
So folk apparently used to believe geocentrism. Now they believe heliocentrism, or something more complex still. While the belief has changed, the truth hasn't. Our evaluation changed, but the truth didn't.
Quoting Nickolasgaspar
To be sure, what I am espousing here is not idealism... It is very much realism.
And some folk will believe that the cup has one handle. What's interesting here is that the truth of "the cup has one handle" is irrelevant to the belief. That is, even if the cup has two handles, some folk may believe that it has one.
They are what we in the trade call "wrong".
So we have truth on the one hand, being ascribed to statements. And we have belief on the other, setting out a relation between a statement and someone.
Bringing these together, we get that some folk believe "the cup has one handle"is true, and some believe "the cup has one handle"is not true. We are close to being able to say that the folk who believe "the cup has one handle" is true know that "the cup has one handle" is true.
The folk who believe that "the cup has two handles" cannot know "the cup has two handles" because the cup does not have two handles.
And here we add the practicality that "the cup has two handles" fits in with the other things we know; that there are cups, that they sometimes have two handles, sometimes one, that we can trust things like our eyes, or my pronouncements, and that if I say the cup has one handle that's a good enough reason to go along with that statements, and so on.
That is, we can justify the belief that the cup has one handle.
So we have a justification, for a belief, that is true. So we can say that we know the cup has one handle.
It was Ayn Rand and Wittgenstein who pointed out (I paraphrase) don't attempt anything before your definitions become clear .
The term "truth" is used to identify a specific quality of a statement (t's agreement with current available knowledge/facts.) Nothing more nothing less.
There is a course on logic 101 by Oxford University where the professor highlights the failure of many people to realize the true nature of human evaluations of qualities like truth, knowledge, information, calculation etc (values found in statements). We tend to project them in Nature as if they are intrinsic values of the cosmos when they are only evaluations of a quality we care about.
Quoting Banno
- truth is the evaluation of a specific quality of a statement while a belief is the result after we accept/ being convinced by that specific quality of the statement (to be true).
Quoting Banno
Of course it changed. The claim for Geocentrism is no longer accepted as true. What also changed was our available data (knowledge) which in turn changed the truth value of that specific claim.
What doesn't change is the nature and condition of the phenomenon (unknown tonus) that we are trying to describe with these statements. Sure, only one specific statement can be true but without the data we can't evaluate it.
I think it's a classic fallacy of confusing the map for the territory. The map(statement)can be precise or not (true or not true) but we can never call the territory "precise". That is a quality of a map(statement) can have.
So true or not true...only a statement can be...but never the phenomenon in question.
Sure , by using ideal values we tend to project those qualities on to anything...but this is a slippery slope because this is how we end up with new age theologies arguing in favor of energy and information and minds etc etc in addition to Nature (bad language mode).
So you are saying that the Sun used to go around the Earth, and now the Earth goes around the sun?
Again, what we are able to say about something (map/ statement) it only describes our current view of it (current knowledge) and it doesn't change the actual thing in question (territory/ Actual condition).
Most of our evaluations on the quality of Truth are limited by our observations. Hindsight might trick you to believe that because we corrected our previous statement the current must surely be the right one (ultimate one).
As I already stated the quality of "precision" can only evaluate a specific aspect of a map but not the depicted territory . In the same way "truth" is only relevant to a specific claim based on our current epistemology.
Hang on. The fact changed? So the fact was that the Sun went around the earth, and now the Earth goes around the sun?
I put it to you that the Earth has always gone around the sun, that this was true even when we believed that the Sun went around the Earth, and that the fact, the truth, has not changed. That our evaluation of the truth of a statement is not the very same as the truth of a statement. That belief is different to truth.
-The facts/data available to us changed.Advances in technology improve our observations which in turn allow us to gather more data .
Quoting Banno
Hindsight, sure. Unfortunately our evaluation on the quality of Truth is limited by our ability to observe the whole picture.
Quoting Banno
Again you are confusing the act of accepting/believing in a claim because it is true with the abstract ideal value of truth.
We are justified to accept a statement true/not true when our epistemology supports it.
The quality of truth only renders out belief in a statement rational or irrational.
Actually I am explicitly differentiating these. I have pointed out that truth is a unary predicate, taking a statement, while both belief and knowledge are binary predicates, taking both a statement and a person - the one doing the knowing or believing.
You are apparently espousing some pragmatic theory of truth. You are changing "...is true" into a binary predication. So you apparently want to be able to say things like "It was true for medieval folk that the Sun moved around the Earth, but when better data was found, it became true for renaissance folk that the Earth moved around the sun"
Now part of my argument against pragmatist approaches to truth is that this locution misuses "...is true", in the place of the perfectly sensible, standard use of "believed". That is, we can say the very same thing as was said in the somewhat constipated phrase above, by saying "Medieval folk believed the Sun moved around the Earth, but Renaissance folk believed the Earth moves around the sun".
The teaching point here is to show some of the inadequacies of the pragmatic account of truth, in the hope of inciting an interest in other approaches. The substantive theories of truth correspondence, coherence, and pragmatism each have inadequacies. Philosophical accounts moved beyond these, especially after Tarski, into much more fertile ground. See the SEP article for a potted overview.
Anyway, I hope it clear that a merely pragmatic view of truth is inadequate. It is inconsistent with our actual use of the words "true" and "believe", hence not informing them, and it is inadequate for many of the things we do with those words - such as claiming that it is true this sentence is in English.