Solution to the Gettier problem
The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has a belief that is both true and well supported by evidence, yet which according to almost all epistemologists fails to be knowledge. Gettiers original article had a dramatic impact, as epistemologists began trying to ascertain afresh what knowledge is, with almost all agreeing that Gettier had refuted the traditional definition of knowledge.
https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
When knowledge is defined as a justified true belief such that the justification necessitates the truth of the belief then the Gettier problem is no longer possible.
Copyright 2022 PL Olcott
https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
When knowledge is defined as a justified true belief such that the justification necessitates the truth of the belief then the Gettier problem is no longer possible.
Copyright 2022 PL Olcott
Comments (156)
So when knowledge is defined as something that can only be had by an omniscient being there is no Gettier problem?
Seems a bit drastic to me to define knowledge out of the range of humans to avoid Gettier problems.
I don't think it necessities omnipotence for knowledge. For example, the Dude in the Big Lebowski knows "he's had a hard day and he fucking hates the Eagles man." He can't be wrong about this because his knowing he hates the Eagles necessitates that it is the case that he hates the Eagles.
Likewise, I know necessarily true things about whether certain chess moves are legal without being omnipotent.
However, it does seem to cut us off from making knowledge claims about many things in the world we seem to know about.
I am skeptical towards justificationism/foundationalism. It looks to me like human attempts at justification are always built on intuitions which are not in themselves logically justified. (Which is not to say that intuitions cannot be extremely reliable.)
I think that in the strictest sense the, JTB definition of knowledge would require a sort of intuition free omniscient ability to construct logical justifications that is not available to social primates like us. Which is not to say the notion of human knowledge is something we should toss, but that we should recognize that JTB is insufficient as a way of understanding knowledge.
I can't pragmatically argue with that. :up:
Though it is inconceivable that someone could hate the Eagles. So I suspect The Dude might be a fictional character.
I agree. It doesn't describe how real people know things or what they mean when the say they know something.
"I am skeptical towards justificationism/foundationalism.
It looks to me like human attempts at justification are always
built on intuitions which are not in themselves logically justified."
{The justification necessitates the truth of the belief} as in the
modal logic: ?P ? ¬?¬P // Necessarily(P) ? Not Possibly Not P
If Fluffy is a cat then Necessarily Fluffy is an animal.
The problem with Gettier is he uses justification as being "true". Truth has nothing to do with knowledge. Knowledge is about creating identities in our minds first. We have the image of a creature, and we call it a cat for example. Then when we encounter something in reality, to know its a cat in reality, we must match what we find essential about our identity of a cat, to the creature before us. If we can successfully do so without induction, then we know its a cat.
If it turns out its actually some weird dog breed, but only because society created the identity of that creature as a dog, and we did not know that attribute that would have made it a dog, that doesn't negate what we know at the time. At that time, we know it as a cat. Once society introduces this new identity, or definition to us, we can decide to accept it, or reject it. If we accept it, now we know longer can know that creature as a cat, but a dog. But if we reject societies identity, we still know it as a cat.
In sum, knowledge is about what identity you accept in your mind, then applying that identity in a deductive manner to ascertain whether it matches based on your context. Truth has nothing to do with it. So when its claimed "Smith has five coins in his pocket" its not a deduced application of identity, but an induction of identity as the claimant doesn't actually have evidence that at that specific moment, Smith has five coins in his pocket. Belief that happens to be the case is not knowledge if the reasons we came to that belief are not deduced correctly. That's just an accident.
To clarify, it is not that it is necessarily a cat. It is that you can logically conclude no other identity at the time of your identification. One could have the belief that its a space monster in disguise. In truth, it could be. But there's no way we could ever say, "I know its a space monster in disguise". Because knowledge is a tool of logic about what we can conclude with the information we have, not an assertation of truth itself.
And how do we know its true? I have a creature that's a space monster, and its absolutely beyond any human to find out its a space monster. We know it as a cat. Its not true that its a cat, but that's what we know it as. Under your point, no one could say they knew it as a cat. In which case, we can only say they believe it is a cat.
The problem is, you need some way to measure a belief against truth. How do you make it possible in this instance? How do we know that many things that we claim to know, are actually not knowledge if we discovered some new aspect of reality? We can't. This is why knowledge cannot be a claim of necessary truth.
Quoting PL Olcott
As for the the cats DNA, you're missing the point of the thought experiment. The point is that we're in an instance where there is something outside of our ability to know, but from everything we observe and are capable of concluding, the only reasonable thing we can know is that its a cat. Thus we know something that isn't true.
"instance where there is something outside of our ability to know"
Does not count as knowledge under my adaptation of JTB.
I'm putting forth some effort here, please do more than a few sentences if you're serious about engaging. Think about it. If truth is the necessary ingredient for knowledge, how do I know what I claim I know is true?
I have pondered this again and again for years.
"If truth is the necessary ingredient for knowledge, how do I know what I claim I know is true?"
Truth is a necessary yet insufficient condition for knowledge.
Knowledge requires:
Awareness that an expression is true on the basis of complete proof that the expression is true.
The reason you've pondered it for years is that there is no answer. Logically, the only conclusion is its impossible. Therefore the only conclusion is that knowledge does not rely on truth as a necessary condition. That doesn't mean that knowledge isn't incredibly useful, or that we can suddenly start believing whatever we want. Check out my paper. There's a great summary of the ideas from another poster a few replies down from the paper.
By addressing the problem categorically gaps in reasoning are impossible.
JTB is a definition, not a fact. I think it's a bad definition. Any definition that says Isaac Newton didn't know that gravity is a force 340 years ago because we now think about it as a bending of spacetime is silly.
You ignored the key question about truth. How do you know its true? How do you know you have complete proof?
Complete proof is a semantic tautology. Cats are stipulated to be animals.
That the animal in front of you seems to have all of the properties of
a cat is evidence and not proof that it is a cat.
Then how would we prove its a cat? How would we prove that its true that its a space monster, especially if its a perfectly disguised cat? Because it can't accidently be true right? That's the whole point of the Gettier argument.
Only the analytic side of the analytic / synthetic distinction has proof.
The synthetic side (that I call the empirical side) only has evidence.
We can know with complete logical certainty that a cat is an animal.
We cannot discern the difference between a cat and a space alien
perfectly disguised as a cat (including DNA).
My adaptation of JTB requires proof that the belief is true, with less
than proof we only have presumption and thus not knowledge.
The whole point of the Gettier argument is that unless the justification
necessitates the truth of the belief then the belief
or incorrectly justified.
Quoting PL Olcott
Then according to your JTB, no one can ever know anything synthetically. Meaning I can't know if I'm really in my house or if I'm a brain in a vat. The Gettier argument is not a criticism of analytic, but synthetic arguments.
Until you answer the question, "How do I know what I know is true?" you've solved nothing. If we don't have a method to know that what we know is true, then we never have synthetic knowledge about anything. Its all beliefs. Is that where you want to go?
Reviewing some of the Gettier cases it seems that they involve
an incorrect mapping from a set of physical sensations to their
corresponding elements in the model of the actual world.
Because of this incorrect mapping the justification for the belief
does not necessitate that the belief is true.
When we require that the justification for the belief necessitates
that the belief is true, then the incorrect mapping is excluded
from justification.
When a set of physical sensations correctly map to elements
of the model of the actual world and the semantic connections
within this model of the world necessitate the truth of the belief
then we have knowledge.
This gets rid of the problem of a space alien perfectly disguised
as a cat. If it is not an actual cat then the mapping is incorrect then
we do not have knowledge.
And again, the same question. How do we know we have the correct mapping, or know that what we know is true?
Quoting PL Olcott
Sure, if it was as simple as that the argument would have instantly died. But how do we know that the belief is true? You can't. Therefore you cannot have truth as a necessary pre-requisite for (synthetic) knowledge. No matter how much you try to avoid this, it will always be there.
How do we distinguish the difference between reality and a perfect
simulation of reality that has no distinguishable difference?
We Don't !!!
Then we know nothing. That's why your fix to the Gettier problem fails. Knowledge is obviously something we use. It differentiates itself from mere belief. The specifics of how and why are the entire question of epistemology. Your viewpoint leads to the "nihilism" conclusion, which is rejected by most thinkers in the field.
If you tie truth as a necessary condition for knowledge, then the nihilism solution, "We know nothing, there is no knowledge" is the only solution. And quite frankly, that's silly. That's an indicator we're doing something wrong. And what's wrong? Making truth as a necessary pre-condition for knowledge. Check my paper out if you want an alternative.
We know that every element of the set of semantic tautologies is true.
AKA self-evident truth.
In epistemology (theory of knowledge), a self-evident proposition is a
proposition that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-evidence
Everything else is at best a reasonably plausible estimate of knowledge.
Or we could say that it functions as if it was true.
Even though we might actually be a brain-in-a-vat it does really seem
like we can get up off the couch and make a sandwich. Getting up off
the couch and making a sandwich is in the model of the actual world.
This remains true even if couches and sandwiches never physically
existed.
Yes, analytic knowledge is true by definition. Few debate that. We're talking about synthetic, which is the entire target of the Gettier argument.
Quoting PL Olcott
Which means that we have no synthetic knowledge of the world according to your Gettier fix. That's a failure, not a success.
If synthetic knowledge does not actually exist and I have correctly
shown that it does not, then this corrects mere presumptions to the
contrary, thus objectively is progress.
No, that's not progress at all. You haven't shown that there is no synthetic knowledge, you've simply set the definition of knowledge as something impossible to obtain. That's not useful, nor does it help us solve problems like science, facts, and knowing where I put my keys. Your solution to the Gettier argument is to burn everything down. That's not a solution.
"No, that's not progress at all."
You did not pay close enough attention to the exact words that I said.
With valid reasoning the premises are assumed to be true even if they
are false.
Premises:
(1) It is definitely true that synthetic knowledge actually does not exist.
(2) I have shown that (1) is true
(3) I have corrected the mere presumptions to the contrary
Thus I have made progress by correcting false presumptions.
This doesn't make any sense. Either the premises are true or false.
Quoting PL Olcott
You have not proved this anywhere. In fact, this statement is a contradiction. When you speak of "exist" you mean, "exists apart from an analytic identity". That means you are trying to synthetically claim that synthetic knowledge does not exist.
You could try to analytically claim that synthetic knowledge does not exist, but then I could claim the opposite. Now we're left with the mess of everything being true, even contradictions. Again, why synthetic knowledge is, at least in the confines of this argument, a very real thing that needs addressing, not mere dismissal.
Validity and Soundness
A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.
A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.
https://iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
If we are living in a perfect simulation of reality like the brain-in-a-vat
thought experiment then all of our knowledge of physical realty is false
because physical reality does not exist.
The synthetic side of the analytic / synthetic distinction simply assumes
that physical reality exists. Because it is possible that this is false then
there cannot be 100% certain knowledge of physical reality.
Quoting PL Olcott
No, its only false if truth is a necessary pre-requisite for knowledge. You've made the claim that it is, but there are practical problems in doing so. I have claimed it is not by pointing out that means we cannot know anything besides our own analytic constructions. This is useless to us, as we deal with more than our analytic constructions in the world.
Quoting PL Olcott
No, the synthetic side does not assume "physical reality" exists. The synthetic side addresses the point that there is more to reality than simply our thoughts. Whether this is "physical" or "something else" is a different question entirely. Unless you champion solipsism, you must address the synthetic side of reality. Do you believe there is something that exists beyond your thoughts? Then you believe in situations that require synthetic judgements, and thus questions of synthetic knowledge.
"You haven't proven your premises as true, therefore you're argument is not deductive."
As long as the conclusion is a necessary consequence of its premises then the reasoning
is deductively valid even if the premises are false. This is common knowledge across
everyone that understands the deductive inference model.
You posted this up above. To be a sound deductive argument, the premises need to be true. This is getting into silly territory now. Do not be afraid to concede a point, or at least leave. Stubbornly trying to make a point without merit is not seeking truth, its seeking ego.
The solipsism argument (whether it is accepted or not) proves that it is
possible that reality is nothing more than our thoughts, thus the synthetic
side of the analytic / synthetic distinction cannot be perfectly relied upon
as necessary true.
It seems that the most reasonable way around these two issues seems
to be to build a model of reality that takes it is a possibly false premise
that solipsism is false and we are not living in a simulation.
The the Gettier issues would seem to only involve making sure that
our physical sensations actually do correctly map to the correct elements
in the model of the actual world.
You did not bother to notice that an argument can be valid even if
its premsies are false.
Validity and Soundness
A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid. https://iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
I rephrase this as whenever a conclusion is a necessary consequence of its premises
then the argument is valid.
If the Moon is made from green cheese then the Moon is made from cheese.
Which again leaves us with, "How do we know that we're correctly matching the correct elements in the model of the actual (true) world?" Its the same question again. Truth cannot be a necessary component of knowledge.
Quoting PL Olcott
I don't need to. My point had nothing to do with validity, and you know that because I explicitly noted your premises were not true. That's not honest discussion at that point.
I believe there's nothing more to discuss here either. You've already noted you cannot answer the major question of "How do we know what is true?" Without that, nothing has been solved. Not that I wouldn't try to continue tackling the question, but until that question is answered, your solution is a dead end.
"Truth cannot be a necessary component of knowledge."
How so?
That seems to me to be perfectly analogous to saying that
"not being dead" is not a necessary aspect of being alive.
If what is taken to be knowledge turns out to be false then
it never was actual knowledge it was only mere presumption.
Please re-read my previous comments. That's been the entire point of the conversation.
It seems to be the exact same position that the {alternative facts}
people push so that they can get away with disinformation.
--- Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" for demonstrable
--- falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized
--- by journalists and media organizations ...
--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
I went back through what you said and your position seems to be
that because there are cases where we cannot possibly confirm
that a belief is definitely true we should construe these cases as
knowledge even when they might be false.
[b]Maybe this paraphrase of your words will enable you to see
that this position is untenable.[/b]
Close. Its more to the fact that there is no answer to the question, "How do we know if what we know is true?" Its impossible in regards to the synthetic, backed by many arguments. And yet we still use knowledge. We still need some way to say, "It is more reasonable to believe this, than that."
So then the only conclusion is that truth must not be a necessary component for knowledge. This makes sense the more we think about it. Prior to telescopes, ancient man knew that the sun crossed the sky from the East to the West. Today, we have greater knowledge and know that the Earth rotates around the Sun, not the other way around. Did that mean ancient man did not know that the Sun circled the sky? Of course not. That was the only thing they could deduce from the information they had.
To say they didn't know it is to make all beliefs have the same rational weight. That means someone who said the sun magically altered our senses and actually always traveled West to East would have an equally valid conclusion. To us, this is absurd. We innately understand that one statement is more rational than the other.
Back then, they knew that the Sun crossed the sky. Today, we know that its actually the Earth rotating away from and back to facing the sun. Perhaps we will know something different in the future. The point is that what we know is what is able to be most rationally concluded with the information and reasoning we have. Its a tool, not truth itself.
The trick then is how do we construct this system of reasoning to be more rational and the best chance to be as close to truth as possible? How do we separate "knowledge" from mere belief? I could go into it, but I wrote a whole paper on it already, and gave a very light summary earlier. Feel free to visit the page and scroll down a few replies. You can cntrl-F and type in Caerulea-Lawrence. They gave a better summary than I ever could have. Feel free to ask me further questions there or feel free to read the original post if it strikes your interest.
"The trick then is how do we construct this system of reasoning
to be more rational and the best chance to be as close to truth as possible?"
Yes that is very good.
Realizing that synthetic knowledge is impossible yet also understanding
that a close approximation of synthetic knowledge has proven to be very
reliable how do these things fit within the Gettier cases?
Gettier cases prove that a reasonable approximation of knowledge
sometimes diverges from actual knowledge.
Isaac Asimov's essay, The Relativity of Wrong, might be of interest.
Within my augmentation of JTB that requires the belief to be a
necessary consequence of its justification Gettier is abolished.
This causes all synthetic expressions of language to be rejected
as knowledge. My augmentation of JTB rejects inductive inference
because it is less than 100% reliable.
You seem to have a weird notion of causality to me. Nothing is causing me to reject synthetic expressions of language as knowledge.
Maybe you can rephrase that?
Because of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment and that it is
understood that solipsism cannot be definitely refuted any
"knowledge" obtained from what appears to be sense data
from the sense organs is possibly fake thus cannot possibly
be perfectly relied upon as definitely true.
The alternative proof is anchored in the problem of induction.
https://iep.utm.edu/problem-of-induction/
We cannot rely on past experience as a perfect predictor
of future events.
The purpose of the Gettier problem is to show the limitation of the traditional JTB definition of knowledge.
If you define knowledge as something like certain true belief, as you seem to, then it would be immune to Gettier problems, but as a consequence much of what we think of as knowledge isnt actually knowledge, and that might be an untenable consequence.
If it is true that much of what we think of as knowledge isnt actually knowledge
then we must accept that as it is.
We are free to create an alternative to knowledge {reasonably plausible assertions}
that can be applied to the synthetic side of the analytic / synthetic distinction.
A verbal model of the actual world can be construed as axioms. Within this model
we can know with absolute perfect certainty that {kittens} are not any type of {fifteen
story office building}.
What we cannot know with absolute certainty is that a kitten that we are looking at
right now physically exists, or is not a mere figment of the solipsist's imagination.
I drive down a forest road and see a bear beside it in the distance. No, as I approach it I see it is merely a small tree. What is so profound about this sort of thing?
It was not a justified true belief such that the belief is a necessary consquence of its justification until you know it is a tree. Prior to that it was an incorrect guess.
"Knowledge" is just a word, not some platonic essence. Your role is to elucidate how the word functions, not to prescribe how it should function, according to some fictitious ontology the word does not possess.
Quoting PL Olcott
And yet, if you see the kitten, and it is really there, then you know it is there. That is just how the word works. If it is not actually there, you only think you know it. It only becomes a gettier problem if the cat appears to be there, but isn't, and yet a real cat is behind you. And you claim something like "there is a cat nearby".
A more reasonable solution IMO is falsifiability: if the cat was not there, would you still believe it is? If the answer is yes, that is, if your belief is not sensitive to the truth of the matter, then I think it is not true knowledge (as we use the word). I think this solves all the Gettier problems: in all of them, belief is justified, but it is not sensitive to the truth. In this case, if the real cat behind you disappeared, you would still believe "there is a cat nearby", because of the illusory cat in front of you. Your belief, while justified and true, is nonetheless insensitive to the truth, and is therefore not knowledge.
If you "know" something that turns out to be false, then
you never knew it and only incorrectly presumed it.
Another respondent provided a simpler example. You see what you
believe is a cat yet it is actually a space alien perfectly disguised
as a cat, it even has cat DNA.
In this case your justification is as complete as it possibly can be
within the synthetic side of the analytic / synthetic distinction and
yet the belief that it is a cat is still false.
You believe it is a cat you have DNA evidence that it is a cat and
yet it is not a cat. This shows that the T aspect of JTB is required.
This is not in dispute
It was the key thing that was in dispute with [quote="Philosophim;831919"]
That is great
I never said synthetic knowledge was impossible. I simply noted that truth cannot be a necessary requirement for synthetic knowledge. Gettier cases are happy accidents that technically happen due to the JTB as written down. Most of them can be fixed by spelling out one's justification.
"A bear is nearby" How did you get that? "Well I saw a bear up ahead just a minute ago." What bear is nearby? "A different bear behind me. I had justification for my belief, and my belief was true therefore I knew there was a bear nearby."
This is of course, stupid. Gettier was pointing out that JTB as written neglected one very important part of justification. That it should lead to why the conclusion is true, not that the conclusion is true and you had some justification for your belief. Something like this is an acceptable solution.
The problem is when you say, "It has to actually be true" you have to answer the question of, "How do you know it is true?" You cannot. If you can, feel free to do so. But if you cannot, then you cannot state that knowledge has truth as a necessary pre-requisite. Otherwise you say we know nothing, which is again, the abandonment of epistemology.
Quoting hypericin
You are disputing this.
Most everyone knows that ALL knowledge must be true or instead of
knowledge we have false presumptions.
Lets say, even though you have no proof, that most people think that truth is a requirement for knowledge. Philosophy is not a contest of opinions. Can you prove that truth is a necessary requirement for knowledge?
It is like the statement that people that are very much overweight
are never way too thin.
The meaning of the word "knowledge" requires that it be true.
Try and find any false statement that counts as knowledge that is
not merely knowledge of its falsity.
It does not. Prove that it requires it. To prove that it requires it, you must demonstrate that one can have synthetic knowledge of it, and also prove that it is true. And to clarify, the thing that we are proving is true, must not be known to be true prior to that proof.
Quoting PL Olcott
I mentioned an example earlier. Over 2000 years ago people used to know that the Sun circled in the sky around the Earth. Later, we found out its actually the Earth that circles around the Sun. My point is that though people did not have the truth of the relative movement of the Earth and the Sun, this was all they could know. All logic lead to the conclusion that the Sun rotated around the in the sky, not that the Earth rotated around the Sun.
Lets go one further. At one time swans were known to be white. Later, someone discovered that swans were black on another continent. Prior to this discovery, didn't people know swans as white? If someone said, "Actually, swans are black" without any justification, they would be ridiculed. Are we to say then that they didn't know what a swan was? What if we later find out swans can be orange? Did we not know what a swan was?
Finally, imagine a man who lives in a forest goes about identifying different plants for his own amusement. He points at a short tree and says, "That's a bush". He's always able to identify it as a bush with complete accuracy. One day a botanist visits him and says, "Actually, that's a tree." The man looks at him and says, "Well that's a bush to me, I don't do botany." So what does the man know the bush as? Does he know? Has he ever known what the plant was?
Knowledge is personal, societal, and cultural. It does not depend on truth as a necessary precondition.
From their frame-of-reference they could see the Sun cross the sky
thus saying they they see the Sun cross the sky is accurate.
This seems to preclude falsehoods:
facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience
or education; the theoretical or practical understanding.
https://docs.elevio.help/en/articles/81626-knowledge
Quoting Philosophim
The correct thing to do at the time is to say all the swans that they know about are white.
To say that all swans are white is incorrect reasoning.
This is a good post. You make your case clearly and your argument is a good one. Purely coincidently, I agree with you.
A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if
it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
This does not work with the analytic side of the analytic synthetic
distinction. How do we know that ducks are animals empirically?
This seems to be mostly a paraphrase of verifiability.
I do agree that the notion of Falsifiability is very excellent. I
don't see how it diverges from my own notion of verifiability.
If when looking at a duck we are actually looking at a space
alien perfectly disguised as a duck (including duck DNA)
then the distinction between duck and space alien could only
be made if it does something that ducks cannot do.
Falsifiability seems to be saying that while looking at a duck
we cannot be sure that it is a duck because it not being a duck
cannot be empirically validated.
My old saying is if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck lays
eggs and everything else just like a duck it could be a space
alien perfectly disguised as a duck.
Here inductive logic works wonders.
Inductive logic would simply (possibly incorrectly) guess that it is a duck.
:up: :cool:
Then you agree with me. The truth is that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, it is that the Earth revolves around the sun. You allow frame of reference to be more important than truth for knowledge, which I agree with. Thus knowledge does not have truth as a necessary pre-requisite.
Quoting PL Olcott
No. At the time it was just understood that swans were white. You would ask a person, "What color are swans?" and they would say, "White." Do we say, "All the gravity we have encountered so far causes bodies to accelerate towards each other, or do we say gravity causes all bodies to accelerate towards one another?
Finally, I did not see a proof in your reply. I will assume that you don't have a proof that lets us know that what we know is true. So the point stands. Truth is not a pre-requisite for knowledge.
Fair Witness
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fair%20Witness
That house on the hilltop--can you see what color they've painted it?"
Anne looked, then answered, "It's white on this side."
Jubal went on to Jill: "You see? It doesn't occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King's horses couldn't force her to commit herself...unless she went there and looked--and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed white after she left."
If the rest of the points are also not addressed, then the point stands. And its really not my point, its just a point that's been concluded by many people in epistemology. If you want to counter them, my arguments are things you'll need to have answers to. Keep at it!
To conclude that all swans are white on the basis of some swans are
white is flat out incorrect and there cannot possibly be two ways about this.
Lets take another example. You live in a place where all apples are red. Everyone calls them apples, everyone knows that they are red. Ask a person what color an apple is, and they'll say, "Red". We know green apples exist. But for them, they've never encountered or heard of a green apple. An apple being red is part of the definition of being an apple. That is what is known. Green apples won't be introduced for 200 years. Are you saying in that time that no one ever knew what an apple was?
And again:
Quoting Philosophim
We say gravity causes bodies to accelerate towards each other. Its in the definition. We don't adendum knowledge claims with all possible exceptions. We assert. Do you know that gravity is a force that pulls objects together regardless of distance, or not?
If they assume that all apples are red without seeing all apples
then they are wrong even if their assumption is correct.
I will count on gravity as long as it continues to function. I will not
assume that it is an immutable law of nature.
This is just a repetition of a previous statement, and doesn't solve the issue. You're not explaining to me how we resolve the fact that properties as part of the definition, are later found to be wrong. That means you can never know anything. What if we discover 100 years ago after scientific DNA advances in DNA, that oranges are actually apples? Its not just the color, its any property of anything we know. Its a vivid example of, "How do we know that what we know is true?"
Quoting PL Olcott
Its not the question of whether you count on gravity, its whether you know what gravity is. Do you know gravity as the force that pulls all matter together? If we did find something different about gravity in the future, wouldn't we say it was because of the context of what people had available at the time, just like the sun example?
Don't just respond that these are assumptions next time please. Really think about it. Address the broad idea, not the specific instance.
Within the model of the actual world we can know the stipulated relations between elements because the model of the actual world is an axiomatic system.
When we attempt to map things in the world based on what appear to be sense data from the sense organs we cannot possibly tell the difference between a duck and a space alien perfectly disguised as a duck.
This seems to indicate that we cannot possibly know that any mapping from what appears to be physical sensations to their element in the model of the actual world is a correct mapping.
Is it really an unquestionable system? Not at all. What is the model of a "tree". I envision a tree, and you envision a tree. Are they likely the same? No. If it were self-evident, then could I say all swans are white as an identity, then know that all swans are white?
Quoting PL Olcott
Only if the underlying requirement is that the mapping is true. And yes, we both agree on that. This not only applies to this example, but all examples. This means again, that we can't know whether something is a duck and a space alien. So every time you go out into the world and see a duck, you'll have to say, "I don't know if that's a space alien in disguise."
That's a rather odd viewpoint of the world. When we step out of our armchair, we find this viewpoint to have major problems. We are left with a system that lets an insane person have just as much validity in saying, "I believe that duck could be a space alien in disguise," as someone who is more rational than someone who says, "I know that's a duck," even if that person has all the evidence in the world that shows that its a duck. Are we to then tell the mentally ill person, "Yes, you have the right of it. It definitely could be an alien in disguise instead of a duck."
The problem is you're so focused on fixing one problem, that you're not thinking about the numerous problems your fix results in. If you have truth as the necessary pre-requisite of knowledge, you are going to run into many, many more problems. Its like there is a crack in the wall, and instead of fixing the crack, you're breaking down the wall so the crack isn't there anymore. That's not a solution. That's just another problem.
Quoting PL Olcott
True, if we require that our mapping must be true. Why not instead of mapping based on reason, we say mapping is based on rational application with the limited information a person or group has at the time? Thus I can know that duck is a duck. I have no information that implies its a space alien, so I can't know it as a space alien, I can only know it as a duck. Then if later it reveals itself to be a space alien I can say, "I once knew that as a duck. I no longer know that as a duck. Now I know it as a space alien." And to be silly, the space alien could actually be a human disguised as a duck disguised as a space alien, ad infinitum, and we would still have stages in which we knew what it was based on a rational application of the limited information we had at the time.
Without the qualified mapping that I propose Buddhist enlightenment is impossible
because societal conditioning is construed as actual truth rather than possible truth.
This closes the mind so that when evidence is presented of the actual truth it is never noticed.
Buddhism is just another philosophy. If its invalidated by the points I make, then it is. Buddhism affords no special treatment, and must answer the problems and solutions presented here on its own. But lets keep Buddhism out of the discussion. The question is whether knowledge needs, or does not need truth as a necessary requirement. Lets stick to that.
Quoting PL Olcott
I've given several examples in which societal conditioning is based on the context of possible truth, not actual truth. You haven't adequately shown that these examples do not happen.
Quoting PL Olcott
Once again, you're jumping past the question, "How do we know we have actual truth?"
We cannot possibly know that we have actual truth on the synthetic side of the analytic synthetic distinction. If we assume that we can we are deceiving ourselves.
When we see a cat in our living room we can act as if it is a cat until it proves to not be a cat. The same applies to the rest of what appears to be empirical knowledge.
When every lymph node of my body was jam packed with cancer last Summer I acted as if this was true and got chemo therapy that brought me back to no detectable cancer anywhere in my body.
The Apple Computer guy Steve Job's figured that orange juice would do the same thing and this killed him.
Good guess, but it is actually possible. :nerd:
If you are telling a difference when it is stipulated that there is no difference
to tell then you cannot possibly be telling the truth.
You have conceded your point! :snicker:
I am reaffirming my point.
I use self-evident truths as the basis of my reasoning.
Self-evidence
In epistemology (theory of knowledge), a self-evident proposition is a proposition that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-evidence
The meaning of my words prove that they are true.
Are you responding to what I said? :grin:
I agree with you on this. JTB theory does not explain how the word "knowledge" is used by people, hence it is a poor definition. I think it becomes even clearer when analyzing the verb "to know."
Keeping in mind the truth in JTB is independent of what I think about the matter, then according to JTB:
If I say "I know I am sitting on a chair" I am saying effectively saying "I believe I am sitting on a chair, I have justification for that belief, and it is true regardless of what I think about the matter"
But the last part of that sentence makes no sense. What I say when I utter the words "I know ..." is linked to what I think about the matter, it cannot be independent of my thoughts.
When JTB is augmented such that the justification guarantees the truth of the belief then this makes Gettier cases impossible. Although this seems intuitively reasonable for analytic truth, it also seems to make synthetic knowledge impossible.
It is self-evidently true that within the hypothesis that a space alien can be perfectly disguised as a duck such as it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, lays eggs and does everything else just like a duck. Then we can know that empirical knowledge is impossible when we require this knowledge to be true.
It seems to make no sense to have false knowledge.
When we simply assume away all of the counter-examples we can say that (for all practical purposes) synthetic knowledge is when a set of physical sensations matches an element in the model of the actual world then we can (reasonably plausibly) know that we are experiencing this element of the model of the world.
We can do this at least up until the element demonstrates properties contradicting its model in the world. As soon as we see a pig extend its wings and fly away we know it was never a conventional pig.
You can "know" empirical things to a reasonably plausible degree that is less than logically justified complete certainty.
The key empirical thing is mapping a set of physical sensations to their corresponding element in the verbal model of the actual world.
The model of the world is construed as an axiomatic system. We know that {cats} are {animals} by looking this up in the knowledge tree model of the world.
Philosophim[/quote]
I changed my view to this on the basis of the above:
You can "know" empirical things to a reasonably plausible degree that is less than logically justified complete certainty.
I only want to be fair and accurate in my assessment yet
it seems that you are saying something like 5 - 0 = 5 is not true.
What could you mean here by "justification necessitates the truth of the belief"? That there is no possible world in which the justification is true but not the truth of the belief? That's an absurdly high bar. I know the cat is on the bed because I saw him there a few minutes ago; but there are possible worlds in which he has subsequently moved, or in which what I saw was not the cat but a shadow.
Did any one in this thread spot this obvious problem?
Are you proposing a difference between reality and a simulation of reality? :smile:
Apparently truthmaker theory answers this question. I just found out that all of my ideas for the last seven years have been anchored in truthmaker theory. I had never heard of truthmaker theory prior to two weeks ago.
My own unique take on this is that for analytical truth an expression of language is proved to be true if it is semantically entailed by expressions of language that are stipulated to be true.
These expressions are stipulated to be true on the basis of the verbal model of the actual world. This is assumed to be stored in a knowledge ontology like the CYC project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
After very much discussion in this thread I have narrowed down the meaning of empirical knowledge to be when a set of physical sensations map to one or more elements within this model of the world.
Copyright 2023 PL Olcott
If there is no difference between reality and a simulation of reality then no difference
can be discerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(religion) might be discernable.
Sounds to me like you are proposing a difference! :grin:
Bye.
The key innovation of my seven years of full time work is that an analytical expression of formal or natural language is only true when it has a semantic entailment (necessity) connection to other expressions of language that have been stipulated to be true.
This is significant because in such a formal system Gödel incompleteness and Tarski Undefinability are impossible.
Expressions stipulated to be true are related to truth conditional semantics. For simplicity we can call them verified facts or Haskell Curry elementary theorems:
Let T be such a theory. Then the elementary statements which
belong to T we shall call the elementary theorems of T; we also
say that these elementary statements are true for T. Thus, given
T, an elementary theorem is an elementary statement which is
true. https://www.liarparadox.org/Haskell_Curry_45.pdf
My ultimate goal of the above work is that this idea be used to create
a True(L,x) software function in AI systems providing them with the
definitive basis to divide truth from falsity. Tarski incorrectly "proved"
that this is impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem#General_form
This is a huge problem with current state of the art LLM AI systems such as ChatGPT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)
They just make stuff up out of thin air and cite it as verified facts.
If there is a difference then this might be a discernable difference.
If there is NO difference then entails that THERE IS NO discernable difference.
if you can claim there is no difference, then someone else can claim they are the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles
When a thing is exactly the same as a duck from all external appearances including
a blood test of DNA, then you can tell it is actually a space alien when it telepathically
invades your thoughts screaming that it
When you believe that there is an alien, disguised as a duck, screaming into your head telepathically, there might be deeper epistemic concerns than Gettier problems.
For this thought experiment it is stipulated that the space alien really
is telepathically communicating with you.
You touch on a deep truth, though I am not sure you are aware. :smile:
An infinitely irreducible simulation of reality (as it seems you are proposing) in no way addresses the categorical separation between reality and its simulation.
When the entire set of properties of a thing (including its point in time and space)
are identical to another thing then we can know that they are one-and-the-same thing.
If a thing has hidden properties that would distinguish it from other things then
we cannot correctly determine whether it is this other thing or not. We can guess
yet our guess might possibly be incorrect.
It is (by definition) impossible to tell the difference between a thing and its simulation
when there is no discernable difference.
Identical points in time and space? This would be illogical, and would also undermine the complexity of your simulation as the fundamental grounds of reality (which were once common) are now dissolved.
We ourselves are not exactly the same as we were one minute ago.
You would have to show how this is relevant. :smile:
Also, instead of using those characters (regarding your hypothetical) it would be simpler to use yourself.
So if there is a simulation of yourself standing in front of you, you are telling me that you would not know there was a difference between you and this simulation that is standing in front of you?
The very first time that I ever heard about the Identity of indiscernibles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles#:~:text=The%20identity%20of%20indiscernibles%20is,by%20y%20and%20vice%20versa.
I had it completely figured out. If every single property is exactly the
same then two different things
they are not one-and-the-same thing. My qualification addresses any
time travel paradox related to the Identity of indiscernibles.
"We ourselves are not exactly the same as we were one minute ago."
Quoting PL Olcott
I am sorry but there is no way for you to apply this philosophical theory to something as advanced as simulation theory. If you want to know why, that would probably be a different conversation. I have already pointed you to the proper perspective. Good luck!
None the less my key point is that if two things differ in ways that are not discernable
such as an actual duck and a space alien perfectly disguised as a duck (including duck DNA)
then the mistake of incorrectly believing that the space alien is an actual duck cannot possibly
be avoided.
[b]Your initial reply seems to fail to understand that if there is no discernable
difference between X and Y then there is no difference to be discerned.[/b]
You seemed to be saying that when no there is no discernable difference
between X and Y that a difference can never-the-less be still be discerned.
You must understand the proper order of philosophical inquiry.
I need to know what happens when you encounter a simulation of yourself. Are you saying that you would not know the difference between yourself and a simulation of yourself?
This seems to be perplexing you but it applies to your simulation in every way. I understand that you do not see it. You must think! :smile:
This is getting a little too silly. An otherwise perfect simulation of myself would not exist
in exactly the same (x,y,z) coordinates relative to the center of the Earth.
:snicker:
Ah so you are a mere Troll after all.
Here, maybe this will help a bit. :joke:
Prompt: he totally conceded his point look!
I need to know what happens when you encounter a simulation of yourself. Are you saying that you would not know the difference between yourself and a simulation of yourself?
chiknsld
This is getting a little too silly. An otherwise perfect simulation of myself would not exist
in exactly the same (x,y,z) coordinates relative to the center of the Earth.
PL Olcott
That you deny the truth of statements that are proved completely true entirely on the basis
of the meaning of their words sufficiently proves that you don't want any honest dialogue.
I try to always give the benefit of the doubt. At this point there is no doubt.
I had you pegged correctly in my original reply.
Maybe you will have better luck next time. :smile:
It has never been any matter of luck. It has always been a matter of applying
very extreme diligence to intuition until the intuition is translated into seamlessly
correct reasoning.
In The Philosophy Forum almost everyone knows the subject matter very well
and everyone besides you seems to want an honest dialogue. [b]This is at least
ten-fold better than any other online forum about philosophy than I have
ever encountered.[/b]
I think the thrust of JTB is that if we believe X is true for good reasons and X is true then it would be right to say we know that X. It is not required, and in many cases not possible, to say that we know that we know X.
The two problems for JTB, which are related, are that there is no determinate criteria for establishing what constitutes justification, and it seems wrong to say that we can know without knowing that we know or that we could be said to have known something which later turned out to be wrong.
In the empirical context we can say that we know that what we observe is the case, and that we know that we know it; we simply observe what is the case. So, there is no need for belief in this context. Believing is what we do when we cannot know.
I think that believing in the case of JTB means that some mind holds the idea of the assertion.
Knowledge is divided from truth in that truth can be unknown.
Are you saying that truth can be unknown but that knowledge cannot be, in the sense that we cannot be said to know unless we know that we know?
Quoting PL Olcott
First, I do not disagree with your overall viewpoint here. The problem is, without certain details, you fall into the Gettier argument. Lets address your main point, "You can "know" empirical things to a reasonably plausible degree that is less than logically justified complete certainty."
Recall that Jones knows Smith has five coins in his pocket with less than logically justified complete certainty. And its truth that Smith has five coins in his pocket. So according to the above statement without any clarification, Jones knows that Smith has five coins in his pocket even though almost everyone would say he didn't have enough justification to say so.
The first problem we tackled was "Truth". I noted that truth is not a necessary condition for knowledge. But that leaves another part of knowledge to tackle. "Justification". In my opinion, that's the real crux of the Gettier argument. What does it mean to be justified? How do I separate something that I believe, from something I know?
Let me set up some terminology. "Justification" is really short for "Knowledge justification". Even beliefs have reasons why we hold them. But reasons for why we hold beliefs are not "Justification". Justification is really the magical word which means, "Holding reasons which lead us to conclude the person has knowledge."
Jones has reasons for his beliefs, but I think all of us feel he has no justification. Jones hasn't seen Smith for an hour. There are a whole host of things that could have happened to those coins. Smith could have dropped one, had a hole in his pocket, or bought something from a vending machine. Its absurd for Jones to say he "knows". Jones simply believes, with his reason being that Smith had the coins an hour ago.
This gives us a hint to what justification can be then. Justification must not be inductive. A deductive argument has premises that necessarily lead to a conclusion. Inductive arguments are premises that do not necessarily lead to a conclusion. Jones argument about Smith is inductive. Inductive arguments are not knowledge. Therefore Jones does not know Smith has five coins.
The truth of the matter is irrelevant. Lets say Smith shows Jones five coins in his hand. Jones is allowed to examine the coins in depth with all the tools he has available to him. After exhaustive study, every bit of evidence conclusively points to these five objects being coins, and that they are in Smith's hand. Deductively the only conclusion Jones can make is that there are five coins in Smith's hand. Therefore this is what Jones knows.
Of course, Smith then reveals that these "coins" are experimental spy coins that hide the fact that they are transponders. It turns out the metal shape and alloy is not currently detectible by public means, and Jones was fooled! Does that mean that Jones did not know that these were five coins in Smith's hands moments ago? Of course not. Jones absolutely knew that there were five coins in Smiths hand. It wasn't a belief, because it was the only thing which could be deduced.
So then the question for you is, "Is deduction without truth knowledge justification?"
My example is that a space alien that is perfectly disguised as a duck (including Duck DNA)
would be mistaken for a duck thus provide fake knowledge that is not true.
The things that can be known with justified logical certainty are located in an axiomatic
system knowledge ontology verbal model of the actual world.
I am back to something close to my original position confusing a space alien perfectly disguised as a duck for an actual duck is the only possible mistakes allowed with my very reasonably plausible approximation of knowledge.
If you believe that your friend has at least five coins in his pocket and you did not see at least five coins then you do not have sufficient justification for your belief. If you see these coins and they turn out to be perfect counterfeits of actual coins you are still justified in your belief. If they are obvious plastic counterfeits then your belief was never justified.
My goal here is to end up with a universal criterion measure for truth such that True(L, x) becomes computable. I am on this forum for the purpose or researching truthmaker theory so that I can write an academic paper breaking new ground in this field.
JTB one must have justification such that the truth of the belief is a necessary consequence of its justification to the best possible extent that counterfeits of things in the world (relevant to the justification of the belief) are detected and rejected when possible.
First, I want to praise this with every fiber of my being. I hope that my challenges to your writing have not come across as antagonistic. I am not trying to tear you down, I genuinely want to see if you can produce answers to the questions that have plagued epistemology for years. Knowledge was an absolute passion of mine for many years until I moved onto other things. So if I can help in any way, I will.
I do encourage you strongly to read my theory of knowledge paper that I linked towards the top of these forums. You don't have to agree with it, but if you're keen on really thinking about epistemology, you're going to want to read it and understand it as it addresses many of the problems I'm pointing out to you.
Quoting PL Olcott
Is it the only possible mistake though? And if a theory allows a mistake, does that mean its a complete and good theory? Lots of theories that we don't use could be used by just allowing one mistake. An epistemology that solves all of our problems can have no mistakes. You're talking about a problem that countless people have examined over thousands of years. It can have no flaws for it to be taken seriously.
Beyond the abstract, the allowance of this mistake in particular will kill your theory. Because at the end of the day you have allowed that one can know something even when its not true. You have to specifically address why that is, and it must be consistent across your entire theory. If you allow one instance in which someone can know something when it is not true, then you cannot claim that truth is a necessary component of knowledge.
Quoting PL Olcott
These are statements, but why? Philosophy might seem easy at first, because our intuitions point out that the Gettier argument is dumb. It is being able to articulate a consistent and clearly why its dumb, and a defined solution that is where the difficulty occurs.
So a few questions with the above quote:
1. Why do you not have sufficient justification if you did not se at least five coins?
2. Why do you have sufficient justification when they still turn out to be perfect counterfeit coins?
It needs to be consistent, and applied to any other statement of knowledge.
Quoting PL Olcott
Lets look again at the statement, "to the best possible extent". What specifically is someone's best possible extent? How do we measure this or note this in any other claim? Does this only apply to counterfeits? Here's a nice summary of a classic epistemological problem, with an attempt to solve it by Dretske: http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/epist2001/dretske.html#:~:text=Dretske%20says%20that%20depends%20on,duck%20but%20isn't.)
Keep at it.
You have been a very excellent reviewer. Almost everyone here has proven to be very knowledgeable and sincerely wants an honest dialogue. That is much better than any other Philosophy forum. For example StackExchange severely penalizes every new idea just because it is a new idea.
Quoting Philosophim
I have no idea how to find this.
Quoting Philosophim
The forced choice here is either to accept that a space alien perfectly disguised as a duck necessarily must be mistaken for an actual duck or empirical knowledge must be determined to be impossible. There don't seem to be even any other categories of possibility. It seems absurd that expressions of language that are false yet taken to be true could possibly be correctly construed as knowledge.
The actual knowledge itself is contained in a correct verbal model of the actual world. Mapping things in the world to their element in this knowledge tree might not itself be any sort of knowledge.
Quoting Philosophim
When a counterfeit thing has no discernable difference from the real thing then it cannot possibly be correctly construed as a mistake when the counterfeit is (at least tentatively) taken to be real. On the other hand taking a counterfeit to be real remains incorrect.
Agreed! I looked for years and was highly dissatisfied with them all until this one.
Quoting PL Olcott
Here's the link again:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
I suggest you do a cntrl-F and search for Caerulea-Lawrence as they've posted an outstanding summary of what I've written. Then if you want more details, try reading the paper itself.
Quoting PL Olcott
I would read my paper first to understand where I'm coming from, but consider instead that knowledge is simply a tool humanity uses in an attempt to get as close to the truth as logically possible. What would be wrong with that? If we have concluded one thing is impossible, then the next step is to determine what is possible within our goals.
Consider the act of induction. I have a deck of playing cards that is normal and complete. Someone starts shuffling the deck without either of knowing the order of the cards and asks me, "What's going to be drawn first after I shuffle the deck? A card with hearts, or a card with diamonds, spades, or clovers?"
Now its impossible for me to know the answer. But, I can take what is not impossible for me to know, that there is a ratio of 3/4 that it will be a diamond, spade, or clover, and guess that it will be one of those. Its using logic in an impossible to know outcome, to still make a guess that is more likely to match the possible outcome than not.
I saved the whole thing as a 33 page PDF. Only the first 12 pages are your paper.
With the free PDF readers of recent years I can highlight key sections as needed.
Dictionaries seem to agree with your view in that they seem to be saying something like
knowledge is a very coherent set of ideas that tend to have very practical application.
I think that when it refers to facts that these expressions of language must be true.
(1) acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition:
knowledge of many things.
(2) familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning:
A knowledge of accounting was necessary for the job.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/knowledge
When analytical knowledge is defined as a justified true belief such that the justification necessitates the truth of the belief then the Gettier problem is no longer possible.
Empirical knowledge is defined as a justified true belief such that the justification makes every possible attempt to correctly match a set of physical sensations to their corresponding elements in a correct verbal model of the actual world.
Unless you actually see the five coins that you believe that your friend has and made a best possible attempt to verify that they are not counterfeit you have no knowledge that your friend has these five coins.
If we don't make the definition of knowledge as tight as possible something mistaken for knowledge could make humanity extinct. Because of the human ego many people take their own wrong headed opinions as exactly one-and-the-same thing as verified facts.
Since the cost of making a mistake could make humanity extinct (or worse) it might be better to err on the safe side and say that empirical knowledge is impossible. This view tends to keep reinforcing humility.
Studies have shown that mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for about half of all wrongful convictions. Researchers at Ohio State University examined hundreds of wrongful convictions and determined that roughly 52 percent of the errors resulted from eyewitness mistakes.
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses
Eyewitness testimony is mistaken to be very reliable and this causes grave errors.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html
A person could be put to death because jurors were unaware of the divergence of empirical knowledge from truth. Because of this it might be best to refer to {empirical knowledge} as a {reasonable guess} and never call it any kind of knowledge at all.
I haven't fully read it yet. It seems that you and I have two different goals. You are trying to define knowledge accurately within the common terminology of epistemology. I am estimating that you have significantly achieved this. I will try and sum up your view here: Because knowledge does include things that have less than logically justified certainty this entails that knowledge must include some untruth. That makes perfect sense to me.
My goal is to define truthmaker theory and epistemology is such a way that ordinary people learn correct reasoning in common terms that they already understand. When they are jurors in court cases they really need to know all of the details of how interpreting sensory perceptions can diverge from truth. By calling even these distortions "knowledge" makes it too easy for them to get away with less than due dilligence.
We must also overcome the egoistic bias of overconfidence in one's own subjective opinions. In this case we can have some very bad outcomes if we allow knowledge to be false: I know that X murdered Y and X was put to death for this even though X did not murder Y. For this reason it is best to construe "knowledge" that turns out to be false as presumption and not any kind of actual knowledge at all.
The additional goal of defining a True(L,x) that can compute what is true and what is not true is much easier in that it only relies on an axiomatic correct model of the actual world. In other words all of its computations are pure deductions.
I've mentioned this before, and its important that you understand this. If using Kant's definitions, the Gettier problem does not apply to analytic knowledge. It applies to synthetic. JTB applies to synthetic, not analytic. Let me show you why.
Analytic knowledge is broadly defined as "True by definition". To simplify this in the most straight forward terms possible, we invent definitions. Why is a dog composed of X, Y, Z properties? Because we invented it to be that way. Definitions are essentially signs that represent some experience. For example, I can create analytic knowledge of a unicorn. I simply combine the experience of a hrose with a horn and viola, analytic knowledge.
Does that mean we can synthetically know a unicorn? Can we find one in the wild? That's the real question of JTB. Even then, analytic knowledge has its problems as well. What if I create a definition of a unicorn that also includes it being magical, while you do not? We both analytically know the definition of unicorn as something different. How do we reconcile that? Some people like Quine believe the analytic/synthetic distinction isn't really a distinction at all when you examine it closely.
But enough exploration of the analytic for now. The thing you have to understand is that JTB is not analytic, it is synthetic.
Quoting PL Olcott
Except this isn't truth. Truth is, "What is". "What is" does not care about your deductions or conclusions. What you are describing is a "Justified Belief". And you are noting that a justified belief makes every possible attempt to correctly match a set of physical sensations to their corresponding elements in a correct verbal model of the actual world. I agree with this model, as I've noted repeatedly that truth is not a necessary pre-condition for knowledge. Your statement agrees with this.
Quoting PL Olcott
As I've noted before, this is simply giving up. Let me tell you the utter disaster this would entail. We would have no way of justifying why science is more valid than my personal beliefs. THAT would drive humanity extinct, or at least invoke some serious Darwinism. If we say empirical knowledge is impossible, then someone who believes the sun is a giant ball of gas has as much rational validity as someone who thinks its a light bulb invented from an ancient alien civilization.
We should not get caught up so much in words, technicalities, and a desire to hold ideology that we ignore reality. In reality, we ascertain that some statements are more reasonable and rational than another. In reality, people claim they have knowledge of things. Our goal in philosophy is to figure out why, and bring explicit the implicit process. Dismissing what people naturally do would be viewed as insanity by the rest of the world, and quite rightly.
Quoting PL Olcott
Or we simply figure out the most reasonable way of objectively ascertaining the validity of empirical claims, and continue to use the word knowledge. Your insistence that knowledge MUST have truth is again, against the way the world works. People will not stop using the word. Your job is not to eliminate the word, but to refine it to be better used explicitly. That way when someone says, "I know this happened," we have an objective set of steps that can confirm whether that person does actually know.
Giving up is easy. It is the temptation of the intellect to do so. Do not give in.
Quoting PL Olcott
This is a fine desire, but your current trajectory will destroy this. Also, your desire may not be real. That is something we also have to accept as philosophers. "I want to define knowledge that includes truth," cannot logically be done. Or, if it can, you must ignore everything else and answer the one question, "How do I know that what I claim I know is true?" in the synthetic sense. Ambitions are fine, but without this core pillar established, the whole roof will collapse around you.
I am taking all of the things known through induction, (ignoring the problem of induction) and converting them into axioms in the verbal model of the actual world. These are all construed as knowledge that is known to be true. This same model also includes all analytical truth.
Empirical knowledge now becomes only the mapping of sets of physical sensations to their corresponding elements in this model of the world. This system allows people and machines to correctly compute True(L, x) as pure deductions within this model of the actual world.
This is another major problem. By the way, my paper has an answer to the problem of induction. Its the last section. Induction cannot be used to ascertain truth.
Quoting PL Olcott
Feel free to try. But so far this is a claim, not a proof or example.
Quoting PL Olcott
Again, this does not answer the question of, "How do I know that what I know is true?" What is true is "What is". We can't change the definition of what is true. "What is" is existent despite our having knowledge of it or not. You can put a T in a function, but that doesn't mean its an actual representative of truth.
I'm just trying to save you from going down an average path. The ideas that you are proposing are not new and have clear problems. Most epistemologists believe that knowledge has to do with mapping our words to reality. The question is "How". How do we do it and demonstrate that a knowledge claim is more reasonable than a not quite certain belief? How do you deal with cross cultural definitions, and physical contexts? How does someone who is blind know the world differently from someone who has sight?
Keep at it, but really apply these flaws I'm pointing out. If you don't have solutions to them, there is nothing your theory adds that already hasn't been implemented before.
Although the problem of induction seems to prove that the very next time you drop your coffee cup it might just hang there in the air levitating, I dismiss this as unreasonably implausible.
Quoting Philosophim
It answers it well enough for all practical purposes. Since we cannot even know that five seconds ago actually existed we can't even know that we have ever met our own mother, even if she just left the room. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minute_hypothesis I dismiss this as unreasonably implausible.
Such as system that I propose can compute that claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election really are nothing more that copying Hitler's own "big lie" for the purpose of overturning a valid election.
It can also compute that drastic climate change by humans is real and must be mitigated very soon to prevent horrific future consequences.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336568434_Severe_anthropogenic_climate_change_proven_entirely_with_verifiable_facts
Sure, but in philosophy, you need a reason. If you can't say why its unreasonably implausible, then you haven't solved anything.
Quoting PL Olcott
If you're just concerned about knowledge for practical purposes, nothing needs to be written or done. People use knowledge in practical ways every day. If you want to get to the heart of it, to find the specifics and create a system that can be applied universally, you can't just dismiss this issue outright.
Again, I'm just letting you know that if you want to make any serious impact in epistemology, what you have is not enough. I highly suggest reading more epistemology to really understand what's been proposed already, and what the remaining issues are.
As there can be a lot to read, here's a video giving a summary of epistemologies evolution over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rK0_-x8bI
Its been a good conversation, and I think we've reached the end. Good luck in your journey!
Back to pure epistemology
The Tarski Undefinability Theorem "proves" that True(L, x) can never be computed on the basis that Tarski did not understand that the Liar Paradox must simply be rejected as not a truth bearer. https://liarparadox.org/Tarski_275_276.pdf
No one cares about the Tarski Undefinability Theorem for practical purposes. If you're going to go that in depth, then you're going to have to be in depth in your analysis. Ok, that's likely the last response now. Good luck in your work!
I agree with you in a sense, but I think your example is so implausible, perhaps even physically impossible, that it does not constitute a refutation of the idea that, within the context of the phenomenal world as experienced, we have direct knowledge based on observation of the world. We cannot extend our knowledge beyond that ambit, and it is pointless to try, and also pointless to claim that our inability to do so constitutes any real threat to the knowledge based on observations, that we do have.
The only way I can imagination that your example might be possible would be if we lived in a simulation, but if that were so, nothing would be as it appears, and that would amount to things just being what they appear to be in our phenomenal world. Just like is a duck appears on a computer screen it is a duck regardless of how the image is realized.
So, your point relies on radical skepticism, and I think we can rule that out just by accepting the phenomenal world as it appears and making and thinking of the truth or falsity of knowledge claims only within that context.
All that said, I'd be happy enough to stop talking about knowledge altogether and instead talk about more or less justified belief, while acknowledging that we have no absolutely precise measure of justification.
Quoting Janus
Only when one fully comprehends the actual limits of logically justified certainty is one's mind forced open enough to see reality for what it truly is as opposed to and contrast with the brainwashing of conditioning of the socialization process. (This is Eastern religion stuff).
Quoting Janus
I have been studying and pondering the mathematical foundation of the notion of analytical truth for many years. I just recently discovered that this is anchored in truthmaker theory.
I think that your criticism of my view has lots of merit. You do seem to be describing
more accurately how people actually use knowledge. When I cut out the stochastic
aspects of this it makes it a less accurate model of knowledge.
Was your response meant to addressthat is agree or disagreewith what I had said, or is it more of an aside?
Quoting PL Olcott
Same question here.
Quoting Janus
After reading this again I agree.
I was also trying to show why knowing the limits of logically justified certainty is important.
I agree it is important. Logical and mathematical certainty seem to be the only full-blown certainties we have, given that they do not seem to rely on the empirical context of the phenomenal world. I would say that direct observations of the empirical world, such as "it is raining, right here right now, can be all but absolutely certain, provided our thinking doesn't slip into radical skepticism, wherein we might think the rain we see is a simulation, illusion or elaborate hoax.
I tend to favour refraining from speaking in terms of belief in such cases but rather speaking in terms of simply seeing what the case is. So not per the old adage "seeing is believing" but rather "seeing is knowing". For example, I might have very good reason, I might even say I know, my wife is having an affair if I find used condoms under our bed, and we don't use condoms, but if I come home and see her with another man then I know, for all intents and purposes, that she is having an affair.
The Getter cases don't impress me: for example, think of the cardboard cutout sheep in the field. I see what looks like a sheep and form the purportedly justified true belief, on account of there being an actual sheep behind a bush that I cannot see, that there is a sheep in that field. But this belief is too indeterminate: my belief is really that what I see, the cardboard cutout, is an actual sheep. Can I say this belief is justified if I am at such a distance from the cutout that it is indistinguishable from a real sheep? I would say not.
It may be best to keep the radical skepticism in the back of our mind just to force a little more humility so that we don't excessively trust the merit of our own opinion.