Epistemology solved.
Epistemology is all about certainty, not “Truth”. Real Truth is inaccessible to us because of physical and mental filters between us and the real world, namely biological, cultural, and psychological.
There are only two ways of knowing, empirical probability and logical necessity.
Some claim a third, revelation, but this cannot be tested or adequately expressed externally and cannot therefore be verified as reliable.
Empirical probability is the realm of science. It is that things keep happening the same way. As we increase the resolution of our instruments, either outward/upward or downward/inward, we effectively increase the size of our reality as well as the level of certainty we can have about it. We increase truth, for all intents and purposes.
Logical necessity is semantic - the words mean what they mean, but absolute. It is not possible for a circle with three sides to exist, by definition. The logical premise that makes this necessarily true is based on the identical foundation as science - it keeps working.
Statistics is a way of quantifying our level of certainty, whether in science replicability or emotional anecdote.
To the extent we use patterns internally, internal versions of words suffice and they need only be internally consistent sufficient for internal purposes. To be used externally, they must be externally consistent (that is, accurately represent the material/sensable/testable world sufficient for whatever purpose they’re being used toward), and the extent to which we agree on them is the extent to which we can communicate effectively.
When making decisions, a certainty of 51% is as good as 100% because nothing may exceed it. However, certainty is not actually a percentage, but a range (for which a percentage may stand in at the average). You may be between 25-60% sure of one thing and 44-78% sure of another, contradictory explanation, for example. When you have an average level of certainty sufficient to outweigh other options, this is called epistemological warrant. It means that you are justified in making the decision or in accepting the fact as true.
There are only two ways of knowing, empirical probability and logical necessity.
Some claim a third, revelation, but this cannot be tested or adequately expressed externally and cannot therefore be verified as reliable.
Empirical probability is the realm of science. It is that things keep happening the same way. As we increase the resolution of our instruments, either outward/upward or downward/inward, we effectively increase the size of our reality as well as the level of certainty we can have about it. We increase truth, for all intents and purposes.
Logical necessity is semantic - the words mean what they mean, but absolute. It is not possible for a circle with three sides to exist, by definition. The logical premise that makes this necessarily true is based on the identical foundation as science - it keeps working.
Statistics is a way of quantifying our level of certainty, whether in science replicability or emotional anecdote.
To the extent we use patterns internally, internal versions of words suffice and they need only be internally consistent sufficient for internal purposes. To be used externally, they must be externally consistent (that is, accurately represent the material/sensable/testable world sufficient for whatever purpose they’re being used toward), and the extent to which we agree on them is the extent to which we can communicate effectively.
When making decisions, a certainty of 51% is as good as 100% because nothing may exceed it. However, certainty is not actually a percentage, but a range (for which a percentage may stand in at the average). You may be between 25-60% sure of one thing and 44-78% sure of another, contradictory explanation, for example. When you have an average level of certainty sufficient to outweigh other options, this is called epistemological warrant. It means that you are justified in making the decision or in accepting the fact as true.
Comments (89)
No.
(Edit: a detailed critique of the OP starts at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/199489)
By saying there is an inaccessible "real world" you are reifying the determinacy of the experienced world as an absolute actuality. I don't think this is legitimate. If there is a reality independent of us it would seem to be a dynamic potentiality, not a determinate actuality. Determinate actuality exists only within the experienced world.
So, if the real is a dynamic potentiality which we are part of, then the world of human experience is a "biologically, culturally and psychologically" actualized potential, not a "filtered" (and by implication possibly illusory) version of some absolutely independent actuality.
Are you sure?
Compare Quoting Kaiser Basileus against "The world is everything that is the case".
Is that you know you are writing in English a logical necessity or a mere probability?
I suggest it is neither, and that as a result, there are more than two ways of knowing.
Damn. Can't find the ladder to climb back down to your level. :wink:
Shouldn't have thrown it away.
I didn't say the Tractatus would be easy; I said it might be one place from which to proceed. Of course, there are others.
Have a look at the SEP article on Formal Epistemology
Here's the first paragraph:
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
This might be trouble though. I think it turns out that to go this way, you need confidence to be quantifiable. Ramsey argues for this view in "Truth and Probability", which you should read as soon as possible. The principal arguments are based on wagering, but there's also this, which I cannot resist quoting:
No.
Is anything determinate beyond its being determined? Perhaps you are thinking instead of something else:determinability. I'd say that what is potential becomes actual in the act of being determined. It is not only humans that determine; all life does, so when I referred to 'the experienced world" I was not confining that to the humanly experienced world.
So, if determinate actuality exists only in the experienced world; it is determinable potentiality that gives rise to it. It is determinable potentiality that "exists prior to and beyond us". I don't see what logical necessity has to do with: I think the idea of logical necessity is bogus. Logic is a purely formal abstraction from determinate actuality.
five is less than six; iron oxidises in the presence of oxygen; animals with hearts also have kidneys.
Quoting tim wood
Quoting tim wood
Your suggestion was that facts are historical. But what you have argued is that knowledge of facts is historical.
Not the same thing.
Quoting tim wood
Where?
Yeah - we are choosing a grammar here.
I go with facts as such things as are true. Then we can have facts we don't know.
Do you mean to say that there are things which 1) are the case and which could be known, but which 2) no one currently knows? I presume not, since that would quickly lead to those unknown things being facts. So, how do you fill out the idea of a "thing that no one knows"? Are you a realist about such things?
I'm not so sure about this. I think what you call filters are channels through which knowledge comes to us. They seem like filters because of their limitations but, through generations of human evolution, we keep expanding them and they maintain their service.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
This I think is an over-simplification. Usually, intuition gets the first bite long before the scientific method is applied.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
Doesn't knowing the percentage of certainty imply an idea of what the absolute truth is. Can you know that you have 26% without an idea of 100%? Because, then, the 26% would be arbitrary and not necessarily significant.
I do believe there is no absolute knowledge but there is comprehensive knowledge for a particular stage in life. Also, I think knowledge applies to all levels of life, including galaxies, stars, planets, animals, plants, even atoms and beyond, the differences being the modes of life and the degrees of application.
For me, one of the signs of knowledge is the awareness/response mechanism, another is differentiation and utility, all of which are expressed by all of life. I believe every life partakes of its share of knowledge.
I think this refers more to choice than to knowledge. It suggests a kind of response or activity born of perception; something distinctly subjective.
When a person says, "The world is flat." Is this a statement with reference to knowledge or perception? The person may have no evidence to the contrary (perhaps due to lack of due diligence in acquiring said evidence), and may as well be confident in his claim. It is also actionable (many sailors and navigators did set out to discover the end of the world based on such ideas and propositions). So, my question is, Can knowledge be wrong? Or, does knowledge bear any relationship to truth?
I believe application of knowledge can be subjective but I don't think knowledge is.
Is it? I thought that it was about knowledge.
This trades on the ambiguity of "Have".
Can we know facts we don't know? of course not.
Can there be facts we don't know? of course there can.
You are over-thinking it. There are things you don't know, that are nevertheless facts - the colour of the cup I had coffee from this morning, and so on. It's not hard to see that there are facts that no one knows.
The inability to account for such a commonplace suggests that that an approach in which all facts must be known is just plain wrong.
Epistemology is about knowledge, and knowledge deals with beliefs, justification, and truth. If I say that I know algebra, that statement is either true or false.
There are at least two ways I can talk about certainty. One way is a subjective portrayal of my inner feelings about what I claim to know, and it can be expressed by emphasis. Another way that the word certainty is used, is as a synonym for knowing or knowledge. For example, I am certain that I saw Tom shoot Mary, or I am certain that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president, etc.
There are many uses of the word know that go beyond your limited description of knowledge. I can know by sensory experience, I can know based on testimony, I can know based argument, inference, or proof, and I can know based on linguistic training, to name a few. The use of the word know is much more expansive than people seem to think.
These are questions of semantics. Are you just trying to get a consensus on the meaning of the terms, or are you looking for the implications based on some particular definitions you have in mind?
Of course this is meaningless in the absence of a definition of "real truth" as opposed to faux truth. Fr me, truth is the adequacy of what is inthe intellect to reality. Adequacy is a relative concept, depending on contextual need.
Further, you seem unaware that all knowledge is both subjective and objective. There is always some known object and some knowing subject. Further, the objective content we know has both an objective object, and a subjective object. If we see an apple the objective object is the apple and the subjective object (the data about the knowing subject) is that we can see, see these colors, etc. Thus, there is no biological, cultural, or psychological distortion -- there is only biological, cultural, and psychological data admixed with data on the objective object. If someone is too unreflective to recognize this, that can be corrected if the person is open-minded.
There is no a priori knowledge, no logical necessity independent of metaphysical necessity. What we call a priori is a posteriori with resect to our learning experiences, and the only "a priori" thereafter because it is constrained by our experiential understanding of being. Logic is not about laws of thought, but about laws of thought applicable to reality. I can think
Finally, as we have no way of measuring subjective certainty, assigning it a mathematical value is only a way of clothing subjective bias in mathematical garb.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
What about, as you mention later on, logical necessities? Truth does not contradict truth; therefore any self-contradicting statements are necessarily false; therefore any negation of self-contradicting statements are necessarily true. E.g. "Timeless objective truths don't exist" = self-contradiction; therefore "Timeless objective truths exist" = true.
Also, what about first principles, such as the laws of logic? Knowledge of logical necessities implies that we have a priori knowledge of the laws of logic as being true, for we cannot logically prove the laws of logic to be true. And in the off chance they are not part of eternal truths, then we are all screwed.
There's no reason why logic works, it simply works. It's descriptive of the relationships between other concepts. Nothing is a priori. It's all based on our experience, individually, socially in the current moment, and historically as cultures evolve. You don't need to question logic. "Just works" takes you all the way to infinity, or until it stops working.
Go right ahead, if you like; but that's not how the rest of us use it.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
and
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
Hmm.
So logic does not tell us what is true?
"A fact is an individual instance of truth just as a choice is an individual instance of freedom. Knowledge is equivalent to epistemological warrant. "
Then I take it that a fact = a true proposition = a truth.
So when you ask "What does fact mean? " you're asking "what makes a proposition true?"
The most commonly accepted theory of truth is correspondence theory of truth. What makes a proposition true is that it corresponds to some actual aspect of reality. The proposition "the ball is read" is true if the ball is actually red.
(I questioned semantics, because epistemologists often use the term "fact" to refer to the element of reality to which a proposition corresponds, if true. )
You also asked," Under that definition/understanding of 'fact,' is 'fact' applicable where there is no knowledge"
Knowledge = a belief that is true, justified, and (somehow) avoids Gettier problems. Can there be a fact (i.e.a true proposition) if no one has knowledge of that proposition? Absolutely: I believe X, but I believe it for a bad reason, therefore I don't have knowledge of X. Nevertheless, X is actually true (i.e. it's a fact). There's an example of there being a fact without knowledge.
Perhaps you're using the term "knowledge" in the less technical, but more common sense, as equivalent to a belief, one that may or may not be justified. That makes for a more controversial analysis: is there a fact (true proposition) if no one actually believes that proposition? It depends on your stance on propositions. If (like me) you consider propositions as a set of words formulated by, and contained within, minds - then if no one has formulated a proposition then it doesn't exist. Consider the universe 100 years after the big bang. There were no true propositions (facts) at the time because there were no minds to formulate and contain them.
On the other hand, some treat propositions as abstractions, like numbers - they consider there to exist a proposition to describe every aspect of reality, irrespective of whether anyone has actually articulated it They would say, "yes, truths/facts exist even if no one believes the truth/fact/proposition".
No, logic doesn't tell us what's true. Logic is a tool to help us draw proper conclusions, but it certainly doesn't guarantee truth. If certain propositions are true (for e.g. a proof), then it follows that the conclusion is true, but that is contingent on whether the premises are true. So in that sense it doesn't tell us what's true. Logic is a tool of correct reason.
I'm a relativist, yes, but that doesn't mean arbitrary. The truth isn't relative to imaginary transcendent knowledge, but to our best attempts at verification.. "for all intents and purposes.
As for numbers; math is descriptive of the relationships between idealised entities that do not exist in reality.
Kaiser Basileus
18
?Relativist
Justified "true" belief is a step too far. If everyone in the entire species thought something was a fact and it turned it not to be, it would still have been true "for all intents and purposes" until the new information came to light.
That is confused because it redefines "truth" by equating it with popular belief or conventional wisdom.
I agree that, in most cases, truth is inaccessible. But we need an idealized concept of truth to grasp the very concept that objective truth is usually inaccessible.
" If the best knowledge available turns out to be wrong, should it not have been considered truth before that? "
No! We should be fully cognizant that the things we believe may be false. Only then can we explore why we might be wrong. The biggest obstacle to seeking truth is certainty: if you "know" x, then you won't entertain the possibility of not-x, which closes doors. Even if the truth we seek is unobtainable in principle, it is the direction we should try to head toward.
What about maths? Can we be sure that twice two is four?
I'm a relativist, yes, but that doesn't mean arbitrary. The truth isn't relative to imaginary transcendent knowledge, but to our best attempts at verification.. "for all intents and purposes.
As for numbers; math is descriptive of the relationships between idealised entities that do not exist in reality.
To say one plus one equals one, that would be fine? One drop of rain meeting one more drop makes one drop?
If we can doubt them, then we can certainly be relatively certain. Epistemology as usual boils down to pragmatics. Doubt and belief ground each other in logically dichotomous fashion.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
There is a sense in which we can be rid of truth. After all, "Twice two is four" and "'Twice two is four' is true" have the exact same truth conditions. The addition of "...is true" does not change the truth value.
But the addition of "...is certain" might change the truth value. That's because certainty is an attitude adopted by someone towards a statement, and so quite a different animal to truth. Certainty is a state of mind. Truth isn't.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
Firstly, why prefix the word "real" to "truth"? Are there unreal truths? Not a big point, but it leaves one somewhat suspicious...
Secondly, this seems to be an example of Stove's Gem:
Plain, ordinary truths are transparently available to us. It is true that I am writing this on my laptop. It is true that I am writing in English. It is true that while I write this the cat is on the modem, keeping its feet warm. These are not extraordinary things in need of epistemic investigation.
In conclusion, playing epistemological games with words takes us away from the way we ordinarily use notions such as "...is true". That's why @Kaiser Basileus needs the modifier "Real truth"; it marks the place were we leave our ordinary understanding of truth behind, and start to play a different game with the same words.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
A trite observation, perhaps: Is the sentence "There are only two ways of knowing, empirical probability and logical necessity" itself known empirically, or is it a logical necessity?
I can't see any way of assigning truth values to it to determine if it is a tautology, and hence known by logical necessity.
So is it empirical? Is it perhaps falsifiable? Well, I know I love Wife; such self-knowledge seems to be neither empirical nor tautologous... So, debatably, it stands falsified. I know how to ride a bike. Is that knowledge empirical nor tautologous?
In any case, it is by no means obvious that we ought accept that there are only two ways of knowing.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
This is the criteria for rejecting revelation seems equally applicable to "There are only two ways of knowing, empirical probability and logical necessity". It cannot be tested or adequately expressed externally and cannot therefore be verified as reliable...
(Here I am supposing that "adequately expressed externally" is somehow like being logically true. If that's wrong, enlighten me).
The first issue is, if epistemology is about certainty, and not abut truth, what are we to do with truth? Should we stop using it altogether? Can we replace every instance of "is true" with "is certain" without loss?
Quoting Kaiser Basileus(My italics).
But here it is clear that it is difficult to remove truth entirely. That being true and being certain are not the same thing, is implicit in the setting out of the argument here.
The salient point is that, at the least, it is not a simple task to remove truth from epistemology.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
This seems to be saying that tautologies are only true because they are useful. That interpretation is upheld by Kaiser's answers to my questions, above. So:
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
But tautologies are true because of their structure. Modus ponens is true regardless of how useful it is. further, and consider this with care, modus ponens can only be useful under a given interpretation; yet an interpretation in which modus ponens were not useful must by that very fact be wrong. An interpretation in which modus ponens appears to fail provides us with a reductio ad absurdum, and hence leads to the conclusion that one of the assumptions is wrong; that is, the interpretation has failed.
Logic is not true because it is useful; rather, it is useful because it shows what can be true.
Quoting Kaiser Basileus (My italics)
Is the suggestion here that one's preference for vanilla over chocolate is a result of some explicit Bayesian analysis?
I don't.
There's something more than just odd about the idea of employing a statistician in order to decide if you should propose to your significant other. But:
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
Here's that divide between the inside and the outside writ large:
Quoting Kaiser Basileus
It will not do to just assume that there is a private world and a public world, and never the twain shall meet. The arguments here are long and windy, but in the end it seems incontrovertible that any private world is itself a public construction.
Further, it is this assumed segregation of mental life from the world that leads to Stove's Gem.
Reject the Cartesian notion of mind as the only source of certainty and you may have no need to explain how we bridge the imaginary gap between the mental and the physical.
I recently witnessed an introduction to philosophy professor who actually put forth this argument.
:gasp:
I was helping an intro student, so I ignored it(didn't call it out) and offered him something entirely different. Talk about trees always works.
I've seen it used to great effect in intro philosophy; it quickly separates the goats and sheep. The goats get to do Honours. The sheep don't get past first year.
Many sheep wind up here, arguing for relativism or pragmatism.
No. Epistemology is about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it.
I'm not at all sure to what this refers - or even if it was directed at me.
But I winder if Proprioception is internal or external. How do I know where my foot is?
Yet Proprioception is a sense.
All up, I think we can conclude that epistemology is not as simple as you supposed.
(the attached knowledge-traditional-1247x610.png is easier to read)
Belief » Formation (Wikipedia)
(Yes yes, the Gettier cases, but they're more a refinement, than a reason to bin it all.)
So, that's not so much about know-how, as it is about propositional knowledge.
Seems the work lies in justification.
Gettier gets believing a disjunction wrong. That's all his second case amounts to, nothing more. His first case is an example of his changing the truth conditions of Smith's belief when he invokes "the man with ten coins in his pocket"... unacceptable change.
Anyway, the OP here seems a bit lost.
Even Plato realised that the justified true belief account was inadequate ; just flatus, he says.
But @Sam26will give a good defence of it; worth listening to.
Better to treat knowing-that as a special case of knowing-how; that is, there is only one sort of knowledge, performative knowledge, knowing how to do something like ride a bike or play a guitar; or produce an argument or give a command or write an essay.
All knowledge reduces to knowing how to do something.
Hence, you demonstrate that you are knowledgeable by doing stuff.
If the battery is flat, no amount of Bayesian analysis or linguistic interpretation will charge it. You have to buy a new one or charge it.