Gettier Differently
I assume that we are all familiar. If one follows the 'logic' Gettier follows, there seems to be a problem with JTB. I'm arguing here that it is Gettier's logic that is the problem. It's first seeded and later arrived at. This post will not cover all of the problems of either case. They run deeper than that, and as such are plentiful. There are accounting errors, as far as I can tell...
Firstly, Gettier changes Smith's belief by changing both the meaning and the truth conditions of it. He does so by invoking the so-called 'rules of logical entailment' and in doing so turned a false belief into true one.
That's completely unacceptable. Logic preserves truth. The rules of entailment do not. Therefore, the rules of entailment do not constitute adequate justificatory ground for the argument Gettier makes.
Remember, in the first case, Smith was - by Gettier's own admission - justified in believing that he would get the job. Smith thought to himself "I am going to get the job". Smith believed that he had secured the job. That is to think of and/or about oneself, not another.
That sort of thought/belief is self-reflective. It cannot be about anyone else. It turned out to be quite false. Yet Gettier's sleight of hand was invoking the rules of entailment as his own justification for changing an undeniably self-reflective thought/belief into belief about someone else. That move is unjustifiable here.
"The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job".<----------that is not a valid move for either Smith or Gettier, unless the referent of "the man with ten coins in his pocket" remains unchanged.
Firstly, Gettier changes Smith's belief by changing both the meaning and the truth conditions of it. He does so by invoking the so-called 'rules of logical entailment' and in doing so turned a false belief into true one.
That's completely unacceptable. Logic preserves truth. The rules of entailment do not. Therefore, the rules of entailment do not constitute adequate justificatory ground for the argument Gettier makes.
Remember, in the first case, Smith was - by Gettier's own admission - justified in believing that he would get the job. Smith thought to himself "I am going to get the job". Smith believed that he had secured the job. That is to think of and/or about oneself, not another.
That sort of thought/belief is self-reflective. It cannot be about anyone else. It turned out to be quite false. Yet Gettier's sleight of hand was invoking the rules of entailment as his own justification for changing an undeniably self-reflective thought/belief into belief about someone else. That move is unjustifiable here.
"The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job".<----------that is not a valid move for either Smith or Gettier, unless the referent of "the man with ten coins in his pocket" remains unchanged.
Comments (218)
For example, a mathematics theorem is a conclusion that necessarily follows from the explicit construction logic of an abstract, Platonic world, i.e. its set of axioms. If "true" means that a proposition appears in the real, physical world, then not one theorem in mathematics is "true". A provable mathematics theorem is still entirely valid knowledge.
Therefore, the JTB definition for knowledge is wrong. It must be JB instead.
This is the same conclusion as Gettier's, but obtained in a different way.
Jones owns a Ford or I am a money's uncle. The second disjunct is not a belief. Only the first is.
I don't see the similarity.
What's left of Gettier?
If "true" means that a proposition appears in the world, there is something terribly wrong with the framework.
With "appearing in the real world", I meant structurally isomorphic with the real world, in line with Bertrand Russell's considerations on the matter.
Gettier concludes that JTB (Justified True Belief) must be JB (Justified Belief). I conclude the same conclusion (JTB --> JB) but for different reasons.
In the debate, Is "justified true belief" a good definition for knowledge?, I agree with the answer: SImply put "Justified belief" is enough As stated so clearly by Gettier.
I like everything I've read from and about Russell. I agree that coherence alone is inadequate/insufficient. I diverge from convention correspondence schools primarily with regard to propositions and all that they entail. I reject propositions in lieu of thought/belief statements. Belief cannot be reduced to propositions. Statements can. Thought/belief is long before statements.
Quoting alcontali
Regardless of what Gettier says...
I disagree.
We cannot know a falsehood.
Agreed. However, as long as thought/belief has not been expressed in language, it cannot be communicated unambiguously. We still use lots of body language, but probably not in the context of philosophy.
Therefore to hold that all belief is propositional in content is a mistake, unless one also holds that propositions are somehow existentially independent of language. Such would have to be the case if thought/belief is prior to language and all thought/belief is propositional in content.
Statements that have no correspondence with the real, physical world are not (necessarily) false. They are simply not "true" as meant in the correspondence theory of truth.
For example, if we construct an abstract, Platonic world in which there are two symbols, S and K, and two rules [1] Kxy = x [2] Sxyz = xz(yz), then we can trivially demonstrate by applying both rules that (SKx)y = y. Therefore, SKx is the identity operator in this abstract world.
Is the claim about the identity operator "true"? (In terms of the correspondence theory)
No, because the SKI combinator calculus corresponds to absolutely nothing in the real, physical world. It is just a system of rules that create a new abstract, Platonic world.
The proposition that SKx is the identity operator is certainly provable in the SKI Platonic world, as it can be justified through standard symbol manipulation. Hence, it is a justified belief (JB), i.e. knowledge. However, it has absolutely nothing to do with the real, physical world or its associated "truth".
Statements of thought/belief. That is what I'm talking about here.
Quoting alcontali
I'm granting all this. It's true by definition. Different animal altogether.
Worse than that!
It is not even true!
It is merely provable (from the construction logic of that abstract, Platonic world).
Furthermore, provable and true are entirely distinct concepts.
The correspondence theory's truth is absolutely never provable, simply, because we have no access to the (axiomatic) construction logic of the real, physical world, i.e. the notorious theory of everything.
Furthermore, Gödel's incompleteness theorems proves that there are statements that are (logically) true but not provable.
Of course, logically "true" does not mean correspondence theory's "true".
Logically "true" just means that there is an abstract, Platonic world in which statements are being mapped on a set of arbitrary truth values, one of which is arbitrarily called "true"; while these truth values satisfy a given set of rules, as specified in lattice algebra.
In other words, Gödel's incompleteness does not mean anything in the real, physical world, but it is definitely provable in the abstract, Platonic world of number theory.
I would disagree here.
Correspondence is easily provable. That's what verification/falsification methods look for.
You'll quickly get beyond my comprehension level using such mathematical jargon. Can you make the case in plain language?
Provable, according to proof theory, means that the proposition necessarily follows from the construction logic of the world (in which you prove it).
You cannot possibly achieve that with the real, physical world.
It just cannot be done.
That is why science, for example, which merely experimentally tests in the real, physical world, does not prove anything. Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a scientific proof. General philosophy also does not prove anything.
It is not possible to prove anything at all about the real world.
At best, you can collect some kind of evidence.
That is why insisting on the correspondence theory's truth for knowledge claims is such a faulty proposition. Provable knowledge is never (correspondence theory's) true.
There's a certain amount of irony here. I mean do you live somewhere else, aside from the real physical world?
Validity is a measure of coherency. Coherency is insufficient for truth. "Logical truth" is a misnomer.
Rubbish. We can know all sorts of provable stuff, and did, long before this school of thought you espouse was invented.
I can know that I'm typing on a computer. My typing can be shown. There is no better proof of my typing than watching it happen.
What you see with your own eyes is true, if you are eyes are not lying to you, but it is never provable.
Try to (objectively) prove that you are typing on a computer. You cannot. It is simply impossible to do that.
This link is a good explanation as to why it is not possible to prove anything about the real, physical world.
Our conversation takes place in a virtual world. It is just an elaborate simulation of artifacts of the real, physical world. The "page" you see in front of you is not physical. It is virtual. It is not fully an abstract, Platonic world, because it still requires running processes on multiple computer systems. It is still close, though. You could see things on that screen that are totally imaginary but look completely real. These things will not be real. They will still be virtual.
The real, physical world is just one of the many worlds we operate in. The Platonic and virtual worlds in which we operate are equally relevant; sometimes even more relevant that the real, physical world.
I happily operate in all three types of worlds.
For once we completely agree. I've pointed out this very issue before (and I think I might have posted either here or on the old board about it).
As you say, this one critique can't cover all Gettier examples, as there are so many different types of Gettier examples, but many of them proceed via assuming that logical conventions are applicable where they don't really work.
While we're at it, what would it "mean" for a proposition to "appear in the real, physical world"?
(Ah, you cleared that up a post or two later: With "appearing in the real world", I meant structurally isomorphic with the real world, in line with Bertrand Russell's considerations on the matter. )
Would you say that it doesn't make sense to use "true" and "false" in logic?
?
That's not what he's saying. The typical approach to the Gettier problems, by the way, is not that JTB is wrong, but that it needs to be better qualified. So, for example, it requires that the justification doesn't turn out to be only accidentally supportive.
"Proposition" and "statement" are usually treated as synonymous.
Well, with the entire field of mathematics not being correspondence-theory "true", the "T" in JTB is simply too much of a problem. If math is knowledge, then JTB is wrong. It must be JB instead.
Couldn't you say that mathematical statements correspond to relations/the way relations work, at least within the system that we've set up?
And I think it should be JB. As an adjective 'true' is just silly. Justified we can work with. Best justified is also workable. But to add the adjective 'true' implies that it is both justified and true,w hen in fact all we have access to is the justification. We have no extra process where we can then go and determine whether it is true. OK, we can checked off justified or best justified, now let's see if we can check off true. If, for example, there is some obvious counterevidence, well that would weaken the justification. It would not longer be justied or well justified. Truth is for the Pope. And even he will then justify - well or not is another issue.
Popular line of thought, but false on several levels.
We have some access to what's happened and/or is happening. That's all we need(assuming a meaningful claim) to check if the claim is true(or not).
Quoting Coben
Rhetorical drivel based upon a gross misunderstanding of truth and the irrevocable role that it plays in all thought/belief and statements thereof, including your own.
Godel show the that all inductive/axiomatic logic is incomplete, as you've indicated. Math is not knowledge. Math is method. May be best looked at as a language. We can have knowledge of math. Logic is not a measure of truth. It is a measure of coherency, and coherency is imperative to avoid self-contradiction as well as building and maintaining shared meaning.
The reason why statements made in common parlance aren't 'provable' in a logical sense of proof is because logic presupposes truth. Logical proofs prove coherency. Coherency is not enough for truth. The Scopes Monkey Trials show this nicely, as do any other number of absurdity arrived at from following a valid form of argument but starting with an absurd premiss.
Gettier said nothing about these concerns. They're irrelevant.
That is not exactly what Gödel proved. There are (simple) axiomatic systems that are complete, such as the Presburger arithmetic.
Gödel did the following. He constructed a virtual/abstract machine, with associated language, that is capable expressing the rules of the (more complex) Dedekind-Peano arithmetic (this is our ordinary arithmetic, actually).
He created a numerical bytecode for this virtual/abstract machine to map these language expressions into numbers. Hence, properties about these language expressions became properties of numbers. At that point, Gödel used that language to express a statement that is (logically) true but not provable, i.e. a so-called Gödel statement or Gödel number:
S = "S is not provable" ---> the bytecode is powerful enough to express this
S is indeed not provable, because there is no way in which you can derive that from the Dedekind-Peano axioms. Therefore, what S actually says is (logically) true.
Hence, there cannot possibly exist a procedure to enumerate all possible valid and logically true statements (i.e. numbers that correspond to a logically true valid language expression) and decide if the theorem that the statement represents, is provable in that system, yes or no.
It also shows that (logically) true is not the same as provable, and even that the fact that a statement is (logically) true does not imply that it will be provable in any way.
Therefore, any axiomatic system that embodies the axioms of number theory or anything else that requires a language of similar complexity, is not possibly complete, aka: It is incomplete.
Well, in Immanuel Kant's lingo, as in Critique of Puree Reason, mathematical theorems are synthetic (=knowledge-increasing) statements a priori (=do not make use of sensory experience) that are derived axiomatically from a construction logic of analytic statements a priori.
Hence, a math theorem is an arrow:
P => Q
with P the axiomatic construction logic
with Q the theorem that necessarily follows from these axioms
Therefore, Q is a belief justified by P.
In other words, a mathematical theorem satisfies the restricted Platonic definition for knowledge, i.e. a justified belief.
Agreed. Logic has nothing to do with correspondence-theory truth. Logic is just a bit of lattice algebra. It is a symbol-manipulation formalism that has nothing to do with the real, physical world. It lives in its own abstract, Platonic world, just like all mathematics.
Agreed. I also complete subscribe to Bertrand Russell's criticism on the coherence theory of truth.
I agree that Gettier said nothing about these concerns. He attacked the "true", the "T" in JTB in his particular way. I have attacked it in another way. I have just pointed out that the "T" in JTB is not sustainable in mathematics either. Not one mathematical theorem satisfies the correspondence-theory requirements for the term true. Mathematical theorems are simply not isomorphic with the real, physical world, if only, because they live in their own abstract, Platonic world.
Sounds like you're a mathematician... physicist or something?
:smile:
I reject Kant's notions of a posterior and a priori. There is no knowledge without thought/belief. Thought/belief begin simply and accrue in complexity. All thought/belief are existentially dependent upon sensory experience. There is no line to be drawn between knowledge with and knowledge without.
I knew I didn't have Godel quite right, but the gist(I thought) was that he was critiquing inductive logic/reasoning. Deductive is another matter altogether.
Or...
Just use the site's click and drag feature to highlight what you want to quote and then click on the quote icon that appears after doing so...
:wink:
Is that not a problem then? Math is all about coherence.
Not in a professional sense. Just as a hobby. I would never join the academia. They require a growing amount of ideological orthodoxy from their staff, which is unattainable for me.
Quoting creativesoul
In many ways a physicist (=scientist) is the exact opposite of a mathematician.
A physicist seeks to create models that as much as possible satisfy the correspondence theory of truth. A mathematician never does that, because doing that is a constructive heresy in mathematics.
Mathematics never says anything about the real, physical world. It only says things about the abstract, Platonic world specifically constructed for that purpose; which is obviously never the real, physical world.
Therefore, mathematics and science are opposite and strictly exclude each other.
I have made my money in software engineering, but now I am semi-retired. I've recently started spending seven hours per day on physical exercise. I might come out of retirement some day, but possibly also not.
Quoting creativesoul
These are just definitions: a priori is without making use of sensory information, while a posteriori is just the opposite, i.e. empirical.
Quoting creativesoul
Symbol-manipulation formalisms are devoid of sensory experience. They are just blind operations on language symbols. It is what Immanuel Kant considers to be pure reason (=no sensory input). In fact, Kant originally deemed mathematics not to be pure reason, because (Greek) geometry (Euclid's Elements) revolves around solving visual puzzles. In the meanwhile, mathematics has completely abandoned the use of visual puzzles. Everything revolves around symbol manipulation, i.e. language only procedures. So, nowadays, unlike in Greek antiquity, it is pure reason.
Quoting creativesoul
Gödel was critiquing Bertrand Russell's impossible optimism in his Principia Mathematica, which gave the absurd impression that mathematics would eventually be able to provably answer all possible questions. It worked like a red cloth on Gödel, who sought to demonstrate the fundamental limitations of Russell's formalisms.
Quoting creativesoul
Yeah, I hadn't noticed the quote button when you select a fragment.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, but never in the real, physical world. Math constructs an abstract world of which the implementation guarantees coherence. It is not hard to get coherence, when you simply force the matter. It would not be possible to do that in the real world.
Well, Kant just defines these things: a priori meaning without the use of sensory information and a posteriori, the opposite of that (i.e. empirical).
Quoting creativesoul
Mathematics is pure symbol manipulation, i.e. language expressions. It does not take any sensory input. Therefore, it is pure reason. Kant criticized the practice in classical geometry (Euclid's Elements) to solve visual puzzles. So, he considered it not to be pure reason. Nowadays math is pretty much algebra only. So, Kant's issue with math has been addressed.
Quoting creativesoul
Gödel was criticizing Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica and its impossible optimism. It gave the wrong impression that mathematics would some day be able to solve all problems. Quod non.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, but not coherence in the real, physical world. It is about constructing abstract, Platonic worlds that are coherent by design.
There used to be this presupposition that if a proposition is (logically) true, there must necessarily exist a proof for it, somewhere to be discovered. It is, in fact, the essence of David Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem.
Back then, at the end of the 19th century and until the 1930ies, people were obnoxiously positivist and scienticist. Some people still are today, actually. It is also the era of the arrogant God of gaps ideology and the ugly modernist Corbusier buildings, because hey, soon, we will know it all.
So, in the 1930ies, Gödel, Turing, and Church set out to prove that none of that would ever happen. It led to the notions of Gödel incompleteness and Turing-complete knowledge, which is the maximum knowledge that can ever be attained.
I know what he means. I also know that there is no such knowledge to be had.
All of it happens in this world. Talk of different worlds is unnecessary and confusing at best, aside from entertaining possibility, which has it's good use, although until Kripke convinced me of it, I had cast modality aside. I still reject the necessary/contingent distinction.
And all the stuff under that we have access to category you refer to is justification. It is not some other, different stuff, it is stuff that justifies our position. You are responding as if I am takign some kind of skeptical position or other. I am not. I am just saying that whatever we base our conclusions on is justification.
It was polemic without much argument, yes. Fine. But you simply asserted Quoting creativesoulwithout explaining what this is, nor did you respond to the argument I made before that. Do you have anything but an assertion that I am wrong? Can you come down out of the clouds of abstraction, and explain what access to truth you mean, that would not be included in the category 'justification'? How do you divide up justification and access to truth? some specifics.
Math consists of symbols made meaningful solely by virtue of our attribution. Math says nothing about common parlance. All symbolic notation is existentially dependent upon common parlance. Truth is presupposed within all thought/belief. Math is utterly irrelevant to the role that truth plays in all human thought/belief. Math cannot take account of language, and thus is a useless tool for taking account of human thought/belief.
Truth is presupposed long before one learns the rules of counting. Math is irrelevant to this discussion.
Kant's notion of pure reason leads to a denial of animal thought/belief. Kant does not draw and maintain the distinction between linguistic thought/belief and non-linguistic thought/belief. That distinction can only be taken into proper account by virtue of thinking in terms of existential dependency and elemental constituency. Kant does no such thing. Rather...
Kant is following Hume's definition of Pure Reason, and as a result starts off on the wrong foot, so to speak...
Pure Reason, as set out by Hume, is somehow implied to be remarkably different from emotion, and it must be or else Hume's philosophy falls apart at the seams. Hume is wrong. Reason is not existentially independent of emotion. Knowledge of all human thought/belief is the seam ripper here.
It is indubitable that Hume thought/believed that pure reason was somehow separate and distinct from emotion. That's the common understanding of what Hume meant, and it is a correct understanding of Hume. Hume meant that. His mantra "Reason is slave to the passions" shows this clearly. Hume works from the unspoken premiss that reason is somehow existentially independent of emotions. The problem is that that is false.
There is a gross misconception of human thought/belief that has been very hard at work for a very long time. It's time to force it's retirement. I suspect two underlying issues are to blame for that all too common misconception. One is the long standing notion that we are superior to other animals, and that that superiority is shown - and clearly so - by the way humans think. I would agree with that on it's face, particularly regarding the breadth of complexity that language affords human thought.
Another is that all human thought/belief is inextricably bound up in language. It's not.
However, thought/belief(and thus reason) is different in terms of element constitution and existential dependency. Pure Reason is thinking about thought/belief, and as such it can be rightfully and meaningfully said to be existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought/belief. From this we can also know that whatever thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon, so too is pure reason.
Not all thought/belief is existentially dependent upon language. All reason is. All reason is also existentially dependent upon rudimentary thought/belief. All rudimentary thought/belief consists of correlations drawn between different things. At the earliest stages of prelinguistic human development, all of us are drawing correlations between external and internal things. Thought/belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity.
All reason is existentially dependent upon pre-linguistic thought/belief. All prelinguistic thought/belief consists - in part - of internal emotion(fear, contentment, discontentment). All reason is existentially dependent upon emotion. That which is existentially dependent upon something else, cannot be independent from it.
Thus... there is no such thing as 'Pure Reason' except and aside from being the name of a product(figment) of the Humean imagination.
Who said anything about access to truth?
:brow:
Access to what's happened and/or is happening is what I wrote. I added to that. It went neglected. Odd given the charge. Did you offer an argument/explanation that I left neglected?
Why is it so hard for anyone else to understand?
You're attempting to dismiss, discard, and/or discount truth. That will not go unchallenged.
That's not Gettier's conclusion. Gettier's conclusion is that "[the JTB definition] does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition."[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup] https://www-bcf.usc.edu/~kleinsch/Gettier.pdf
The meaning of symbols comes from their relationship with other symbols. It is not possible to attribute anything to them because they often do not correspond to anything in the real, physical world. For example, what meaning could we possibly attribute to the S and K combinators in the SKI calculus? They are mentioned in the reduction rules. That is all there is to them.
Quoting creativesoul
You can write the symbols in full too, as complete words. They often mean absolutely nothing in common parlance. What would be the common parlance for a "tower of radical field extensions" in the Galois correspondence? There is absolutely nothing at all that corresponds to this in the real, physical world.
Quoting creativesoul
Agreed. It has no direct incidence on correspondence-theory truth.
The reason why math plays an outsized and even dominant role in science and even in daily life, is because math is consistent by design, while the real, physical world is deemed to be consistent by assumption. The requirement of consistency forbids particular things from happening in the real world. All mathematical models in applied math or science exploit this consistency correspondence.
Quoting creativesoul
Math is knowledge, but math is not correspondence-theory true. Hence, math is a justified belief but not a justified true belief. Therefore, it raises exactly the same problem as the one Gettier raised.
Quoting creativesoul
I'd rather agree with Hume. Reason is just a tool suitable for propositional inference. Even a machine can verify whether a new proposition is indeed provable from a set of other propositions.
Discovering new knowledge propositions is something else. We certainly do not exclusively use reason or knowledge for that. If we had knowledge on how to discover new knowledge, we would actually already have the new knowledge, and then would not need to discover it.
Quoting creativesoul
It may originate from there somehow, but once you program the propositional inference engine in software, it no longer has anything to do with emotion. The Isabelle reasoning engine is not emotional.
In particular, Isabelle's classical reasoner can perform long chains of reasoning steps to prove formulas.
Quoting creativesoul
Pure Reason even exists in software.
I did not make that conclusion directly based on Gettier's work or examples, but on the argument in the debate.org discussion about JTB:
He wrote:
Simply put" Justified belief" is enough. As stated so clearly by Gettier, it is possible for a proposition to be simultaneously true and false in a similar way as Shrodingers cat can be both alive and dead before obtaining incontrovertible evidence to prove it is one or the other. Knowledge does not equal truth so to add that into the definition of knowledge is tenable.
As I wrote, I came via another route to the idea that "Justified belief" is enough. A mathematical theorem is a justified belief that is not correspondence-theory true. So, with mathematics clearly being considered knowledge, this requirement of correspondence-theory truth is unsustainable.
Furthermore, Immanuel Kant's synthetic statements a priori are also knowledge without any reference to sensory input or the real, physical world. Hence, synthetic statements a priori are impossibly correspondence-theory true.
Who wrote this? Clearly not Gettier. Gettier himself didn't conclude that knowledge is justified belief.
This person is clearly someone with a background in physics.
Werner Heisenberg already pointed out in 1927 a massive flaw in the correspondence-theory truth about the position (p) and velocity (v) tuple of an electron: (p,v).
An electron may indeed have a (p,v) tuple, but if you know one element in the tuple, you can impossibly know the other element. That is his notorious uncertainty principle. Heisenberg received the Nobel prize in 1932 for arguing this. It forced everybody in nuclear physics to switch over to quantum mechanics, to the utter dismay of Albert Einstein, who hated this.
Schrödinger's cat is another gigantic problem with the correspondence theory of truth. The state of a particle is indeterminate until the external world observes it:
According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed.
The correspondence theory of truth simply starts falling apart at the level of nuclear physics. In fact, both Heisenberg and Schrödinger rediscovered what Kant had already insisted on: Das Ding an sich ist ein Unbekänntes.
In other words, what Gettier argued in his own work sounds trivially obvious to nuclear physicists.
I did not use the physics argument, because I do not think like a physicist. I came to the same conclusion by looking at the nature of mathematics. That is a completely different route, but one that suits me much better than physics, which I certainly recognize as a sound discipline, but one that I do not really like, because I prefer the abstract, Platonic worlds of mathematicians to the real, physical world of scientists.
OK, but he clearly misunderstood Gettier because Gettier didn't conclude that knowledge is justified belief. Gettier only concluded, in his own words, that the JTB definition "does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition."
His argument is surprisingly closer to the examples Gettier gave, than it looks like. Gettier manually concocts what physicists call an entanglement, and then concludes, "Oh My God, it goes wrong now!".
Well, these Gettier entanglements naturally occur all the time in quantum physics. No need to fabricate them!
That is why he is not really interested in Gettier's actual examples, which even look relatively silly compared to the ones that spontaneously occur in nature.
a) I am a postman.
b) Mary is married to me.
c) Therefore, Mary is married to a postman.
Isn't this valid?
I did, in the post you responded to, first. Since you were not specific about what parts you disagreed with and that was one of the parts, I asked you about it.
And you haven't challenged me. You have just told me I am wrong.
The postman that Mary is married to is me. The man with ten coins in his pocket who will get the job is me. That's what Smith believes in either situation.
This coming from one who said "Truth is for the Pope"...
Yes, you are.
It's better to stick to Gettier's examples.
So I have two beliefs. One is true and one is false.
This is a Gettier example. Mary is a con-woman and married to someone else - who happens to be a postman.
Quoting Michael
Problem solved.
We're looking at Smith's belief.
Smith believes that he is the only one married to his wife.
Not Smith's belief...
You seem to be saying that if I believe X because I believe Y then I don't really believe X, only Y, and that if Y is false then there is no true belief. But that's just not tenable.
I believe that you will punch me because I believe that you know that I slept with your wife. Do I believe that you will punch me? Yes. However, it turns out that you don't know that I slept with your wife but do believe that I stole $10,000 from you, and so will punch me.
I have a false belief (that you know that I slept with your wife) that justifies a true belief (that you will punch me). And in the same way I have a false belief (that Mary is married to me) that justifies a true belief (that Mary is married to a postman).
Quoting Michael
That belief is true.
Quoting Michael
That one is false.
No, it’s false because Mary isn’t married to me.
Quoting creativesoul
My belief that you will punch me is true.
Quoting Michael
:brow:
Quoting Michael
Note the difference?
Y is one belief, X is a second belief. Again, basic stuff.
Self contradiction is not valid.
Quoting Michael
It is a basic conflation of proposition and belief.
What self-contradiction? It’s a straightforward valid syllogism.
:brow:
Do it for you:
Quoting Michael
I’m asking you (somewhat rhetorically) if the argument is valid. I’m not asserting that both premises are true.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
I'm asking you (not at all rhetorically) Can you believe that your wife is married to someone else based upon that argument?
I don’t believe that she’s married to someone else, I believe that she’s married to a postman.
And in my other example I believe that you will punch me.
That's an oversimplification of what you believe. An accounting malpractice. It is the malpractice that is the problem here.
You do not believe just that she's married to a postman. Rather, you believe - in strict accordance to the argument you've offered - that the postman she is married to is you. Moreover, you believe that the reason she's married to a postman is because she is married to you and you are a postman.
Quoting Michael
The above is a good account. The below is inadequate.
Quoting Michael
Quoting creativesoul
Beliefs aren't just some single monolithic thing that contain all the various avenues of reasoning such that if any one part is false then everything we believe is false. It's a network of different beliefs, with possibly some true and possibly some false. If I believe that murder is wrong because I believe in divine command theory and that God has prohibited murder than my belief that murder is wrong is true even if it turns out that God doesn't exist. If I believe that my friend is moving to London because I believe that she has found a job at law firm there then my belief that my friend is moving to London is true even if it turns out that her new job is at a marketing firm.
Exactly! Propositions are. Some belief cannot be adequately accounted for and/or represented by a single proposition. That is precisely the point I'm making. Gettier examples are nothing more than cases of accounting malpractice. A basic conflation of proposition and belief.
If you believe that your friend is moving to London because she has a job at a law firm, then the proposition "my friend is moving to London" does not take proper account of your belief.
Beliefs have propositional content. I believe that [some proposition] (is true).
See the SEP article on belief:
Yes it does. It just doesn’t account for all my beliefs. I might have lots of beliefs related to the issue. She’s moving to London because she has a new job at a law firm after passing an interview she went to on Thursday, and her motive for doing so is to earn more money and distance herself from an abusive ex-boyfriend.
It’s just wrong to say that this is a single belief which is false if any one part of it is false and that I can’t just say that I believe she’s moving to London - and be right, even if I’m wrong about some other details.
No, it does not.
"My friend is moving to London because she got a new job at a law firm." is not equivalent to "My friend is moving to London."
I did not say such a thing about all that.
I didn't say they mean the same thing. I'm saying that if you believe that X because Y then you (also) believe X (and believe Y).
Then the latter cannot be substituted for the former. We're assessing the former, not the latter.
Quoting Michael
I'm saying that there are some beliefs which are more complex than a single proposition can represent, with this being one example thereof. All Gettier examples are as well. Such complex belief are understood and thus represented in their entirety... and only in their entirety.
If you believe your friend is moving to London because she got a new job at a law firm, then that is the belief. Nothing less is adequate.
This, and the OP itself, is exactly the point I made in another thread a couple weeks ago:
[i]Applying this idea of familiarity to a famous Gettier example which is supposed to be an issue for JBT: say I see what i believe is a sheep in a field and form a consequent extended belief "there is a sheep in that field". But the sheep turns out to be a cardboard cutout, so my belief is mistaken; there is no sheep in that field. According to JBT then my belief does not count as knowledge because it is not a true belief.
But then say there is another hidden sheep in the field; does my belief that there is a sheep in that field then count as knowledge? It is justified by seeing the cardboard cutout, and it is true because there is a sheep in the field, so perhaps I do know there is a sheep in that field.
No, I do not know there is a sheep in that field. I think the answer to such puzzles is pretty simple and obvious; I am only justified in believing that the cutout is a sheep on account of perceiving what I understandably (if it is a very convincing cutout) take to be a sheep. Regardless of whether this is mistaken, seeing the cutout cannot serve as a justification for believing there are any other unseen sheep in the field, it can only serve as justification for mistakenly believing that the cutout is a sheep.[/i]
This is all becoming more and more ridiculous if you ask me.
Who on earth could sit and say - with a straight face - that Smith believed Brown was in Barcelona or anyone other than he was going to get the job?
We must dispense with any 'logic' that leads to concluding otherwise.
Some would have us believe that Smith was referring to the other guy?
No.
Hell no!
When reporting upon Smith's belief we ought at least keep that in mind. It is supposed to be Smith's belief. It is Smith doing the thinking. Gettier is reporting upon it. With that in mind...
If Smith carried ten coins and thought "the guy with ten coins in his pocket is going to get the job" he was thinking about himself.
Our account of Smith's belief(any and all such accounts), if it is to be called a good practice, it ought use "the guy" only in reference to Smith, because that's how Smith used it, that's what Smith's belief means, and we're supposed to be reporting upon Smith's belief.
Speaking of belief having propositional content...
On the one hand(Case II), Gettier wants us to join two propositions that - quite simply - do not belong together in the category of Smith's belief, and yet on the other(Case I), he separates two propositions that are inseparable(meaningfully irreducible) without losing crucial semantic content of Smith's thought/belief. That would be to report upon something other than Smith's belief.
Ridiculous indeed!
Stop writing shit that you don't really mean...
Quoting Coben
What's wrong with discussing justified true belief?
There's nothing wrong with discussing jtb. I am discussing jtb. My problem with jtb I explained
in an earlier post.
If we look at a statement/conclusion/belief we can check to see if it is justified. This would include things like does it fit obervations/experience, is there counterevidence, how has the evidence been gathered (like, say, is there a good sample, was it controlled conditions, if the justications is scientific), are the conclusions arrived at logically, are there other beliefs that better fit the evidence.....
You don't then go and check the truth. Whatever one would do in checking the truth of a statement is already there in the justification. That's how we decide if things are true. In science, for example, we do not decide something is justified and then check to see if it is true. There should not be two adjectives. If it was false, then it would not be well justified.
In the context of discussions of knowledge based on justification, it is silly to add in as a criterion true, especially for empiricists.
True is a perfectly good adjective, but in jtb it is redundant. I use true and truth in other contexts, but to add it to JB is like being the Pope. Beyond all that nice justification I also know directly that it is true. But the reason one would know is in the justification. It's like a weird claim that one can separately judge truth and justification.
Such as?
I think the statement I exist is true. Even if I could not convince others it is the case. To me knowledge formulations like jtb are about communal beliefs, which ones we all have good reasons to believe in. One example of where I might use true includes things wehre I realize others, lackign my experiences, lack the same justificaiton I have. Despite that; I believe certain things are true. That I saw a mountain lion in the US where there are not supposed to be any - and a number of other explanations were put forward for what I 'really' saw. I have sympathy for what they want to consider knowledge. But I still hold it to be true that at least one mountain lion was where I saw it. If it had flashed past in the shadows, ok, perhaps I made an image more than saw that animal. But I had time. I know my own ability to doubt my perceptions, how and when I can jump to conclusions, my own lack of interest or need to have seen the animal and so on. I know - not to absolute certainty - but I know it is true. I saw one, despite what the relevent biologists would say about one being there. Despite my own use of true in this case, I do understand why they don't just take my word for it. Of course in other situations I consider some things true where it is also considered knowledge. In fact knowledge for me is a set of things we consider true. However if I am describing knowledge I will only describe it as the best justified belief. Because now we are getting into the process of deciding. We are into nuts and bolts. And the nuts and bolts we have access to are justification. We do not have some separate other access to truth....
Note the part I bolded above.
I don't think this is right; there may be justified false beliefs, as in the example of the cardboard cutout sheep in a paddock I referred to a couple of posts ago. From where it is viewed it is indistinguishable from a real sheep, so I have no reason to believe it is not a real sheep, at least on immediate viewing. Say I am going by at high speed and only catch a glimpse of the cutout for a couple of moments, then I will not have time to notice that it is not moving; something which, if noticed, would be good reason to doubt it is a real sheep.
Another example: the ancient's belief that the Earth is flat could be counted as a justified false belief. There would be countless examples of justified false belief.
seems quite confused...
If we were to clean up JTB by virtue of dropping one of the three... it would have to be the justification aspect, as traditionally held. One need not argue for a belief in order for it to be true. Traditional JTB cannot admit of prelinguistic thought/belief, let alone pre-linguistic true belief, or pre-linguistic well-grounded true belief(knowledge). And yet, it is quite clear that many creatures can learn that fire hurts when touched, despite not being able to tell anyone about the causal connections they've drawn between the behaviour and the pain.
I don't understand this at all. What in the world does "access to truth" mean?
We can look to see if a cup is on the table. That's access enough, right?
And yet there are justified false beliefs. Paradigm shift happens by virtue of peeling them away from conventional certainty. Copernican revolution. Einstein's On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and General Relativity are exactly such cases which show that what were justified beliefs held to be true were not true, but were justified nonetheless.
That's right! When new facts emerge or new observations are made what was a justified false belief may no longer be justified, and if held onto, will become simply a false belief. :yikes: :fear: :cry:
Quoting creativesoul
This could easily be misread as "paradigm shit happens"... :lol:
If the critique I've put forth here holds good, then Gettier poses no problem for JTB, even as it is currently understood with belief having propositional content and justification requiring being able to give one's ground for arriving at the belief. Rather, he showed that there is an accounting malpractice of reporting upon Smith's belief at hand.
You're being unusually conducive here. Something wrong?
:joke:
Yes, the "justified" would seem to be relevant only to the context in which justification can be given, which would obviously not be the context of pre-linguistic believing. In that latter context not only can a justification for what is believed not be given, the believing cannot even be stated as a definite belief.
Obviously I agree since I presented pretty much the same critique in the other thread (copied and pasted here in my first comment in this thread).
Quoting creativesoul
It may not always or even often happen that we agree, but does it follow that when we do there must be something wrong? :joke:
To be sure...
Are we agreeing that the thinking/believing creature cannot state it's own thought/belief?
Are we agreeing that the thought/belief of a pre-linguistic creature cannot be in propositional form?
Are we agreeing that the content of pre-linguistic thought/belief cannot have propositional content(it cannot consist of propositions)?
Nah. There's much to be gleaned here. Nothing wrong with that!
The same target. The critiques differ in their sharpness.
Could you re-phrase this? What is the referent of "the believing"? The process of thought/belief formation? The 'act' of thought/belief formation? The behaviour driven by that?
I would say that we can definitely state what the content of pre-linguistic thought/belief is. It takes the strongest of justificatory ground in order to convince the reasonable skeptic, but it can be done, regardless of whether or not everyone is capable of being convinced by such ground.
There are flat-earthers after-all. We need not convince everyone. Right?
Do we still agree?
:meh:
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes and no. "No" because I am not comfortable with speaking about "content" of "pre-linguistic thought/ belief". I would instead speak about 'the process of pre-linguistic believing' or something along those lines.
Quoting creativesoul
As above, for me the referent of "the believing" would be the process or act of believing. I don't feel comfortable with referring to believing in that context as "thought/ belief formation". It may not be problematic, but I think it could be misleading, and I think "believing" is a perfectly sufficient term in any case, and that using a different term when referring to pre-linguistic contexts may help to avoid anthropomorphization and any confusion that might ensue from that. In other words I don't see any advantage, and perhaps no inevitable disadvantage, but I do see possible disadvantages, to be had in referring to the act of believing as an act of "belief formation" when speaking about a pre-linguistic context.
In any case, we've been over this before, perhaps a few times now, I think.
What else could differentiate pre-linguistic believing from post-linguistic believing if not the content?
Sometimes being uncomfortable is not a bad thing.
Well, we get to here. I do not remember our ever having finished hashing it out.
The caution against anthropomorphism is already well considered.
Some descriptions of believing can only be had by a creature capable of metacognition(Gettier's cases). That is drawing correlations between past and present considerations(thought/belief). Others can only be had by creatures with pre-reflective thought/belief fostered by language use(believing in Santa Claus). That sort of believing consists of meaningful correlations drawn between Santa and all sorts of other stuff, depending upon the thinking/believing creature under our consideration.
Pre-linguistic believing can only be had by a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All of the content of pre and/or non-linguistic thought/belief is directly perceptible.
Perhaps things look a bit differently now?
The fact that the latter has determinate content, insofar as it can be expressed verbally.
TBH I'd rather dispense with belief/ believing and stick to thought/ thinking, particularly when trying to address pre-linguistic scenarios.
The problem with the term 'belief' and 'believe', even in the linguistic context, is that they seem to carry a kind of extra baggage that 'thought' and 'think' do not. I can't see any logical difference between 'I think X is the case' and 'I believe X is the case'.
But there could be a difference between thinking X and believing X, so the former seems to somehow carry extra weight, and although I don't think that impression of extra weight is really based on anything substantive; there just seems to be a quality of extra commitment associated with the term 'believe'. So, particularly when referring to animals who I don't think are committed to any of their thinking beyond their mere act or process of thinking, it seems even more problematic.
So maybe knowledge (in the propositional) sense could be said to be JTT: justified true thought. :grin:
See, again here I'd rather just say "a creature capable of associating different things" because the association may be (I'd venture to say probably is) in terms of visual, audial or motor "imagery", so the term "drawing correlations" seems too linguistically oriented to me. But of course there's no absolute right or wrong about this, it's really just a matter of preferred locution. The association of different things in the animal mind or brain may be nothing more than a neural one for all we know.
The determinant content of thought/belief that is prelinguistic cannot be propositional. Nevertheless, the content of all thought/belief can be expressed verbally, just not always by the thinking/believing creature. We are more than capable of taking proper account of that much. We can know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of by virtue of knowing what linguistic thought/belief consists of and taking it from there.
It must be meaningful to the creature in question, and it must somehow be capable of presupposing it's own truth somewhere along the line.
This is all perfectly satisfied without any unwanted anthropomorphism.
Mental correlations(associations works fine too) drawn between different things.
It's the content of the correlation/association that matters most here.
If it's true for our earliest stages...
We'll pick up later.
Be well.
Of course. And that will always be the case. That's how we work in science. This is what the evidence suggests. Nothing seems to contradict it. It fits with our models. Other scientists receive the same results. So we add X to our body of scientific knowledge. But there is the chance that later it will turn ou to be false. I am not saying we should not use the word true. But if adding the word true means that it can never ever turn out to be false, who are we to say that?Quoting JanusOf course. And any of our current beliefs may turn out to be false. That's why in the JTB formulation, I think it is irrational to use the word true. Not in other contexts, but because the addition of the word true implies that we know, somehow, beyond our justification.
Sure, see my post above to Janus.
Sure, in a naive realism. Not if this is a simulation or you are in a coma dreaming. And look I am not arguing that we can never take something as knowledge. I am saying that if we have criteria for knowledge and the first one is justification...
You justify your belief that the cup is on the table - explain your realism, good vision, ability to distinguish cups from other things, cite other witnesses.....
There's your justification.
There is no other process you go through where you now decide if it is true. Those things that justify your belief also make you think it is true.
We do not examine your belief in the cup first to see if it is justified, then to see if it is true.
In the specific case of saying we are going to base knowledge on these criteria
is it justified
is it true
we have no extra process to test the latter. Whatever process that is is included in the former.
And let's look at this again. When I read this question it is as if I am saying y ou cannot consider the cup being on the table to be the truth. Like I am a radical skeptic.
No.
What I am saying is that when we determine what is knowledge and we start with justification (which is the first adjective) we investigate the justification for the belief
and this will include ALL the reasons why we believe something.
There are no other things we check to see if it is true, after we checked to see if it was justified.
I don't doubt your abilities to identify cups, nor am I raising brain in a vat scenarios. I am looking at what we do when we decide something and we don't have two criteria we check off. We have the justification one.
I am happy to say this or that is true. I am talking about using jtb and I think it is silly to have two criteria, as if we check one and then the other. It is nto what we do when creating communal beliefs or knowledge. It is not what scientists do, for example.
And those who believed them would have said they were true. And any belief we have now that we consider extremely well justified in science may turn out to be false. In fact that is an foundational idea in science. So this would mean we could never consider anything knowledge ni science since consensus science now might turn out to be incorrect on issue X. So that would mean we could never use the t, since it might get revised. I don't think that's a useful model for knowledge. Unless you are saying that we know forever that General Relativity be found the be lacking as much as Newton's was. And then, how do you know that?
You don't have a true belief that Mary is "married to a postman, any postman." Your belief is that she's married to the postman who happens to be you. In your mind, "postman" stands for "me." It doesn't stand for any arbitrary person with that title.
Quoting Michael
That's similar in that you only believe that he will punch you because of a particular reason. You don't actually believe that he'll punch you for some arbitrary reason, whatever it might be. It's wrong to characterize it as a belief that he'll punch you
That's why these sorts of examples don't work. They mischaracterize how belief works.
I don't share your confidence about this. We can impute, from the standpoint inherent to our linguistically based reasoning, particular thoughts or beliefs to animals and pre-linguistic humans, but it will always remain a projection that cannot capture the reality of animal experience. In other words I think the nature of animal experience and even of our own experience prior to linguistic mediation is indeterminate; we can gesture at it, but that is about all.
OK, but the point for me is not that we can know, with any absolute certainty, that our beliefs are true in any absolute sense; but rather to unpack the logic that is inherent in the ways we think and speak about truth. So, past false beliefs may have seemed at the time to be justified true beliefs, but if they were indeed false, then they were false then, just as they are false now. (Of course truth and falsity for us is always going to be contextual, not absolute, so for example to say that the Earth is flat or that the Sun traverses the Earth may be true in a restricted context relative to the initial untutored human perception of the world, but false in other contexts).
So, we can know, within suitably circumscribed contexts, whether a belief is true or false. For example it certainly seems vanishingly unlikely that the justified belief that the Earth is roughly spherical will ever turn out to be false. But when it comes to truth considered as absolute, then we can say that what we consider to be justified true beliefs may or may not be so, but that we can never know with certainty.
I think it's also worth considering that the pragmatist (Peircean) conception of truth which is something like "What the community of inquirers will come to believe when there is no longer any reasonable doubt" is also perfectly compatible with the JTB model. The point of this thread though, which I agree with, is that Gettier objections are facile and hence toothless insofar as they trade on a de-natured model of belief.
You're all over the place. There's one basic disagreement between us that is worth discussing here, because it's what piqued my interest regarding what you wrote. You claim that the truth criterion is redundant when regarding JTB. You further state and imply that there's nothing more about the "true" aspect of JTB than what we have regarding the justification aspect.
I'm saying - flat out - you are mistaken.
The ground for my saying that is that justification is inadequate for truth. If the aspect of being true were redundant regarding JTB, then there could be no such thing as justified false belief. But there is. The reason that there is and that there can be is quite clear. They are two different criteria.
I understand that science keeps our own fallibility in mind, and in doing so allows for the possibility of future evidence/observation to displace current convention. That's irrelevant here. Science is based upon truth as correspondence. That is precisely what verification/falsification techniques are looking for.
It took a few years to verify General Relativity. They looked at a particular area of space for a particular celestial body during a particular set of circumstances and they saw exactly what Einstein's equations predicted would be seen.
Einstein's predictions corresponded to what happened/what was happening. They became true.
His justification was in the paper.
A justified belief is not equivalent to a true one.
I'd be interested to know if there are any academic papers presenting the same devastating critique of Gettier that the three of us here apparently agree upon, and if not, why not?
You know Janus, I've given you more flack over the above considerations than anyone deserves. I mean, without question I am the one in the minority here. So, I want to give this the attention that it deserves... that you deserve, especially given the steady improvement of our dialogue.
You are absolutely within the bounds of good reason(valid critique) to point out that there is a remarkable difference between some thought and belief, and some use of the terms. Kudos. You've worded the above well. There is an additional/extra sense of commitment(certainty?) typically associated with the terms "believe", "believing", and "belief" that is not always associated with the term "think", "thinking", and "thought". This is easy enough to understand. I mean, one can follow a train a thought to it's conclusion without believing any particular statement within it. However, one cannot follow the same train of thought to it's conclusion without thinking.
So...
This is actually a good time to draw and maintain this distinction between thought and belief, because it helps to situate different complexity levels of thought/belief along the evolutionary timeline. That distinction between thought and belief requires creatures with an ability to take account of their own thought/belief. That ability is facilitated by complex language use.
However, surely you can now better understand that that difference only matters when we're reporting upon creatures who have the ability to suspend their own judgment during complex metacognitive considerations. Aside from that, there is no difference to be had. Even that difference dissolves at the basic level of correlations.
That said, the focus is on pre-linguistic thought/belief(thinking/believing is acceptable too), and here at this very early stage, there is no ability to either doubt or suspend judgment, and thus there is no difference between thought/belief.
I also agree with pretty much everything you say above, and it is the very fact that, as you point out, thinking and believing would not seem to be distinguishable in the case of animals that leads me to want to talk for the sake of parsimony, in that context, only about thinking.
As you say, and as I have also suggested, it is in the light of the logical difference that obtains between merely thinking and actively believing some proposition that the distinction between thinking and believing, between thought and belief, becomes necessary.
And yet, as we agree, belief has that something extra, that additional commitment that thinking doesn't have. Could it be that our metacognitive accounts merely caught up with and began to account for rudimentary thought/belief? If thinking is drawing correlations, and it is, and believing is that and more, then when Pavlov's dog drew correlations/associations between the sound of the bell and eating, it was thinking. However, the involuntary salivation shows us that the aforementioned 'something more' that we typically associate with belief but not always with thinking is had by the dog!
Expectation.
The dog believed that he was going to be fed after hearing the bell. The dog's thought/belief consisted entirely of correlations drawn between the sound of the bell and eating.
Indeed. This must be kept in mind throughout, ad rightfully applied when the context demands.
None that I'm aware of.
Typically, convention conflates propositions and belief, and has for centuries. I blame it on the church. The vestiges thereof remain in conventional notions of thought/belief. Philosophy proper has not gotten up to evolutionary speed regarding thought/belief. There are more reasons for that aside from the church.
All this talk about "consciousness" and "experience" doesn't help either... but it sells!
Interesting! That seems to raise a question: if at the non-linguistic cognitive level of the dog there is no distinction between thinking and believing, such that we would not say that the dog could be thinking an association between the sound of the bell and eating with no expectation, then would it not be sufficient to say that the mere association inevitably produces the expectation?
It's lateish at night where you are I think, but here its 2 PM, and unfortunately I have to go and do some things, but I'll be back tomorrow.
Perhaps. But that would obligate us to admit that all correlation/association inevitably 'produces expectation'. I do not think it does... pace the difference between thinking and believing on the agreed upon metacognitive level.
It offers support to the notion that thought/belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity. Doubting and suspending one's judgment are kinds of thought/belief that are more complex, as they have as their own subject matter... pre-existing thought/belief.
I thought you may find that interesting. It's reminiscent of Hume. He struggled with belief, by his own admission. He did mention expectation. I won't offer my usual critique of his mistake(s).
:wink:
Looks like you understand.
This ought be gotten into...
Next time!
:smile:
Til then... Cheers!
In light of the above agreements, do you accept the following?
Pre-linguistic believing requires a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All thought/belief formed and/or had by a language-less creature consists of correlations drawn between directly perceptible content(different things). No pre-linguistic thought/belief has propositional content. All thought/belief has correlative/associative content. Not all correlation/association requires language. All propositions do. All correlation/association counts as thought/belief in it's most rudimentary form. Some rudimentary thought/belief is prior to language.
All thought/belief is all meaningful to the thinking/believing creature, and presupposes it's own truth somewhere along the line.
Do we agree?
:worry:
We can know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of by virtue of knowing what linguistic thought/belief consists of and taking it from there. Are you seeing this for yourself yet?
Knowing what it takes for a disjunction to be true is knowing the conventional rules.
Why ought we believe that Smith does?
All Smith believes is that Jones owns a Ford. His ground for that belief warranted his certainty. It warranted certainty by most. The ground doesn't get much stronger. Smith was so certain that Jones owned a Ford that he haphazardly asserted a disjunction solely as a means for emphasizing his own certainty.
Smith stated something that he did not believe.
He picked a place at random(Barcelona), because it did not matter which place he chose. Rather, all else said was for rhetorical effect/affect. Hence, he randomly chose "Brown is in Barcelona" because that was obviously unbelievable to him:He was certain that Brown was not in Barcelona. That certainty washed over from his belief that Jones owned a Ford.
Smith did not believe that Brown was in Barcelona.
What sense does it make to say otherwise?
No, I don't see that. As I said a few posts ago, I think the most we can do is "gesture at it" which means to speculate more or less blindly or wildly.
Do you take issue with talking about the content of our(as metacognitive creatures) thought/belief?
So, we can talk about the content of post linguistic thought/belief. You agree as shown above. It's actually tied into Gettier and the OP...
Convention has it that all belief is propositional in content, because all reports/accounts of it are(including the traditional epistemological notion of justification).
However, propositions are existentially dependent upon language use. Language-less creatures have no language. Thus, either there is no thought/belief prior to language, or not all thought/belief is propositional in content.
Agree?
That must be dealt with first. Of course, I'm asserting the latter. The question then becomes what does non and/or pre-linguistic thought/belief consist of? The answer does not have to be a result of blind/wild speculation. In fact, I would reject such a method.
I'll wait for a response prior to moving forward. I have a tendency to say too much too soon. Comes from assuming that everyone else has already been through all the same thought processes that I've been through. Bad habit.
:smile:
For me, thoughts and beliefs are propositional expressions of a more primordial activity that we could refer to as non-linguistic thinking or non-linguistically mediated thinking. I also think we who can use symbolic language also do this kind of 'thinking". Visual thinking, musical thinking, spatial thinking, motor thinking; all these we may have in common, more or less, with animals, but I would say the ways we do even those is mediated by our ability to think symbolically; that is it may be more or less "mixed up with" symbolic thinking.
Ok.
What is the justification for going that far?
:smile:
What are these propositional expressions doing if not representing and/or misrepresenting the speaker's own thought/belief on the matter?
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts."
This doesn't make any sense to me.
You assume wrongly.
Perhaps an example would help. I throw a ball for the dog onto the verandah, He obviously doesn't see whether it has gone over the edge because he runs all around the verandah searching for the ball. When he has looked all over and doesn't find it he immediately runs down the stares and into the garden and looks there for the ball.
Now if it were me I would look all over the verandah and when I saw the ball wasn't there would think "The ball must have gone over the edge of the verandah onto the garden, so I should look there for it". Now I know the dog cannot think that thought just as I have expressed it there, since he cannot exercise symbolic language.
But I can conjecture that he might have visualized the ball being on the verandah, and when he found it wasn't then visualized it in the garden beyond. Did he make some kind of inference? I don't know if it would be right to call it that.
We cannot get into that pre-symbolic animal mind in order to find out, but it does seem reasonable to say that he kind of did infer that the ball must be in the garden. Is this right or should we simply say that he visualized it on the verandah, and when that didn't work out, visualized it in the garden? Or was it all merely a series of neural processes that triggered his actions, and nothing more? Who knows?
Personally I don't favour thinking in terms of merely neural processes, because that would be to think of the dog as being equivalent to a robot; but I recognize that I don't really know, and that not tending to think that way is just my personal preference. Someone who doesn't like or relate to dogs might tend to think of them as robots. There doesn't seem to be any clear right or wrong in the matter.
Quoting Janus
So, we agree that propositional expressions represent and/or misrepresent the speaker's own thought/belief, that the thinking/believing non and/or prelinguistic creature cannot state it's own thought/belief, and that the thought/belief of a pre-linguistic creature cannot be in propositional form.
Do we also agree that all creatures' thought/belief(thinking/believing) begin(s) simply within some reasonably determinable time frame - after biological conception - and grows in it's complexity?
:smile:
Yes, I agree to that. :grin:
I'm still left wondering what all those different kinds of thinking have in common such that they count as being cases of thinking. Clearly we agree that post linguistic thinking is only enabled by language and consists of propositional content. Clearly we agree that the dog's thinking is not propositional in content.
It's hard to place much value upon the above conjecture, especially after things have been said like we cannot get into the mind of a dog in order to know what it's thinking. That's an outright dismissal. A consistent/coherent position would stop there... and must. We both know that that's not right though. I reject that sort of approach... as if it was fait accompli, or a foregone conclusion. It's not. We both know that some thought/belief(thinking/believing) is prior to language. I suggest that you reject any and all conclusions and/or logic that leads to the contrary, for it's wrong on a basic foundational level.
Think about it this way...
We need not get into the mind of the dog any more that we need to get into our own minds. We cannot get into either. Such rhetoric adds nothing to our understanding of the evolutionary complexity of thought/belief. Rather, it stifles it and contradicts much better accounts of everyday events.
We can take good account of thought/belief from it's earliest stages through it's most complex by virtue of taking account of it's content. All we need know is what our thought/belief consists in/of combined with a reasonable conception of what non and/or prelinguistic thought/belief must not consist in/of in order to be rightfully called non and/or pre-linguistic, along with what it must consist of to be sensibly, rightfully called "thought", "belief", "thinking", and/or "believing". That harks back to the aforementioned criterion.
What counts as thinking/believing? What does each and every case have in common that makes them a case of thought/belief? This is what must be established/determined prior to any and all conjecture about the dog's thinking/believing. Well, if we are to avoid blind conjecture, that is.
We have to know what we're looking for, just like the dog.
Dogs look for balls, especially after having had enough experience playing the game. Clearly the dog believes that there is a ball to be found, and looks where it has been found in past, wherever it now thinks/believes it will be, or perhaps wherever it's physiological sensory perception leads it... this time around.
That is a common report of the dog's thought/belief and behaviour.
A more precise description of that thought/belief would be put in terms of the correlations drawn by the dog between different things; such as your behaviour(throwing the ball), it's own behaviour(fetching it), and other things like it's own mental/physiological ongoings and their immediate effects/affects(it's state of mind - loosely speaking).
That's more than adequate for bridging the evolutionary gaps between non-linguistic thought/belief and our own without anthropomorphism.
I don't follow your basic point.
In the job case, Smith is told that he will get the job. Because he knows he has 10 coins in his own pocket, he validly infers "a man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job". It turns out that Paul gets the job and that Paul has 10 coins in his pocket. Smith has a justified true belief but he doesn't have knowledge. Now you claim that Gettier changes the meaning and truth conditions of some belief of Smith's, but where? He doesn't change the meaning of "I am getting the job" to "a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job". He validly deduces the latter from the former using the extra premise "I have 10 coins in my pocket". What's wrong with a basic use of deduction such as this?
-PA
Quoting creativesoul
That actually supports my argument.
We are here at a particular point in time. We do not know which of the beliefs we have that seem both true and well justified will turn out to be false, precisely as in the examples you gave from within science.
We have Scientist 1 who reaches belief X through a series of experiments. Other scientists test also and the belief X is extremely well justified.
1) it may be overturned
2) those scientists do nothing more beyond examing the justification to say it is true.
Now one could say that knowledge covers well justified beliefs that have not been shown to be false. But that is not the same as true.
And note, you justified the use of justified true beliefs as a label for knowledge by saying that there are false justified beliefs. 1) I obviously accept the existence of the latter and 2) the existence of those does not demonstrate that the label 'true' is useful.
For us. Here at this moment in time, knowing that our ideas may be overturned in the future.
It is not that a jtb not different from jb
It is that we don't have access to anything more than justification. And justifcation is weak the moment we find something that says a belief is false, and says it well.
YOu are looking down from the sky and say
Belief X is justifed and true
which is different from beleif Y which justified but not true.
That's a God's eye view.
I am looking at, for example, the history of science and saying we mere humans do not have some extra process we can use to text if it is true.
So, yes, there is a difference, but we in situ don't have anything other than our justifications. Our sense it is obviously true may be wrong.
In science not just any justified belief is considered knowledge. It must have a great deal of evidence including wide range testing and a lack of strong counterevidence.
In science we have something like extremely well justifed beliefs are knowledge.
They do not then do some other experiment to show that it is true. Any other evidence or experiment would merely add to the justifcation.
When the scientific community is done amassing evidence and concludes that idea is so well justified they consider it knowledge, what step do they take to check if it is true?
Yes, but these support my assertion.
We do not now know what justified beliefs we have now will turn out to later be considered false.
I am not arguing that all justified or even extremely well justified beliefs are true.
I am saying that we do not know which of our currently held well justified beliefs will turn out not to be true.
I agree that there is a difference between a jtb and a jb even a very well justified jb. But here's the thing....we don't know which beliefs are very well justified and this will last and which are very well justified and will be ovoerturned.
You both keep mentioning that there are false justified beliefs
and I want to say..........................precisely!
Earlier in the history of science there were beliefs held by the consensus of the scientific community that we now know to be false. I think it made sense for them to consider those ideas knowledge. However it turned out they were not true and they
did not have the skills to test for truth after they used their justification.
Again: I am not saying that all even extremely well justified truths are true.
I am saying that all we have is our justifications and these may well turn out to have been for false beliefs.
We do not text hypothesis X, use all the evidence as justification, then check the truth. We just work out good justification.
Now we can check to see if anything contradicts, shows it to be false.
I could see an argument for justified and now shown to be false belief. Which is bascially what science does.
It calls certain beliefs knowledge when they are extremely well justified and there is nothing that says they are false.
But to say something is justified and true
§1) implies a two step process with two criteria when we in situ only do the justificaiton and have not other trick to determine if it is true. 2) it may be overturned.
We can try to falsify what is currently called knowledge.
Sure. But my point is the usefulness of jtb. Is it a smart way to decide what is knowledge, given that we can only determine something like extremely good justification. Why not just leave it at that? What is the act of adding on the adjective true, knowing that we may, as a species, realize later it isn't. We can still call the conclusions knowledge. And, in fact, I think this is how scientific epistemology works.
Quoting Janus
Fine, so we all that knowledge, because it is an extremely well justified belief.
We act, certainly, as if it is true, and that's workign out great. I have no problem with that.
But notice how true is functioning in your schema.
It is functioning as an intensifier. It is saying something like extremely good before justification.
It is not some other kind of criterion. It is simply saying 'and this justification is so good we doubt it could change.'
It is not referring to some process of evaluation outside of the justification processes: the evidence and so onQuoting Janus
I am looking at jtb as a definition of knowledge. I have no problem accepting all sorts of things as knowledge or scientific knowledge that are extremely well justified.
My point is the 'true' is misleading. One because it implies there is some other criterion, when in fact it is just saying the justification is great while being a word with absolute connotations. Two because it is not necessary. Three because it does not in any way reflect the actual process, say in science, for deciding something is knowledge. There is no 'meeting the justification criteria process' then the 'meeting the truth criterion process'. There is only the gathering of enough evidence (read justification) to convince the scientific community that this is knowledge. I could see using j nstbf b, as in
justified not shown to be false belief.
But jtb to me implies that there are two criteria when there is only one. There are degrees of justification and science is on the rigorous end. A different in degree of justification. Not two criteria.
I'll give up here. Hopefully I managed to reach one of you. I am not sure I can formulate it any better. Please check out my responses to creativesoul since I expressed it a bit differenly there. But I don't think I can do any better.so I will leave it at that.
When Smith thinks to himself, "the man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", the referent of "the man" is himself not Paul and that is not properly accounted for. He does not have justified true belief that Paul will get the job, rather he has justified false belief that he will. He does not believe that anyone else is going to get the job. "The man" as used within Smith's belief does not - cannot - refer to anyone other than Smith himself.
That's not true. We look and check for ourselves to see if the cup is on the table, and we do not look at the justification.
There is no god's eye view needed.
That example has nothing to do with the idea of JTB.
JTB is a proposed way of evaluating whether a belief should be considered knowledge.
EVALUATING. KNOWLEDGE.
We don't look at the justification, you say.
But that's what the process of deciding whether something is knowledge is.
You are treating JTB as if it is a failed theory of perception.
It's a suggestion for how we determine if something should be considered knowledge, and that must include looking at the justification.
Now I understand why we are having problems. I don't think you understand what JTB and the category it is in are about.
Of course even your ability to trust your perception is based on implict justification. But sure, you don't need to think about justification and yes, you'll reach out and find that cup in the vast majority of situations.
JTB is not a heuristic for dealing with the things in your flat.
It's a description of what some people think are the criteria one should use
when deciding if a belief is knowledge.
So when you say you don't have to look at the justification, you are confused about what jtb is.
IMagine scientists writing papers where they say that bacteria X causes stomach ulcers and that this belief they have should be considered knowledge.
When asked why anyone else should agree - that is what criteria did they use to determine it was knowledge not some less rigorously arrived at belief - the scientists said it's knowledge because it's true. Now that saves a lot of paper since journal articles would be simply the conclusion, but it seems like a weak theory of knowledge.
And it is not a way to analyze beliefs. Cause pretty much everyone believes their beliefs are true.
I'm done.
And I just realized how rude this post of yours was. You did not interact in the slightest with the arguments I presented. You simply say one part is wrong and repeated something you said earlier. Even if you did understand the category jtb is in and what it is proposed to deal with and do, you are a terrible dicussion partner. I mean, seriously. Good riddance.
The one point we disagree about is this. We have many justified beliefs, no doubt some more justified than others. Justification is contextual as I have said. That Paris is the Capital of France is a justified true belief that only the most way out simulated reality scenarios could falsify; so for all intents and purposes it is a belief that will never be shown to be false.
It is not really about claiming or being able to decide just which of our justified beliefs are also true beliefs, it is about making the general logical distinction between justified beliefs which are true and those which are not. We cannot do without the distinction between true and false beliefs, which is not the same as to say that we know, or even could know, which beliefs are true and which false in any absolute sense, in other words.
I don't know what you are trying to say or imply here, To say what the dog is thinking just is an attempt to get into the mind of the dog. We are already "in" our own minds in a way that we are not "in" the mind of other humans, let alone dogs. This is not rhetoric. I know what I am thinking, but I don't know what you are thinking unless you tell me, and even then I cannot be absolutely sure that you are not deceiving me. It comes down to trust. I don't see how you could reasonably deny that. You gesture towards "much better accounts" but I have no idea what you are referring to.
Make your position/argument in such a way that it pertains to and/or references the two Gettier cases. That may help. Not trying to be rude dude. You're all over the place though. Can we simplify what your saying?
You claim that the true aspect of justified true belief is redundant. You further claim that the justification aspect basically covers the true aspect. You go further and claim that we have no access to check for truth.
I'm denying all three of those claims, and I've provided arguments and/or prima facie examples which support that denial. I don't know what else to say here...
Some of the stuff you've said I agree with. I do not agree with what you do with that stuff.
I'm saying that such talk of "getting into the mind" of anything is misleading at best. There are better ways to talk about our thought/belief.
Are you claiming that we cannot know what the content of non linguistic thought/belief is because those creatures do not have language?
Nothing you have said so far convinces me to think otherwise.
You've said many things my friend, including talking about the propositional content of belief statements.
I want to see your response to the above.
I've been setting out the content. It has already been determined.
To convince me that you can know how and what animals think you would need to outline how you think this can be done, which would also involve, obviously, a refutation of the notion that non-symbolic thought is indeterminate. I haven't see you do that.
Anyway you seem to have derailed this thread (your own thread at that!) away form its original concern with the incoherence of Gettier objections to JTB ( which I agree with) and steered towards your usual preoccupations. Frankly, I don't really understand those preoccupations, or see why the issue is of very much importance in any case, but it seems to be all you want to talk about.
And when that begins but goes unnoticed?
What makes you think/believe that we cannot represent non linguistic thought/belief symbolically?
:brow:
Quoting creativesoul
I am saying that I can see no way to know what non-linguistic creatures' thinking consists in. By contrast, we know that linguistic creatures' thinking consists in language, or at least that it is expressible in language and thus comes to have determinate content. But it is not as though we determine some "content" of what we think and then translate that "content" into language; the expression of thinking in language just is the determination of its content. Put another the way the content of thought is inseparable form its symbolic expression.
I'm just curious...
Could you be wrong about this?
Right now I can't see how, but of course I could be. If you can convince me that I am wrong then I think I should be humble enough to admit it.
On the other hand, could you be wrong about it?
As a aside which I think is relevant; when people ask me why I write, I usually tell them "to find out how and what I think". I also paint, and if asked why I do that I could equally reply, " To find out how and what I imagine".
We're both aware of our own fallibility.
Cheers!
Regardless of how we got here, or how many times we've failed prior to, we are here!
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
There's the basic outline. This is a good start to acquiring knowledge regarding the content of pre-linguistic thought/belief. Thought/belief, including statements thereof, must begin simply and gain in complexity.
You've agreed to all of the above. Time for the next step...
Non linguistic thought/belief must consist of something that is evolutionarily amenable to propositions, assertions, and statements. It must be able to evolve and grow in it's complexity from whatever it is prior to into linguistic expressions we all know and use. Any and all accounts of thought/belief must be amenable to evolutionary terms.
Yours is not. It has all the earmarks of conventional mistakes. Don't take that personally. You trusted the wrong people. I think you already know this. I mean, you're continually qualifying your remarks by stating stuff like we cannot get into the minds of animals. The whole fait accompli aspect...
You know the account you've adopted is not quite right.
The earlier bit about visual thinking was an open admission of anthropomorphism. The dog's thought/belief included use of it's eyes. "Visual thinking" draws a false equivalency between the way you think when looking for a ball and the way the dog thinks when looking for a ball. That method is fraught. Toss it aside.
Not all writing leads to such knowledge.
Firstly assuming that symbolic thought evolved from non-symbolic thought, says nothing about the determinability of the latter. My own thinking is determinable only insofar as I can represent it symbolically. That's what thinking symbolically is for the language capable; determining thought. But there is no relation I can become determinably aware of between the indeterminable process of pre-symbolic thinking and the determining process of symbolic expression; the only relation is itself an indeterminable one of feeling.
In other words the relation between the indeterminable pre-symbolic process and symbolic contentful expression is exclusively a matter of feeling, not of discursive thought. And there is no feeling relation between an animals' "thinking" processes and what I might feel is plausible to say about it; I can only rely on analogies extrapolated from whatever felt relation I might be aware of between the pre-symbolic process and symbolic expression in my own case.
You assume too much I think; I don't "know" any such thing!
And if you want to impute "mistakes" to my thinking then the onus is on you to clearly identify them and explain just what it is you believe is mistaken and how and in relation to what you think it is mistaken. Vague generalization and gesturing will not suffice to convince me.
Yes, I do say that we cannot get into the minds of animals: do you actually disagree with that, and if so, on what grounds?
Care to address what I wrote?
:brow:
Quoting Janus
I'm saying that such talk is unacceptable. There are better ways to acquire knowledge of what all thought/belief consists of.
The sheer number of things I've written that have been sorely neglected is continually rising. Do you really want to know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of?
You cannot take adequate account of what pre-linguistic thought/belief is because the framework doesn't allow it. The terminology you're using tend towards anthropomorphism, and admittedly so. Your position is based upon language use that cannot bridge the gap between non-linguistic thought and our own.
You know this. Thus, you deny all ability to take proper account of non linguistic belief. The odd thing is that you then go on to argue in favor of exactly what you say cannot be done.
Is that clear enough?
Careful what you wish for. Do you want to know what all thought/belief consist in or not?
And yet you seem to be unable to give an account of them that makes sense to me. So, I haven't "neglected" anything; I have just failed to be convinced by it. Your last question just makes you look arrogant or deluded, as if you think you know something hard to understand that others don't.
If you can give a clear account of what you think pre-symbolic thought consist in, and why you think that, then I'm all ears, but don't keep making vague claims about my "framework" not allowing me to understand what you have to say. As I said if you have something cogent and convincing to say it should be translatable into any framework, unless the central presuppositions are completely incompatible.
I'm not going to continue this unless and until you come up with something I can get my teeth into.
Care to address what I've written?
Quoting Janus
There's the basic outline. This is a good start to acquiring knowledge regarding the content of pre-linguistic thought/belief. Thought/belief, including statements thereof, must begin simply and gain in complexity.
You've agreed to all of the above. Time for the next step...
Non linguistic thought/belief must consist of something that is evolutionarily amenable to propositions, assertions, and statements. It must be able to evolve and seamlessly grow in it's complexity from whatever it is prior to language into the common linguistic expressions we all know and use. Any and all accounts of thought/belief must be amenable to evolutionary terms.
Do we agree?
PA
Nada.
The issue is a conflation of proposition and belief borne of an inadequate notion/conception/definition of thought/belief that is hard at work behind the scenes. Those consequences run deep and in all different directions, so to speak.
This where the first disagreement began. The expressed concern regarding anthropomorphism rings quite hollow now, given that it is the reason you offer for rejecting the framework I put to use(even though there is no such issue within my position), and yet the terms you're using in lieu of "content" are guilty of exactly that.
:brow:
Anthropomorphism.
You warned against it. Discarded my terminology out of the expressed possibility of being guilty of it. Then you began doing it.
The above is the warning against and the subsequent discarding of the terminology I put to to use for a purported fear of possibility of anthropomorphism.
Quoting Janus
The above is the fait accompli notion, as if it is not possible for us to acquire knowledge of what non and/or pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of.
[quote]Quoting Janus
There is the anthropomorphism at work. "If it were me"... projecting into the mind of a dog... even though you've repeatedly said that we cannot get into the mind of a dog.
Quoting Janus
The above assumes precisely what needs argued for, and introduces a strawman and/or red herring. On my view, there is no such thing as non-symbolic thinking. I explained this already. That cannot be emphasized enough.
Quoting Janus
The above, once again, introduces yet another argument that I'm not making. In addition, it assumes exactly what needs argued for.
These are all good reason for me to question what you're doing here... I want to think/believe that you're arguing in good faith. I'm still hoping that that is the case.
I do not have this all figured out yet. You are and have been helping for some time now. We help each other, ya know? What you said early on here about our interactions helping to sharpen your thinking rings true here, on my side, as well. We can figure this stuff out...
Taking things personally and saying things personally will not help that to happen.
Unless you are somehow personally vested in using the language that you do, what stops you from pursuing different frameworks? This is the place where we get to. Let's be a bit more professional about it and hash it out the rest of the way... together. If our thought/belief is the product of an evolutionary progression, we ought be able to set this out with a framework that is amenable to doing so.
Right?
Thus, thought/belief begins simply and grows in it's complexity. That must be the case if our thought/belief is a product of evolutionary progression.
:smile: