What is knowledge?
Plato proposed that knowledge involves having a justified true belief.
Subsequently many have argued that this is incomplete and there must be some other element, for we can conceive of cases where a person has a justified true belief, yet our resaon says that they lack knowledge.
Bertrand Russell came up with a counterexample, one of kind made more famous later by Edmund Gettier (and that have subsequently become known as 'Gettier cases'). In Russell's case, a clock has stopped and is reporting a time of 3pm. Someone ignorant of the fact the clock has stopped but desirous to know the time looks at the clock and forms the belief that it is 3pm. By pure coincidence it is, in fact, 3pm. This person has a justified true belief. They belief that it is 3pm, and it is 3pm - so their belief is true. And their belief is justified because they have formed it in an epistemically responsible manner - they looked at a clock, a clock it was reasonble to assume was working. However, though they have a justified true belief that it is 3pm, it seems equally clear to our reason (the reason of most of us, anyway) that they do not 'know' that it is 3pm.
Why doesn't that person's justified true belief qualify as knowledge? It is tempting to say that it doesn't qualify becasue it was just by luck that it was true. The method adopted - looking at clockfaces - was not reliable in this kind of context .
But there are counterexamples to this modified 'no luck' analysis as well. For example, imagine that you want to know what the time is and so you look at a clock tower and form the belief that it is 3pm. This clock is working and it really is 3pm. However, unbeknownst to you, the area you are in is one in which most public clocks are stopped. This is the one exception. Well, it still seems true to say that you know it is 3pm, even though it was just by luck that the clock you looked at was the one working one.
So, it seems that sometimes a justified true belief fails to qualify as knowledge due to the fact it was only by luck that it was true, and yet sometimes a justified true belief does qualify as knowledge despite the fact it was only by luck that it was true. Luck seems sometimes to explain why a justified true belief is not knowledge, but in other cases the same degree luck does not affect the knowledge status of a justified true belief. This is puzzling - or puzzling to many, anyway, who continue to try and refine the justified true belief account so as to be able to resist counterexmaples.
Here is my proposal: for a belief to qualify as knowledge is for Reason to be adopting a certain attitude towards your possession of it. Sometimes the presence of luck will mean she does not adopt that attitude towards your possession of it; sometimes it will not.
For an analogy: sometimes I approve of the presence of chocolate in a dish, sometimes I do not. Chocolate on a cookie - yes. Chocolate on a potato - no.
It would be odd to try and formulate a hard and fast rule about when I do, and when I do not, adopt this attitude towards chocolate. For example, although I do not generally approve of chocolate when it is accompanying potato, perhaps there aer some contexts in which I will - perhaps potato and caramel and chocolate is a combination I approve of, even though were you to remove one element, I would disapprove of the combination of the others.
Anyway, what I am suggesting, then, is that 'knowledge' is like this too. In some contexts a true belief will elicit the 'knowledge' attitude from Reason due to the fact it was not formed in a lucky fashion; but in other contexts a true belief may elicit the 'knowledge' attitude despite the fact it was formed in a lucky fashion.
I also think that much contemporary thinking about knowledge confuses two distinct questions. "When do we have knowledge?" and "what 'is' knowledge?" Even if we can agree about when we have knowledge, that doesn't necessarily tell us what knowledge itself is. And likewise, we may be able to answer the latter question without being able to say with any precision when we have knowledge.
My proposal, then, is that knowledge itself is constituted by having a true belief that Reason is adopting a certain attitude towards (the knowledge attitude). That analysis leaves open when and where Reason will adopt that attitude towards a true belief that one is holding.
Subsequently many have argued that this is incomplete and there must be some other element, for we can conceive of cases where a person has a justified true belief, yet our resaon says that they lack knowledge.
Bertrand Russell came up with a counterexample, one of kind made more famous later by Edmund Gettier (and that have subsequently become known as 'Gettier cases'). In Russell's case, a clock has stopped and is reporting a time of 3pm. Someone ignorant of the fact the clock has stopped but desirous to know the time looks at the clock and forms the belief that it is 3pm. By pure coincidence it is, in fact, 3pm. This person has a justified true belief. They belief that it is 3pm, and it is 3pm - so their belief is true. And their belief is justified because they have formed it in an epistemically responsible manner - they looked at a clock, a clock it was reasonble to assume was working. However, though they have a justified true belief that it is 3pm, it seems equally clear to our reason (the reason of most of us, anyway) that they do not 'know' that it is 3pm.
Why doesn't that person's justified true belief qualify as knowledge? It is tempting to say that it doesn't qualify becasue it was just by luck that it was true. The method adopted - looking at clockfaces - was not reliable in this kind of context .
But there are counterexamples to this modified 'no luck' analysis as well. For example, imagine that you want to know what the time is and so you look at a clock tower and form the belief that it is 3pm. This clock is working and it really is 3pm. However, unbeknownst to you, the area you are in is one in which most public clocks are stopped. This is the one exception. Well, it still seems true to say that you know it is 3pm, even though it was just by luck that the clock you looked at was the one working one.
So, it seems that sometimes a justified true belief fails to qualify as knowledge due to the fact it was only by luck that it was true, and yet sometimes a justified true belief does qualify as knowledge despite the fact it was only by luck that it was true. Luck seems sometimes to explain why a justified true belief is not knowledge, but in other cases the same degree luck does not affect the knowledge status of a justified true belief. This is puzzling - or puzzling to many, anyway, who continue to try and refine the justified true belief account so as to be able to resist counterexmaples.
Here is my proposal: for a belief to qualify as knowledge is for Reason to be adopting a certain attitude towards your possession of it. Sometimes the presence of luck will mean she does not adopt that attitude towards your possession of it; sometimes it will not.
For an analogy: sometimes I approve of the presence of chocolate in a dish, sometimes I do not. Chocolate on a cookie - yes. Chocolate on a potato - no.
It would be odd to try and formulate a hard and fast rule about when I do, and when I do not, adopt this attitude towards chocolate. For example, although I do not generally approve of chocolate when it is accompanying potato, perhaps there aer some contexts in which I will - perhaps potato and caramel and chocolate is a combination I approve of, even though were you to remove one element, I would disapprove of the combination of the others.
Anyway, what I am suggesting, then, is that 'knowledge' is like this too. In some contexts a true belief will elicit the 'knowledge' attitude from Reason due to the fact it was not formed in a lucky fashion; but in other contexts a true belief may elicit the 'knowledge' attitude despite the fact it was formed in a lucky fashion.
I also think that much contemporary thinking about knowledge confuses two distinct questions. "When do we have knowledge?" and "what 'is' knowledge?" Even if we can agree about when we have knowledge, that doesn't necessarily tell us what knowledge itself is. And likewise, we may be able to answer the latter question without being able to say with any precision when we have knowledge.
My proposal, then, is that knowledge itself is constituted by having a true belief that Reason is adopting a certain attitude towards (the knowledge attitude). That analysis leaves open when and where Reason will adopt that attitude towards a true belief that one is holding.
Comments (508)
Why does one have to have an awareness that something is knowledge for it to be knowledge? Farmers know a great deal about how and when to plant, probably without any kind of reflective awareness about anything vaguely epistemological. I would argue not only do they possess knowledge, but that a very important and fundamental kind of knowledge.
I think what you are describing is a theory about knowledge, not knowledge simpliciter.
Quoting Pantagruel
You don't, I think, and I haven't said that you do. Sometimes someone can know something - that is, can have a justified true belief - without knowing that their belief is justified.
Being justified and being aware that your belief is justified are not necessarily the same.
Where? I didn't define truth. Others did, and I took issue with their definitions. Also it is not I, but Plato, who offered the 'justified true belief' definition.
I am taking issue with it.
Quoting tim wood
I am not offering definitions. I know full well that definitions do not provide understanding. I am proposing that knowledge consists of an attitude. That's a thesis for exploration, not something I am certain about. And it is not a definition.
Quoting tim wood
I'm trying to figure out what knowledge is. Using reasoned reflection to do that is practical, for what else would one use?
Quoting Bartricks
and this
Quoting Bartricks
seem to be in disagreement?
The topic here is "what is knowledge?" There is already broad agreement that whatever else knowledge involves, it involves having a true belief and a justification for it. But there are cases where these elements are present yet the person does not possess knowledge.
Philosophers have spilt a lot of ink trying to come up with a list of ingredients for knowledge. Again, they agree that true beliefs and justifications are in the mix. They just disagree over what additional ingredient or ingredients are required.
What I am saying is that their project is misguided. They are thinking of knowledge as being akin to a cake and then trying to figure out what ingredients are in this cake. But then they wonder why the cake doesn't always come out right.
What I am saying is that knowledge is more closely akin to a 'delicious cake' as opposed to just 'a cake'. Some cakes are delicious, but 'being delicious' involves the cake standing in some relation to a taster. That is, a 'delicious' cake is a cake that is causing certain sensations in someone who is eating it.
I am saying that knowledge is like that - knowledge is a true belief whose possession by a person is causing a certain attitude in Reason. Just as a cake is delicious when it is responsible for causing certain taste sensations in you, likewise a true belief is 'knowledge' when it is responsible for causing a certain attitude in Reason.
I don't see that. To be justified in a belief is for there to be reason for you to hold it. 'A reason' here denotes a bidding or approval of Reason (we have reason to believe something when Reason wants us to believe it). But it is entirely consistent with this that one might be unaware that Reason wants you to believe what you are believing, or unaware that Reason approves of you believing what you are believing. She still does - so your belief is justified - but you are unaware that the belief is justified.
To be justified in holding a belief there needs to be a reason for you to hold it. But there can be a reason for you to hold a belief even if you are unaware of that reason.
You have said this is inconsistent with knowledge being made of an attitude that Reason is adopting towards a true belief someone is holding.
I do not see any inconsistency.
The ancient Greeks called her Athena. These days she's the natural patron of universities and apparently it's well worth seeking her favor.
Quoting Athena
No one really bothers that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge viz. inductive and deductive.
The difference between the two is usually said to rest on the degree of certainty in the truth being argued for. Deductive knowledge is certain because given true premises and a valid argument form the conclusion can only be denied on grounds of insanity.
Inductive knowledge is a different beast altogether. No amount of justification can guarantee the truth of an inductively inferred conclusion.
This is basic or as some are fond to call it "baby" logic. No disagreements at all.
Now consider the JTB theory of knowledge within such a framework. JTB theory has no problems with deductively derived knowledge for it's impossible for the conclusion to be false given true premises and a valid argument form.
It's only in the domain of inductive argumentation that we find justification insufficient to make an inference to the truth. It is this gap between justification and truth, characteristic only of inductive arguments, which is inhabited by Gettier-type problems. I'm quite confident that all counterexamples to the JTB theory are inductive-based arguments and it surprises me why that's such a big deal. After all inductive arguments are known to be problematic in this way.
Deductive knowledge is immune to Gettier-type problems.
It's like someone who knows he has an ulcer but gets surprised when his tummy hurts.
:joke:
Do you know what I mean by metacognitive? An attitude towards a belief would be cognition about a belief.
Knowledge should work all of the time, not some of the time.
(Caveat) Knowledge should always be considered within a certain frame of reference. Newton's law of motion is true when objects move at a certain fixed speed and under a certain gravitation pull.. Einstein showed Newtons law of motion do not hold when objects speed up/slow down or experience less or more gravity.
I don't see how you can define knowledge in such a way and then say that a person fits that definition yet doesn't possess knowledge. It's like saying, "It walks, talks and acts like a duck, but isn't a duck".
Why doesn't the person have knowledge if they fit all the requirements? Find what is missing and make it part of the definition.
Maybe truth and knowledge shouldn't be conflated. Knowledge is like a theory - a justified a hypothesis. One might say that knowledge is an effect of testing one's beliefs in the same way theories are the effect of testing one's hypotheses.
Knowledge is a thing one possesses and knowing is the act of using that thing one possesses. In this sense, knowledge is the same as information. We possess information. Knowledge and information have this quality about them - particularly "aboutness". They are about states-of-affairs in reality. This means that I don't have the states-of-affairs in my mind, I have knowledge about those states-of-affairs in my mind. Knowledge, in this sense, is a mental representation of those states-of-affairs, based on testing my beliefs/hypotheses.
No. Quoting Pantagruel
Why not just say that, then?
And, like I say, where is the inconsistency between these two claims?
Quoting Pantagruel
How are they 'in disagreement'??
I can have a justified true belief - that is, a belief that I have acquired in a manner that Reason approves of - without realising that Reason approves of it.
There is no inconsistency.
No, that's clearly false. Merely being confident about a belief is not sufficient for knowledge (it may not even be necessary). If I am confident I will win the lottery this evening that does not mean I know that I will (even if I get lucky and win it).
So then why is reason adopting an attitude towards that belief? (your words).
I agree with the first statement wholeheartedly.
The issue is that we're trying to empirically find out what knowledge is (or, linguistically, how people use the term), not legislate it.
A human actor or a mechanical robot that walks, talks and acts like a duck satisfies the above definition, but isn't a duck.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Right. So JTB is like Newton's theory of gravity. Newton's theory predicts the planet's orbits really well. Except for Mercury. So the question just is to find what is missing (or to posit a different theory altogether).
Well, because it is true and has been acquired in a manner she approves of. But beyond that we do not need to know why she has adopted it, for my point is that a belief qualifies as knowledge when - and only when - Reason is adopting this attitude towards it.
For an analogy: a cake qualifies as being delicious-to-me when and only when it is causing certain taste sensations in me. That's true even if we do not know more specifically why it is causing those sensations in me.
I believe many things. Some of what I believe I feel I 'know'. Of course, my feeling that I know something does not entail that I know it. There may be some things I do not feel I know, but that I do know. And there may be some things I feel I know, but do not know. The point, however, is that there is a feeling associated with knowledge - I feel I know some things.
That feeling - a feeling we're all surely familiar with - does not constitute knowledge when we feel it towards a belief of ours (or anyone else's). After all, as just said, it is quite clear that if I feel I know something it does not follow of necessity that I know it.
But that feeling - the knowledge feeling - does make a belief into knowledge when Reason has it towards a belief. That's what I am proposing, anyway.
No, not 'reifying' because that term means 'mistakenly treating as a thing'. I am treating Reason as a thing, but there is no mistake. And I am personifying Reason, but again, that is not a mistake.
It is not essential to my case that Reason be personified - one could accept what I have said but insist that non-persons can adopt attitudes towards things and that Reason is such a non-person. Now, I think that's an insane position - for I think that a person who sincerely believes that non-persons can adopt attitudes towards things is mad. Hence why I personify Reason. But one could resist personifying Reason consistent with accepting everything else I have said about knowledge. I just wouldn't recommend it, as it is bonkers.
But personifying Reason also sheds light on the nature of knowledge. Why has knowledge defied analysis? Well, because philosophers have been trying to locate its ingredients. But 'knowledge' is not a thing - it is not a kind of cake or other kind of substance. It is a specific kind of attitudinal relation that a true belief stands in to Reason.
How would we distinguish between those beliefs Reason approves of and those she does not?
Or to put it another way, why does Reason approve of the beliefs she does?
I do not think those are the same question. The latter has as no definitive answer - it would be like asking me why I find delicious what I find delicious (it varies) - but is also irrelevant to the question at issue. The question at issue is what knowledge is, not why it exists.
As for the former question - well, our reason is our source of insight into what Reason approves of.
Take the Gettier cases mentioned earlier. It used to be thought that possession of a justified true belief was sufficient for knowledge. But then Gettier cases are brought to our attention. And, for most of us, it is clear enough to our reason that the subject in a Gettier case lacks knowledge even though they possess a justified true belief. Now, that isn't arbitrary - people are not just randomly deciding, on the basis of nothing at all, that the subject in a Gettier case lacks knowledge. No, their reason tells them that the subject in that case lacks knowledge.
So, just as I think I know there's a fig tree in my study because there appears, visually, to be one there - a visual impression that has been confirmed by everyone who has come into my study thus far - I think we can know when a person has knowledge if it appears to our reason that the person in question has knowledge. That includes people who may be unaware they have knowledge, too. It can be apparent to our reason - even if it is not to theirs - that they know something, and that is excellent evidence that they know it.
No, that's quite wrong. It's not a 'definition'. It is a thesis. It was Plato's thesis. And it seems true for the most part.
But then counterexamples were devised - cases where although a person possesses what the thesis says they need to possess, it seems manifest to reason that they nevertheless lack knowledge.
You're doing things the wrong way around - or you're imagining that philosophers do things the wrong way around.
A good philosopher does not just 'define' knowledge and then dismiss as 'not knowledge' anything that fails to match that definition. That's not philosophy.
A philosopher tries to figure out what knowledge is by a combination of looking at clear cases of knowledge possession and seeing if there is anything they all have in common apart from being cases of knowledge and conceptual analysis.
They may propose a thesis - as Plato did - but then others are going to set about trying to refute it. Which they do not by just 'defining' knowledge differently and then insisting that the word does not apply to what Plato described. But rather by rational reflection - a major part of which involves devising thought experiments to test the thesis.
Now it seems to me that there is nothing all clear cases of knowledge have in common apart, that is, from involving a true belief.
That doesn't mean that having a true belief is sufficient for knowledge - it is clearly not, for we can easily imagine cases in which someone has a true belief but does not have knowledge. Nevertheless, there seems nothing - apart from being cases of knowledge - that all cases of knowledge have in common apart from involving a true belief. Knowledge cannot be reduced to 'true belief', but there seems nothing else all cases of knowledge have in common.
And that's why I propose that knowledge itself is an attitude Reason is adopting towards true beliefs. Hence why there is nothing else they all have in common apart from being cases where an agent has a true belief.
What do you mean? I am asking what knowledge is - literally what it is made of.
So, take someone who knows something. Don't question whether they have it or not - they clearly do have it. The question is what they have in having it. What does their having knowledge consist in?
It can't just be having a true belief, for that would mean that lucky guesses could count as knowledge. But if I believe - on the basis of no evidence whatsoever - that Jack killed someone, then I do not 'know' that Jack killed someone even if, as it happens, he did.
So, it is clear to our rational reflection that having knowledge does not just involve having a true belief.
It does involve having a true belief - for when we imagine someone with a false belief, it seems clear in every case that they lack knowledge. 'False knowledge' seems an incoherent idea.
So, knowledge does involve having a true belief, but having a true belief is not sufficient. Yet it would be sufficient if 'knowledge' was composed solely of possession of a true belief. Thus, it is not.
What about a justification, then? If we add a justification to a true belief, does that transform the true belief into an item of knowledge?
Sometimes - often - yes. But not always, as Russell and Gettier demonstrated. There are cases -clear cases - where a person clearly has a justified true belief, but equally clearly lacks knowledge.
Thus, knowledge cannot be composed solely of a justified true belief, for otherwise there would not be such cases (and there clearly are).
I think there are also cases (though I have not yet described one - and I also would admit that they are not as clear cut as Gettier cases) where a person has knowledge and yet is not justified in their belief.
So it seems to me that, upon reflection, justifications are not essential to knowledge. They sometimes transform a true belief into knowledge, but they do not invariably do so.
What's knowledge, then?
Well, because it seems that the only thing all clear items of knowledge have in common is that they involve a person possessing a true belief, and because having a true belief is clearly not sufficient to have knowledge, I conclude that knowledge is a relation that a true belief stands in to Reason. I don't say that's entailed. It is a proposal. But I do think that whatever else anyone proposes, it will either amount to saying "a person has knowledge when they have knowledge" - in which case it is true but vacuous - or it will be false, for we'll be able to conceive of cases involving the said combination yet that are clearly not cases in which the person possesses knowledge.
My proposal, then, is that when Reason feels a certain way about a true belief of yours (or anyone's), then that true belief qualifies as knowledge. Sometimes - very often, it would seem - the fact your true belief is justified is going to be what is responsible for making Reason adopt that attitude towards your belief. But not always. Just as, by analogy, covering something in chocolate will often make me like it, but not invariably.
Just for the sake of argument, time is an abstract concept. Time is not a tangible reality. That is, it is not a thing that is perceptible by touch, therefore it can not be known. It can be believed by an individual or the whole state in that time zone can believe that it is three o'clock, as it can be believed the earth is flat, but if I understand the OP argument, believing something is not exactly knowing it. Experience is a vital part of knowing, and if it is not perceptible by touch, it can not be experienced.
1 Knowledge should work all of the time, not some of the time.
2 Knowledge is useful.
3 Knowledge answers questions
4 Knowledge solves problems.
5 Knowledge is made of facts.
6 Facts are true
7 Facts are true because they are useful, answer questions, solve problems.
I don't know what point you're making. Time is not an abstract concept, but what time is is not the topic of this thread. This thread is about what knowledge is. It is not about what can be known, but what knowledge itself is.
That's just a string of false claims, not an analysis of knowledge.
I don't know what 'knowledge should work all of the time" means? It's confused. It's like saying 7 should work all the time.
Quoting ovdtogt
Not necessarily. "Useless knowledge" is not a contradiction in terms. And we can think of loads and loads of examples where knowing something was anything but useful. For instance, there are some things that, if you know them, can make your job harder. If you know that your friend is in the audience, it might be much harder to do a good performance or make a good speech, and so on .
3 Knowledge answers questions
No, that's a category error. Knowledge doesn't 'do' anything. It 'is' something - exactly what is the issue under debate - but it doesn't 'do' anything. We do things with it, but it does nothing.
5 Knowledge is made of facts.
No, for if there are no persons in existence then there is clearly no knowledge, yet there would still be facts (such as the fact no persons exist).
6 Facts are true
No, propositions are true, facts are part of what make propositions true.
7 Facts are true because they are useful, answer questions, solve problems
No, facts are not true - propositions are the bearers of truth. And 'true' and 'useful' are not synonymous properties of a proposition.
So you haven't answered my question or said anything true.
Same problems as the truth thread. Anthropomorphism... the personification of thinking about thought and belief(Reason). Reason is not the sort of thing that is capable of having and/or adopting an attitude.
Other than that, I'm a bit impressed. Well written OP.
Justified... or "well-grounded"? Did Plato use the term "justified"?
Is it well-grounded to believe that a broken clock is correct?
But if Reason asserts, directs, prescribes, and so on, then Reason must be a person, for it is a self-evident truth that persons and persons alone do that kind of thing. So it is not a mistake.
Reasoning involves thinking, but not all thinking is reasoning. And reasoning can be done well or badly. It is not just 'done' in the way that thinking about thought is either done or not done. No, it is done well, or it is done badly, or indifferently.
How so? Because reasoning is attempting to listen to Reason. That is, reasoning is not Resaon - that's a category error (reasoning is an activity, but Reason is not an activity). And when one fails to hear clearly what Reason says to do or believe, then one is reasoning badly. That is to say, one is attempting to hear her in ways that she disapproves of.
So Reason is the source of the prescriptions and assertions that we are attempting to hear when we engage in reasoning. Hence how reasoning can be done badly or well.
And again, what - other than a person - can possibly be a source of a prescription? What - other than a person - can possibly assert anything to be the case?
So there is no mistake here, there's just an unothordox view about what Reason is, but that's no reason to reject it.
I am not sure, but I am also not sure I see a distinction between the two. I take it that a belief is justified when there is a normative reason to believe it. Perhaps well-grounded means something different....
Quoting creativesoul
I am not sure what you mean by 'well-grounded'.
The person believes that a broken clock is correct. That belief is false. It also serves as ground for the subsequent belief regarding what time it is. So the belief about the time is not well-grounded. It is based upon false belief.
Well, that's not true at all actually. Smith's belief in Case I is false. Gettier wants to say that Smith deduces and believes the proposition(via the rules of entailment) "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", which is fine as long as the referent is himself. Otherwise Gettier needs Smith to believe that someone other than himself will get the job... but he doesn't.
Case II is a bit more complicated, but it basically amounts to what Smith's believing the disjunction consists of. Smith believes "'Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona' because Jones owns a Ford." The disjunction is true, by the well known rules of disjunction... but not because Jones owns a Ford. So, Smith's belief is false.
Seems perfectly clear to me that Gettier put forth an accounting malpractice(of Smith's belief) in both Cases.
That ought be put a bit differently...
The person believes that a broken clock is working... that's better.
Typically a justified belief, to the best of my knowledge, is one that can be and/or has been argued for. Traditionally, the justification of one's beliefs involved offering the ground; the basis for belief. I mean, I'm fairly certain that the justification method was invoked as a means to further discriminate between conflicting knowledge claims.
Being well-grounded does not require being argued for. Rather, a belief can be well-grounded and formed/held by a language less creature... on my view anyway.
That... I would not take issue with... perhaps. I'm tentative here, though. I mean, you and me have a past so...
:joke:
It looks ok on it's face, and seems amenable to my own notion of being well-grounded. If you agree we can swap them at will without loss of meaning.
Hmmmm....
On second thought, the term "normative" could be problematic. That would amount to agreement with conventional standards. All paradigm shift begins with rejecting convention somewhere along the line. So... I'm unsettled about the normative aspect.
I am a philosophy novice, and I have never read much Plato that seems purposeful (yes, I know, everything I ever read that was purposeful was based on Plato :roll:), but don't we all have different views of justified? If knowledge relies on justified true belief...then aren't we in Descartes' arena? I only "know" that some being that I refer to as "I" is thinking. How could I justify anything beyond that?
I think this is an example (for me) of philosophy thinking itself out of relevance...why do we have to consider what knowledge "is" beyond the obvious:
Quoting ovdtogt
Works for me. (even if a bit circular) When does my knowledge of "knowledge" need to go beyond this?Would a deeper understanding of "knowledge" allow me to better explain the things I "know"? I am missing the point of delving into "what is knowledge" beyond trying to find a semantic "gotcha!"
I am using 'justified' far more broadly to mean just 'a belief that there is a normative reason for the person to believe'. So that it includes beliefs that have not been inferred. Some of those are, I think, correctly described as 'justified'. After all, inferences have to proceed from some beliefs and those beliefs cannot themselves have been inferred, yet we do not - presumably - want to say that all such beliefs are unjustified. So I would say that a belief is justified just if there is a normative reason for the person to believe it, a reason they may well be unaware of.
Quoting creativesoul
Okay, so a 'well grounded' belief is one that is in some sense 'based' on a true belief? Okay, but that's by-the-by because we can conceive of cases in which a person has a 'well grounded' true belief yet, intuitively, does not qualify as knowing.
For example, let's say I know full well that I am in a town in which all but one clock has stopped. I see a clock. I believe that the clock is working. That belief is clearly unjustified. But it happens to be true - by fluke the clock I am staring at is, in fact, the one clock in town that is working. From that true - but unjustified - belief I draw the conclusion that it is 3 o clock (because that's the time the clock says it is). That belief is true and well-grounded, but intuitively it does not count as knowledge.
I think that's going to be something we will be able to do for any proposal that adds something to 'true belief' in an attempt to spell out knowledge's ingredients.
In the original clock case, the subject has a justified true belief, but it is not knowledge.
In this variation of the original clock case, the subject has a well-grounded true belief, but it is not knowledge.
We're in agreement here, it seems.
No, a normative reason can also be called a 'justifying' reason. It has nothing to do with conventional standards - indeed, we judge the appropriateness or otherwise of conventional standards by considering to what extent there is normative reason to accept them.
There are different kinds of normative reason, but they are called 'normative' just to distinguish them from other uses of the term 'reason', such as 'explanatory' reason. An explanatory reason explains why something occurred. But a normative reason is a reason to do or believe something.
So, if the clock reads 3 o clock and I have no reason (normative reason) to believe the clock is stopped, then I have reason (normative reason) to believe it is 3 o clock.
So, on my usage - which is, I think, uncontroversial - justifications 'just are' made of normative reasons. Being justified would then involve either holding a belief that you have normative reason to hold, or having acquired a belief in a manner that you had normative reason to acquire it in. Something like that, anyway.
I wouldn't say that.
Quoting Bartricks
But it doesn't matter. It's not justified. The problems for JTB, if there are any, need to be clear cut examples of justified(well-grounded) true belief. An unjustified true belief is not.
Warrant?
What counts as sufficient/adequate reason to believe?
yes, but with that example I was refuting the theory that knowledge is well-grounded true belief.
Add anything (aside from my thesis, of course) to 'true belief' and I hold that it can be refuted as a theory about what is sufficient for knowledge.
I am not sure what you're asking - I was giving a definition of a normative reason. It isn't in dispute that justifications must involve them - they're also called 'justifying reasons'.
By offering another kind of knowledge? I don't think adherents of JTB deny all other kinds of knowledge, do they? If they do not, then my quote above still applies... that's what Russell and Gettier attempted to provide, a case of JTB that was clearly not knowledge.
The explanation(definition) seems to be synonymous with warrant, a notion that is sometimes taken up in lieu of justification. So, surely you can see the similarity?
Both lines of thought are about what counts as sufficient/adequate reason to believe something or other.
No, by offering an example of a case in which a person has a 'well-grounded' belief yet fails to have knowledge.
If 'well-grounded' just means 'justified' then the original counterexamples will do.
If 'well-grounded' means 'a true belief that is based on another true belief' then my case described above refutes it.
Like I say, my thesis is that if you add anything to 'true belief' aside from "that Reason has a certain attitude towards you having" then the thesis can be refuted (unless what's added is the trivial 'that is known'.
Whatever warrant means, unless it just means 'known', we'll be able to come up with counterexamples to the idea that knowledge is true belief plus warrant.
I spoke of time because this is in the OP
By what authority do you claim time is not an abstract concept and therefore can not be known?
I didn't say that - I didn't say it couldn't be known (I know there is time, for instance). I said that it is not an abstract concept.
An abstract concept is an idea about something abstract. 'Concept' is fancy for 'idea'.
Time is something we have an idea 'of'. It is not itself an idea.
It's like saying 'free will is an abstract idea' or 'morality is an abstract idea'. Same mistake - confusing the idea with what the idea is of.
As for what time actually is - well, it's made of the same kind of stuff that knowledge is made of, namely attitudes of Reason. But to argue for that would take us beyond the scope of this thread. We're beyond it already.
So Reason has no reasons, as it were. She is inscrutable.
Quoting Bartricks
It seems that you regard human reason as a kind of intuition or feeling that derives (however imperfectly) from Reason. Through a glass darkly, so to speak.
If so, do you regard it as futile to try to determine the conditions for knowledge? That there just are none (other than emanating from Reason)?
Three o'clock is nothing more than an idea. If we experienced time, we would not need a clock to know it is three o'clock. There is nothing concrete about 3 o'clock. You can not see it, hear it, touch it, taste it. Our measurements are manmade concepts and quite culturally bound. The crazy notion of 3 o'clock, or the 12-month calendar, were not experienced by all cultures, as say a desert, forest, water are actually experienced and known through experience, that is different from knowing time because a teacher taught the concepts of time.
If so, do you regard it as futile to try to determine the conditions for knowledge? That there just are none (other than emanating from Reason)?"
Reasoning and knowing are not equal. With math we can reason measurements of time. Time being intangible and not something we experience. If one lives on a desert island with only males, one can reason females are different, but can know the difference without experience. LOL I think some males can know the difference without having reasons to explain the difference, other than they are impossible to get along with. LOL
Does anyone know Kabala? Kind of a Jewish philosophy. God not having a body could not know what it is like to be human, so Jesus, God in human form, was necessary for knowledge of being human. with this knowledge, the jealous, revengeful, fearsome and punishing god became forgiving and more tolerant of humans. LOL
Knowledge is dependent on experience.
I am not sure what you mean when you say that "Reason has no reasons", for the second word 'reason' is ambiguous. If it is an 'explanatory' reason - so, basically, a cause - then I see no reason to think that Reason's attitudes will lack causes. For instance, if I acquire a true belief in one way, she seems not to adopt the knowledge attitude towards it, whereas if I acquire it another way, she does.
Take Russell's case of the stopped clock. Well, in that case it seems as if the fact the true belief was acquired by fluke explains why Reason did not adopt the knowledge attitude towards it. Thus her 'reason' (in the 'explanatory' sense) for not adopting the knowledge attitude towards that true belief was that it was acquired by fluke.
However, perhaps you mean by 'reason' not 'explanation' but 'normative reason'. But I see no reason to think that she will lack those either. For normative reasons are also attitudes of Reason. And nothing stops her from adopting such attitudes towards other of her attitudes. Just as I can like an attitude of mine, so too can she (that is, she can approve of herself adopting certain attitudes towards things - approve of herself adopting the knowledge attitude towards whatever she adopts it towards).
So I see no reason - no justification, no normative reason - to think that Reason has no reasons.
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, quite. Our reason is to Reason what the internet is to me - it is the means by which I am communicating with you.
I worded myself poorly. You didn't say time couldn't be known. I am saying time can not be known because we can not experience it.
"An abstract concept is an idea about something abstract. 'Concept' is fancy for 'idea'." Yes
"Time is something we have an idea 'of'. It is not itself an idea." It is not? How do we have an idea of time?
"It's like saying 'free will is an abstract idea' or 'morality is an abstract idea'. Same mistake - confusing the idea with what the idea is of." What is free will if not an abstract idea? Morality is a matter of cause and effect, and our understanding of cause and effect is abstract. Animals are not credited with morality because they do not reason as humans reasons, but they behave morally because their survival depends on it.
I don't know about you, but I am so tired nothing is making sense to me, however, I think our argument is right on target. Do you remember Robin Willaims "Reality... what a concept." Have you ever tried LSD? I have heard it can be an experience that changes a person's reason. Good night
Knowing what makes a person nervous is very usefull for me.
Knowledge doesn't 'do' anything.
It does a lot for us
if there are no persons in existence
Facts wouldn't exist because this is a human concept
facts are part of what make propositions true.
You can't have a true proposition with a false fact.
You propose a proposition which is either true or false depending on the verity of the facts.
I experience it every Time I am bored.
Listen to Jazz and tell me they don't experience time.
Ever heard of a biological clock?
OK.
Quoting Bartricks
OK. So we can investigate why Reason adopts a knowledge attitude towards some beliefs and not others, such as the 'no fluke' condition above.
Thus we can say that what beliefs count as knowledge are the beliefs that Reason adopts a knowledge attitude towards. And the beliefs that Reason adopts a knowledge attitude towards are those that are justified, true and something else to be determined (such as the 'no fluke' condition).
So aren't we, in effect, back where we started? That is, we are inquiring about the conditions of knowledge, albeit mediated by Reason.
The word 'reason' is more nebulous than 'knowledge'.
I am reminded of the celebrated anthropological study of the Azande (Evans-Pritchard) a culture in which many events were attributable to 'witchcraft'. So 'a criminal' as convicted by a Western style court would only be acknowledge as 'guilty', by both himself and others, if the subsequent ritual slaughter of a chicken 'disproved his bewitchment' by a third party.
Perhaps it is necessary to return to the agreement...
We agree that language less creatures can have justified true belief.
Now the disagreement...
For you, that(justified true belief) means having a true belief supported by normative reasons(a notion I can't make sense of if that does not include some conventional agreement). That's what normative is... what counts as acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. Those are notions usually reserved for discussions of ethics/morality. I'm puzzled what you think such statements have to do with justified true belief... unless it is normative belief. That's not the only kind of belief... and certainly not the kind historical notions of JTB and their proponents are concerned with.
For me, that(justified true belief) means having well grounded true belief. The difference between well grounded and justified I've already delineated.
The example of the broken clock and my earlier account of that belief still stands neglected. You started to respond, but the notion of "well-grounded" caused you pause. I've since cleared it up. So, let's revisit where we were prior to the distraction shall we?
Believing that a broken clock is working is false belief. Subsequently believing that the time indicated on the broken clock is accurate is belief based upon falsehood(false belief). It is never logically or reasonably acceptable to base belief upon falsehood. Believing a broken clock indicates the correct time is not well grounded belief.
How does a language less creature possibly have a true belief based upon normative reason?
:brow:
Quoting Andrew M
How else do you find out what something is, except empirically? How people use terms can be inconsistent with their understanding of what it is they are talking about - like in this case of "knowledge".
How do you know that you know anything? How do you know what knowing is? Can you know? It is a contradiction to say that you know that you know nothing, and any understanding of knowledge that can lead one to say such things must be wrong.
Can a human actor or a mechanical robot lay an egg like a duck? No. Of course not. So you can distinguish between human actors or mechanical robots and ducks because human actors or mechanical robots can't behave (and look) exactly like a duck, or else how would you be able to distinguish between the them to be able to use different terms to refer to them?
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, so either something else is interfering with Mercury's orbit, or we need to posit a different theory, in which case our knowledge would change. Is knowledge something that can change, or is it a black and white case of either you have it or you don't, and if whether you have it or not is dependent upon whether it is true or not?
Quoting Bartricks
Definition, explanation, etc. whatever you want to call it. You need an explanation of "knowledge" - of determining the common features, or qualities, that entail "knowledge" and "knowing" - before you can say that others have it or not.
Quoting Bartricks
How were the counterexamples devised? If a person exhibits the common features and qualities that are commonly understood as "knowledge", or "knowing", then the counterexamples must be assuming something else about "knowledge" than what is commonly understood. What are they assuming?
Quoting Bartricks
What is a clear case of knowledge possession? How would you know unless you already have an idea of what knowledge is? In explaining a clear case of knowledge possession, you'd be defining the common features and qualities of knowledge possession. How does one possess knowledge, and how is that different from "knowing"?
Quoting Bartricks
It seems to me that you're not saying anything different than I am, except that you seem to be trying to using phancy words to say it, like with your Reason with a capital "R".
If you had read the rest of my post, you would see that I mentioned that knowledge was justified beliefs, where "justified" means tested.
Beliefs are like hypotheses. Knowledge is like a theory. The fact is that the universe exists. Some hold a belief that God created the universe. Others believe that the Big Bang created the universe. We can't test the belief/hypothesis that God created the universe, therefore it remains a belief. We have tested the hypothesis of the Big Bang. We have the expansion and background radiation as evidence. This doesn't mean that the Big Bang theory is true. It just means that it has been tested. It can be falsified, therefore it counts as knowledge, not just a belief.
Truth shouldn't be conflated with knowledge. Any explanation of "knowledge" needs to explain how our "knowledge" is wrong even though we claimed we possessed "knowledge" at the time.
Knowledge is like a tested model of reality, or some specific aspect of it. We test our knowledge every time we use it. When our knowledge leads to predicted results, or goals, then we call that an act of knowing. When our knowledge doesn't lead to predicted results or goals, then we call that an act of not knowing. But then how can we say that we possessed knowledge if we were caught in the act of not knowing? Was it that we never possessed knowledge in the first place, or is it that our knowledge/model changed? Is a common quality of knowledge that it can change, or is an either-or case of either you have it or you don't? If it is the latter, then how do you ever know that you have it, and what would it mean to know that you know or don't know?
No, because now we can recognise that there are two distinct questions here - "what is knowledge?" and "when do we have knowledge?"
The answer to the first question is "an attitude Reason adopts towards some true beliefs". The answer to the second question, well, varies and we can only say rough-and-ready things about it. Such as that, for the most part, we have knowledge when we have a justified true belief, but not always - sometimes we can have knowledge without a justification, sometimes we can have a justified true belief and not have knowledge, and so on.
Hitherto most have thought that they were answering the first question - the "what is knowledge?" question - by answering the second. That's a big mistake. And in a way one is continuing to make it if one faults my view for not being able to answer the second, for that is to fail to recognise that the second is a quite distinct question.
So, my analysis does not answer the second question, but that's not a fault in it - far from it, for it answers the first question and it was the first qusteion, not the second, that we wanted answered.
Note too that though my analysis does not answer the second question - a question it was not seeking to answer - it nevertheless helps us see why it won't have a definitive answer. For once we understand that Reason is a person and knowledge an attitude she is adopting, we can understand that though there is likely to be a character to when and where she adopts that attitude, there need be no rigidity about it. We can understand that there is unlikely to be a signed-sealed-and-delivered set of conditions that will always and everywhere make a belief knowledge, just as we understand in our own case that, say, there is no ingredient whose presence in a foodstuff will always and everywhere lead to us finding that foodstuff delicious.
This is incoherent and/or self-contradictory. When we use something as a means to judge what's acceptable, it is a standard by which we determine what's acceptable. The standard has everything to do with what is being determined by it's use.
So, it makes no sense at all to say that normative reasons are not conventional.
This is just nonsense.
Reason does not use language. All assertion, direction, and prescription is language use. Reason cannot assert, direct, or prescribe.
It is self-evident enough to say that persons and only persons assert, direct, and prescribe, because people use language. Reason does not. Reason is not equivalent to persons.
Well, not really. He describes developing that theory as no more than farting.
It was rejected from the start.
I'll add to the dualities described here, by pointing out that one can know that such-and-such is the case; and that one can also now how to perform some action. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that is well worth considering.
Isn't it odd that we talk of knowing in both these cases? Why should we have the very same word for such disparate activities?
Are they really that disparate? They seem closely related to me, types of knowing.
It is a bit strange, the way we have so many senses of the same word instead of new ones. Im under the impression english is very bad for that sort of thing but I speak only english, so nothing to reference for me. Language thing or english thing?
Okaay.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes she can and does.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes she is.
This claim:
Reason asserts, requires, demands, bids, favours, values
is 'true'.
This claim:
Reason does not assert, require, demand, bid, favour, or value
is 'false'.
This claim: only a person can assert, require, demand, bid, favour, value
is 'true'.
From them it follows that Reason is a person.
You disagree. You have no argument for your view, however, and you are committed to making claims that are manifestly false. I can't stop you making them, but thankfully no matter how many times you make them - or how passionately - that won't make them true.
Oh, okay then. What a good point!! You're not arguing, you're just making false statements. You just don't know what a normative reason is. They're not 'conventions' or 'what is conventional'. I can have reason to do something even if there are no conventions, and often we have reason to defy convention. You're just showcasing your ignorance.
This doesn't seem to be on topic - which is knowledge, not time - but even if time is not experienced, it would not follow that it can't be known. I don't experience 'my self' for instance - my self is an experiencer, that-which-has-experiences, but it is not itself experienced. Nevertheless, I can surely know that I exist. And I can know that this argument:
1. P
2. Q
3. therefore P and Q
is valid, even though I cannot experience validity.
Plus it also seems false to say that we do not experience time. I seem to be experiencing the present, for example, and when I remember something it - its content - seems past - and when I anticipate something, what I am anticipating seems future.
No, I have never tried LSD. Why would I want to try something that might change my reason? That would be like rubbing salt in my eyes in order to see better.
Reality isn't a concept. It is something we have a concept 'of'.
The idea of a person is not a person.
A person is that which answers to the idea of a person.
The idea of free will is not free will.
Free will is something we have an idea of. And free will itself is that which answers to the idea.
So you're confusing ideas with what they're ideas of. That's like confusing a book about Napoleon with Napoleon.
Ideas are 'about' things - they have 'content', the content being that which they're about. You, for instance, have some kind of an idea about me. But I am not an idea. When you go to sleep your idea of me disappears, but I do not. So, though you can have an idea about me, and I about you, we are not thereby rendered ideas. The same applies to reality, truth, time, free will, etc, etc.
What makes it so?
:brow:
What makes it so?
Nothing is 'the truth'. Everything is contains a degree of truth.
Reason is the effort to express 'reality' in words and numbers.
This is so inconsistent, it can't be philosophy.
If knowledge is "an attitude Reason adopts towards some true beliefs", then people have knowledge when they have an "attitude Reason adopts towards some true beliefs". But what are true beliefs?
The second question is not distinct because you can tell when someone has knowledge because you have defined it. So people have it when they fit the definition that you have proposed, which is a dumb way of explaining it, IMO.
Reason is the process of providing justifications for what you believe. The justifications have to be logically sound - which means that the conclusion follows from the justifications. Truth is a property that we shouldn't be attributing to knowledge. Truth and knowledge are distinct, not what knowledge is and how to know whether someone has it or not.
No, reason is the effort of linking justifications to beliefs.
Dualistic thinking is the cause of many of the problems of philosophy.
You know how to play soccer by knowing that you can't touch the ball with your hands, that your teammates wear the same color jersey as you, that you have to kick the ball into the goal more than the other team to win, etc.
You know how to tie your shows by knowing that you cross the strings and then fold one of them under the other, then knowing that you make a loop with one string and fold it under the other string and pull, etc.
You know how to get to work by knowing that you have to put the keys in the ignition and turn on your car and drive your car to the main road just down the street from your home, etc.
I can recall how to do something without doing it, just like I can recall that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 without someone asking a question about when the Battle of Hastings was. I possess information/knowledge that I can access arbitrarily, not just within the social contexts it is used.
I would have accepted: 'reason is the effort to justify our beliefs' and that would not have precluded 'reason is the effort to express 'reality' in words and numbers'.
Dualistic thinking is the solution to most problems. Most (everyday/philosophical) problems are dualistic by nature.
Or you're using all sorts of commonly used words in odd ways?
:wink:
Reason is the effort to justify our beliefs and language-use is the effort to express reality in words and numbers. Language-use isnt necessarily a use of reason. We can say unreasonable things about reality using words and numbers.
Okay, let us go with your experience of time. Which takes longer, for you to use the bathroom or for someone else to use the bathroom? People commonly experience time quite differently when they are waiting for something compared to when they are having fun, and oh my goodness does fly when I am writing!
For sure I don't think like everyone else. This greatly troubled me until my later years and being okay with being different. :joke:
Like what?
What we need here is quantum physics and getting past dualistic thinking.
It would have sufficed if you had stated: you can say unreasonable things.
What is different in how you think to other people?
Yes very funny. You know quantum theory is all about the dualistic nature of matter right?
The most obvious one that comes to mind would be nurture vs nature argument. But I can think of many: Freedom vs responsibility, private vs public... too many to mention all. Yin and Yang, Day and night, winter and summer, high tide and low tide. cold and warm, light and dark is a common thread in all philosophical pursuits. The pendulum of time sways to and fro. Even DNA is are 2 interconnected sinuses. Up and down like a spiral staircase they wind their way to the top.
What we need is a theory that joins the theory of the micro with the theory of the macro. The dualism is a result of our ignorance and skewed perspective
Quoting ovdtogt
Quoting ovdtogt
You said that dualistic thinking is the solution and that the problem is dualistic by nature.
I'm saying that thinking in dualistic terms creates the problem in the first place. Thinking of it as nature VS nurture is the problem. To imply that they work against each other is the problem. The fact is that you can't have one without the other. They both work in unison to define your being.
Day/night, winter/summer, high/low tide, etc. are cycles - a process. Because one aspect cannot exist without the other, one aspect is meaningless on it's own. Thinking of them working together, instead of in opposition, you get at the true meaning of the process.
.
All I have done so far is offer some examples of knowing-how reducing to knowing-that. I don't know if I'd say all of them do.
I was hoping you might provide some examples to the contrary?
See the thread on Truth! And our evidence that such claims are true is that our reason represents them to be.
For example, if you think the walls are talking to you, then you're nuts, right? Why? Because walls can't express desires and beliefs as they have none, because they're mindless. Now, that's self-evident. You can't investigate it empirically. But our reason assures us that those objects that lack minds, cannot do things such as assert, require, favour, demand, value.
That's the best possible evidence that mindless things cannot do those things.
Now, if you just insist they can, then although that's your prerogative, you're just ignoring the evidence and asserting rather than arguing.
Here's how you make a case for something. If the thing you're making a case for isn't already self-evident to reason, then you need to show how its truthis implied by propositions that are self-evident to reason.
Propositions that are self-evident to reason are the stopping points of justifications. There are exceptions - such as when we have reason to believe that our faculty of reason is malfunctioning.
Now, to make a case against me I claim that you are going to have to construct arguments that will have premises that are not - not - self-evident to reason.
Perhaps I am wrong about that, but so far you have provided no evidence that I am.
Insisting, apropos nothing whatsoever, that Reason does not represent, direct, assert, require, demand, is not to raise a reasonable doubt about anything I have argued. Like I say, just pick up a book about Reason - a book about ethics, a text book in philosophy - and see how far you get before some mention is made of directives of reason, or demands of reason, or requirements of reason, and so on. It won't be far.
'Reason' is just the name for the source of those directives, demands and so on.
If you think 'directives' of reason do not exist, then argue for that - and argue for it without appealing to any directives of reason (an impossible task).
Perhaps you think that directives do not need a source. Well, they do. A directive can't exist by itself anymore than the age of an object can exist absent the object.
Perhaps you think that directives can be issued by things that are not minds. Okay, like what? Give a clear example.
If you can't do those things, all you're doing is saying "no!" Anyone can do that. Einstein: E=mc2. Creativesoul: No!
It isn't inconsistent at all. It is philosophy. And also, inconsistency is not inconsistent with philosophy - philosophers are inconsistent all the time and spend a lot of their time trying to find inconsistencies in each other's positions. Owned.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Er, no. Now 'that' is inconsistent. I'm not inconsistent, you are. If knowledge is an attitude Reason adopts towards some true beliefs, then people have knowledge when they have a 'true belief' that Reason is adopting that attitude towards. Not when 'they' have the attitude, but when 'Reason' does. Owned.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The two questions are distinct. Knowing 'that' someone has something is not the same as knowing 'what' it is that they have. I can know that you own a keg of beer without knowing what beer is made of. O.W.N.E.D
Quoting Harry Hindu
It isn't dumb, but it will appear that way to the dumb. If it was dumb, why am I finding it so easy to own you?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Now that's dumb. Conceptually confused. It's like denying bachelors lack wives - it does no more than show you've failed to grasp the concept under analysis. Knowledge essentially involves having a true belief. Nobody, but nobody, denies that. What else it requires is debated, and what it actually 'is' is distinct again. I so own you.
They can work against each other. But they can also work in conjunction. Our male and female characteristics for example do not need to be in, but can be in opposition. As in Yin/Yang, when one increases the other must by necessity, decrease. They work in conjunction. If you do not realize the dualistic property of our nature you will never fundamentally understand how we operate. People used to believe in the Tabula Rasa theory. Our understanding of the role of genetics has improved our knowledge in that respect.
Oooo, someone's been on the Krishnamurti again. Truth is one but many. Love is truth. Truth is a tapeworm peeking out the bum of the cat of reality.
The philosopher J.L.Austin thought that the desire to be profound is the enemy of philosophy. I think he may have had a point.
Sleep vs awake work in unison and define our being. They can also be in opposition when your activities don't allow you to get enough sleep. In this case there is an imbalance between sleep and activity where your activities are in opposition to your sleep. A problem arises when an imbalance exist in the dual nature of our being.
Not at all. I am merely noting the fact that many 'truths' we adhere to are in themselves refinements of past 'truths'. I am always reminded of how Einstein continued to refine the theories of Newton and how we are still refining the theories of Darwin. Knowledge is an iterative process that slowly builds on the foundation of earlier discoveries. This process will never stop. Even Einstein had to contend with those scientists that continued his work elaborating quantum theory demonstrating that his theory fell apart at the quantum level.
When it comes to the subject of this OP, which seems to be simply knowing that; I would say that it just consists in those true beliefs we have good evidence for. So, as to the OP's example of the clock that has stopped working at 3pm telling the correct time by chance: believing it is 3pm does not count as knowing it is 3 pm because we do not have good evidence for that belief.
As to the other example, where all the other clocks have stopped and we just happen to believe it is 3 pm on account of seeing the one clock that is working, that does count as knowledge because we do happen to have good evidence (a working clock) for that belief.
I don't see anything to be puzzled over here.
Glad we agree!
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, they are distinguishable. But we seem to have different ideas about what your duck definition can include. The common definition for a duck specifies the genus which serves to exclude other things that just happen to have a similar appearance or behavioral characteristics.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm of the view that truth is a condition of (propositional) knowledge which I regard as a thesis about how people ordinarily use those terms.
That's because you don't understand the original cases. (I mean, philosophers are and have been puzzled by these cases, so the fact you're not should give you pause - you shouldn't assume the philosophical community is not up to where you are, you should assume you're not up to where they are).
A true belief that is based on evidence is not equivalent to knowledge, for we can easily imagine cases in which someone acquires a true belief based on evidence yet it is manifest to the reason of most that they lack knowledge.
For instance, imagine there is a murder scene and upon seeing a red hair on a chair I form the belief that Terry did it. I have no special reason to think that the red hair came from Terry's head - for there are loads of red haired people. Nevertheless, the sight of it causes me to form the belief that Terry did the crime.
Now, in fact Terry did do the crime and the hair is, in fact, good evidence that he did it (as DNA testing on it confirms it is from Terry's head).
So, I formed my true belief on the basis of good evidence. Yet clearly I did not 'know' it was Terry. Why? Because although the hair was good evidence that he did it, I was not justified in believing that it was.
As for the clock cases - even if the person does qualify as knowing in the second case, it then shows that one can know even when it was by pure fluke that one's true belief was true.
Thanks for your reply, just one question below for the moment:
Quoting Bartricks
What is an example of that, on your view?
No, I should assume neither until I have good evidence to do so. You are fallaciously mounting a kind of "argument from authority" here.
Quoting Bartricks
Yes, but you obviously did not have good evidence on the basis of the red hair alone. It is the DNA testing of the red hear that constitutes good evidence.
Quoting Bartricks
No, it may have been "by pure fluke" that they had good evidence, but that doesn't matter; it still qualifies as good evidence. Their true belief may not "seem" to qualify as knowledge to you, but that fact is irrelevant. How things seem to you has no bearing on the matter, and only says something about you.
So, still no puzzle.
You do have good evidence - the fact that people clever enough to be paid to think about such things find the cases prima facie puzzling.
If your doctor tells you to get the mole checked out, whereas your mindless friends all tell you that the mole is fine, you're a fool if you think you've got no good reason to think you need to get it checked out.
Quoting Janus
No, upon doing the DNA testing we realize that the hair is good evidence. It was good evidence all along. Even if no testing is carried out on it, it is good evidence that Terry did it.
So you need to adjust your analysis from 'good evidence' to 'justifiably believed to be good evidence'. But then the original clock case refutes that view.
I use 'justified' to mean 'has a normative reason to believe' (which is uncontroversial). So in saying that sometimes a person can 'know' something without having any justification for the belief, I mean that sometimes a person can know something even though there is no normative reason for them to believe it.
Let's say a total stranger has been accused of a crime and some evidence is provided that they did it and I form the belief that they did it based on the evidence (and they did actually do it). Well, I think I qualify as 'knowing' that they did it. But in this case I clearly have normative reason to believe they did it: the evidence provides me with normative reason to believe they did it.
But now imagine that a good friend of mine has been accused of an equivalent crime and some evidence is provided that they did it. Do I have reason to believe they are guilty?
Well, I think it is plausible that I do not. The evidence is relevantly similar to the evidence in the previous case. But the important difference is that this time it is my close friend who stands accused. And I think it is plausible that I have a moral obligation to my friends not immediately to think the worst of them. And I think it is plausible that the moral obligation to be a good friend means that the evidence in this case does not provide me - me - with any normative reason to believe in my friend's guilt. Others, yes. But me, no.
Now imagine that I nevertheless do believe that he is guilty on the basis of the evidence. I shouldn't, but I do. And now imagine that he is, in fact, guilty. Well, it seems to me that I 'knew' he was guilty. I knew the first guy was guilty, and it seems no less true to say that I knew my friend was guilty too, for I formed both beliefs in exactly the same manner (I formed them based on the existence of the evidence). But in the first case the accusation provided me with normative reason to believe in the person's guilty, whereas in the second it did not. Thus in the latter case my true belief qualifies as knowledge despite the lack of any normative reason for me to believe it.
That means you do have to have a justification for your knowledge. Knowledge without justification does not exist. If you believe something, you will have a justification for it.
Oh dear, we are getting prickly aren't we? Isn't past your bedtime?
You said this:
Quoting ovdtogt
Another pronouncement. And all the claims are false. Knowledge without justification does appear to exist - I described a case.
And it does not at all follow that if one believes something, one has a justification for believing it. Unjustified beliefs exist (most of yours are of this kind, for instance).
No-one holds a belief they would not justify to you, if you asked them to. They might not (yet) have formulated their justification but they do believe they have a justification for that belief.
Another pronouncement. And it's false. Are you being sponsored by "Total Crap PLC" or something?
Even if it is true that everyone would justify their beliefs to me if asked - and that's obviously not true - that is not the same as their beliefs being justified, for one might try and justify a belief that there was no normative reason to believe.
I didn't say that if I believe they hold unjustified beliefs, their beliefs are unjustified. This just underlines my point: you can believe your belief is justified without it being so.
But even if I did hold the absurd view that if I believe someone is unjustified, necessarily they are unjustified, this would not imply I was a solipsist. Far from it: it would be a belief about the status of someone else's belief, and thus would imply I was not a solipsist.
I think you'll be getting a bonus from Total Crap Plc this month.
So are you going to retract that statement?
Tell me one belief that you hold that you do not have a justification for.
He's been all over the place...
Fun though...
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Bartricks
Looks like you're squirming to me...
What makes that claim true? What makes the other claim false?
Straight forward questions. Given that truth is prior to all language, it ought be a pretty straightforward answer.
Again: see the thread on truth. This thread is on 'knowledge'.
Quoting Bartricks
Quoting Bartricks
This is just ridiculous. I cannot take it seriously.
That's the problem the closed minded have always had with new solutions to old problems
JTB is in no need of any solution. There's no problem with it. There are no examples of well grounded true belief that we would be unwilling to call knowledge if we first knew the flaws in both broken clocks and Gettier cases.
I've already adequately argued for that by showing that both of Gettier's cases are cases of malpractice, and I've pointed out the obviousness that believing a broken clock is working does not count as good ground.
We all know this is true.
It doesn't matter if the believer doesn't realize the clock is not working. It's not working. They believe that it is working. That is false belief. False belief does not make good ground for knowledge. Luck? Sure. So, that case is not a case of well grounded true belief even if it is a case of being lucky.
And...
It is just absurd to deny the following...
Reason is quite simply not the sort of thing that is capable of making assertions. Reason is not equivalent to a person. All Reason is language use. People are not. All Reason owes it's very existence to language use. People do not. People are prior to language use. Reason is not. People are prior to Reason. Reason cannot be equivalent to that which existed in it's entirety prior to it. People did. Reason cannot be equivalent to people.
Now...
Can we move on yet?
Christ, this is tedious. No. You. Haven't.
Saying 'malpractice' a lot doesn't do anything. I don't have a clue what you mean by it - and nor do you, you just read it on a page on the internet somewhere and thought if you use it you'll sound like you're steeped in the literature.
As for being well-grounded - well, I refuted that view. That view is refuted by cases in which someone's belief is based on another true belief, but fails to qualify as knowledge.
here's my characterisation of this debate.
Bartricks: here's an eye-wateringly brilliant thesis.
Creativesoul: promising start, but let me teach you. Malpractice. Malpractice. Mally, pracky, tice.
Bartricks: er, what?
Creativesoul: grounded. Well grounded. True beliefs that have lots of ground around them are knowledge. There is no problem. I have spoken.
Bartricks: not sure what you mean by 'well grounded'
Creativesoul: I mean this. Or that. Or something.
Bartricks: well, if you mean this, then this case refutes you.
Creativesoul: answer this question
Bartricks. Answered
Creativesoul: Now this one....and this one....aand this one.
Bartricks. Answered
Creativesoul: Well, those answers aren't quite right. Now this one, and this one, and this one
Bartricks: answered - why are you asking me these questions?
Creativesoul: your view is silly. Ridiculous. Here's an argument against it that has premises that have nothing whatsoever to be said for them.
Bartricks; Your argument appears to be rubbish.
Creativesoul: your view is absurd. It isn't on the internet and I can't associate it with a big name. So it is rubbish.
Bartricks: your argument is rubbish - its premise have nothing to be said for them and appear false on their face - my argument is good, as its premises are self-evidently true or conceptual truths.
Creativesoul: there's no problem. As I showed you earlier. Yes, you took me to the cleaners, but I can't realise that becsaue I have blinkers on.
Bartricks: here's my parody of our discussion
Creativesoul: this is pointless. You can't receive my instruction. You don't listen to me or any of the other intellectual peons on here. You need therapy. You are a terrible person. How dare you use reasoned argument to show things. You are in need of help. Goodbye!!
Bartricks: bye squidy.
Did you miss this?
You certainly have not given in subsequent due attention.
:brow:
Or this?
Quoting creativesoul
Tedious?
Fairly straightforward if you ask me. Which part of any of my arguments, in particular, are you objecting to and what are grounds supporting that objection?
That's an odd account of what's taken place here. Accounting malpractice clearly to anyone who looks for themselves.
Invalid inferences can be based upon true belief. They are not knowledge.
So what?
That's not a problem for well grounded true belief. Invalid inference is not well grounded. You seem to be a bit confused.
Asking me how I think differently is like asking a person with schizophrenia how s/he thinks differently. The experience of being different is not easy to explain. :lol: How about people have thought I do drugs and I do not, or in forums, people rarely understand my intended meaning. I come to a thought with many different thoughts and I can not understand why others don't get the complexity, while they totally miss what I think is important.
Kind of like you challenging me on the notion that quantum physics is not dualistic. In my mind, it is not dualistic :lol: Nothing is either/or. It is all this and that and that interacting.
Quoting Thomas Herold
Looks like Plato's perfect forms doesn't it? I thought Plato's perfect forms were just a funky imagination, but now I see, with a different consciousness Plato's perfect forms make sense. When we do not understand something, perhaps we do not come to it with the necessary consciousness?
Quantum mechanics providestwo fundamental examples of the duality between position and momentum, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle ?x?p ? ?/2 stating that position and momentum cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrary precision, and the de Broglie relation p = ?k which states the momentum and wavevector of a free particle are proportional to each other.[1] In this context, when it is unambiguous, the terms "momentum" and "wavevector" are used interchangeably. However, the de Broglie relation is not true in a crystal.
Er, I think you're the confused one. You don't seem to understand how Gettier cases work, or have any stable notion of what a 'well grounded' belief is.
Gettier style cases can be constructed for any mechanism of belief acquisition that does not guarantee the truth of the belief.
Here's why. A belief can be justified, or well-grounded, or warranted, or whatever, yet false.
So, just imagine such a scenario. That is, imagine that the procedure has been followed perfectly, yet the belief it has resulted in is false.
Now imagine the case again, only imagine that this time the resulting belief is, by fluke, true.
That's a Gettier case.
And in such cases it seems clear to the reason of most that the believer falls short of having knowledge. They're arrived at their belief impeccably, and it is true, but it isn't knowledge.
Thus, it seems that no combination of true belief and belief-formation procedure is sufficient for knowledge.
As such knowledge itself cannot be reduced to some combination of true belief and belief-formation procedure.
I'm going to attempt to get you to understand something... one more time...
If a belief is justified(well-grounded) and false, then it poses no issue whatsoever for justified true belief. False beliefs are irrelevant.
No, take a humble pie and eat the whole thing - then go to the humble pie aisle in the supermarket and buy several more humble pies, and eat them.
You - you - don't understand Gettier cases.
Yes, obviously you don't have knowledge if you have a false belief. I said that. Everyone says that.
I was saying how you 'construct' a Gettier case.
So, once again, first imagine a case where a person acquires a belief impeccably, yet the belief is false.
So, Smith believes Jones will get the job and believes that the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket, and he has acquired both beliefs in an epistemically responsible way (and make that any way you goddamn like, short of a way that guarantees truth). Now imagine that Jones does get the job but he happens not to have 10 coins in his pocket.
Now that - that - is not ('not') a Gettier case. That's a case in which a person has acquired a belief - the belief that the person who gets the job has 10 coins in his pocket - in an impeccable manner, yet it is false.
Next step. Imagine the case again, but this time imagine that, by fluke, the belief is true. So, Smith - not Jones - gets the job and he happens, by fluke, to have 10 coins in his pocket.
That - that - is a Gettier case.
Why? Because now Smith has acquired a 'true' belief in an epistemically responsible manner. And yet it does not qualify as knowledge.
Thus, the thesis that knowledge = true belief acquired in an epistemically responsible manner is false.
By the way - the example I gave in which the person, by fluke, looks at the one working clock in a town in which every clock bar one has stopped.....does that remind you of a case?
Try again...
Smith believes that he - Smith - will get the job. His belief is well grounded(justified). It's also false.
Do you understand that? Do you follow me here, so far?
So, Smith believes that the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket.
But as it happens, Jones does not get the job. Smith does. And Smith happens to have 10 coins in his pocket.
Thus, Smith's belief that the person who gets the job has 10 coins in his pocket turns out - by fluke - to be true. Smith also acquired the belief in an epistemically responsible fashion. Hence, Smith has a justified, or well grounded, or warranted true belief - yet it doesn't qualify as knowledge.
Also, if you knew your stuff - and you don't, but want to give the impression you do (hence your thinking you need to 'educate' me), then you'd be able to answer my question.
So I'll ask it again: what case does my case involving the one working clock in the town full of clocks that do not work remind you of?
We can go through that one if you like... Gettier's been solved, whether you realized it not.
You don't understand the cases. YOu really don't.
Alright, that's enough. You do not know what you're talking about. I suggest you peruse the paper.
They're very well known in the literature. Literature I seem to be better acquainted with than you.
Yet you're confident about these matters - confident that Gettier cases have been 'solved'. Hmm. Interesting. I wonder who's right...…
Quoting creativesoul
I'm looking at it right now. I suggest you read me.
:yikes:
Let's look at Case I...
So, originally(without revisiting the paper) I had thought that the referent of "the man with ten coins in his pocket" needed to be Smith. I was mistaken about that. It needs to be Jones, because - as you've noted - that is who Smith believes will get the job...
There... humble pie and all. My mistake... but an insignificant one. My charge of accounting malpractice still hold good. The rules of entailment permit a change in both meaning and truth conditions. Case I shows this nicely.
Smith believed Jones would get the job, and no one else. Gettier needs Smith to believe someone other than Jones will get the job in order for his belief to be true, but he doesn't.
What Gettier does show is that the rules of entailment are not logical for they do not preserve truth.
Yeah, I've heard of 'em. Those are easy to refute as well.
Yes, you heard about them 3 or 4 minutes ago - from me.
Quoting creativesoul
That's the spirit. Get used to saying that. That's just one tiny crumb of humble pie there - I've got a spade of it for you.
Quoting creativesoul
You mean like I did and you didn't? Drop the teacher act. I don't need my hand held. I'm the one frogmarching you to school, sonny.
That's the refutation of Gettier Case I in a nutshell. Do you understand that?
Now, you've stopped eating the humble pie - remember, I understand these cases far better than you. So stop acting like the reverse is true. It's a big spade o pie and the sooner you get your lips around it the better.
Again: you don't undersand them.
I mean, how the hell does this:
Quoting creativesoul
refute them?!?
You really don't have a clue what you're talking about!! Not a clue. How do you boil an egg? I imagine you insist on first cracking it into a frying pan and then hurling the whole combo into a hedge.
Gettier cases refute justified-true-belief accounts of knowledge (and any other account of knowledge that appeals to some mechanism of belief acquisition that falls short of guaranteeing truth).
To overcome them you'd need to specify a mechanism of belief acquisition that did not guarantee the truth of the beliefs it leads to, yet is immune to Gettier-style refutation. By all means give that a go, but since no-one has yet been able to do that - indeed the task looks hopeless - I am not going to hold my breath.
Calm down. I'll show you.
First...
Smith believes Jones will get the job. We agree here, right?
That's not true. I've overcome them(it's a refutation as best I can tell) by virtue of showing how Smith does not believe what Gettier needs Smith to believe. It's common sense. I'm more than happy to explain it, if you're willing to listen.
Quoting creativesoul
There's no 'we' here. Just explain. Lay it out for teacher. Show your working.
No you aren't or you'd have done so. All filler, no killer.
Remember - you don't even understand the cases you're talking about.
Read the article and then read some commentaries on it. Then realize I'm right.
Note how nice I am being in allowing you to go off in a self-righteous huff and save face.
Hold your horses... Jeez. Don't be such a dick. You give me two minutes to refute Gettier? I had to revisit the paper, just to make sure I was not involved in an accounting malpractice. Two minutes to do what you said cannot be done? That's a bit unreasonable a timeframe, dontcha think?. No worries, my good man. Thing is, I can do it on the fly, because I know the underlying issues by heart. Took me seven minutes.
:razz:
Smith believes Jones will get the job. He knows Jones has ten coins in his pocket. He infers that the man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job.
Here's the rub...
Smith's belief - and hence his inference is about Jones, not anyone else. Someone other than Jones gets the job. Smith's belief is false. The referent of "the man with ten coins in his pocket" is Jones... not Smith.
That's the accounting malpractice.
It's a conflation of proposition and belief.
Oh, believe me... I've studied it very carefully. It's just been a while, and it's not the only thing going on in my life....
:wink:
Which makes it all the sadder that you don't understand them.
Quoting creativesoul
That's it?? That's what you think overcomes Gettier cases? laughable.
He believes 'the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket". He also believes Jones will get the job and that Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
That's the sleight of hand my good man... As I've explained several times heretofore. The rules of entailment permit a change in the truth conditions and meaning of Smith's belief. It does not have to be that way though. We do not have to conflate belief and propositions, which is what Gettier has done, and neglected the details of Smith's belief in the process. He did the same thing in Case II.
We're taking account of Smith's belief here. "The person" refers to Jones. "The person" does not refer to Smith. Smith does not believe that anyone other than Jones will get the job. Gettier needs him to. He doesn't. He can't.
Gettier needs "the person with ten coins in his pocket" to refer to Smith. It doesn't, not in Smith's belief anyway. That's the conflation between the truth conditions of that inference as proposition and the truth conditions of that inference as Smith's belief. They are not one in the same thing.
It's Smith's belief about Jones, and it's false. Therefore, not a problem for JTB.
QED
Yup. That's it. Simple. Common sense. Eloquent. Easy to understand. What more could you ask?
:wink:
Yeah, that's it...
:kiss:
No it isn't. The relevant belief is not "Jones has 10 coins in his pocket" but "the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket".
For instance, that belief is 'true' (you'd have to insist it is false, yes? For by your reasoning what would make it true is Jones and Jones alone occupying the role with 10 coins in his pocket)
As I said, what's core to a Gettier example is that a person forms a belief in an epistemically responsible fashion, and the belief is true, but it is true by fluke (which is always going to be possible so long as the epistemically responsible fashion does not guarantee the truth of the belief it furnishes you with).
So, to see this just imagine another way of setting up the case. Imagine that Smith has justified beliefs that Jones will get the job and that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket. Now imagine that prior to the interview someone pickpockets Jones and steals the 10 coins. Then imagine that, by pure fluke, just after the pickpocketing incident, Jones finds 10 coins in the street and puts them in his pocket. Then Jones gets the job.
Now Smith believes that the person who gets the job has 10 coins in his pocket. And it turns out that the belief is true. But because it was by pure fluke that it was true - given the earlier incidents - Smith's belief, though justified, does not qualify as knowledge.
Perhaps you will reply that this time Smith's belief is about the 10 original coins and not the subsequent ones (which is prima facie absurd, of course). But in that case just imagine that the pickpocket dropped the coins after pickpocketing Jones and Jones, by pure fluke, found them on the street and put them in his pocket. Again, Smith's belief is going to be true and justified, yet not knowledge.
Yes!
Bullseye!!!
Whose belief is it, and who precisely does it refer to?
Who is it about?
Who is the referent of "the person with ten coins in his pocket"?
Not Smith.
It's Smith's belief and it's all about Jones.
Therefore, it's false, and again poses no problem for JTB.
I suggest you re-read what I've written tonight.
Smith's belief is that Jones is the man with ten coins in his pocket who will get the job. That belief is false. No problem for JTB.
Yes. It is.
Your 'solution' demonstrably doesn't work.
Quoting creativesoul
Er, no I won't be doing that except to quote this line, which I feel is apt: Quoting creativesoul
Ding ding! Oh, there's the bell - playtime is over and lessons must begin.
Now, the belief is about the holder of the role. (A role that, in the original case, Smith gets).
So the belief is 'true'. And it is 'justified'. And yet it does not qualify as knowledge.
You are going to have to insist - absurdly -that the belief is false. That's wrong. It's true.
Now children, read my variation on the case - a variation that no-one needs to run, but that I ran just to highlight how profoundly wrong you are about the nature of the problem.
In my variation Smith's belief unquestionably refers to Jones, and to the coins in Jones's pocket. And it is true (because in my variation Jones does get the job). And yet it does not qualify as knowledge.
So, now write down in your copy books the following:
What's essential to a Gettier case is that a person acquires a true belief in an epistemically responsible way, yet the belief is true by fluke (which is always going to be possible so long as the epistemically responsible mechanism does not guarantee truth).
If that person is anyone other than Jones, IT IS NOT Smith's belief. That's the accounting malpractice.
It's a conflation between "the man with ten coins in his pocket" when examined as an inferred proposition(which is what Gettier mistakenly does), and "the man with ten coins in his pocket" when examined as Smith's inference from his own belief.
They are not the same thing. They do not have the same truth conditions. Therefore, they do not have the same meaning. That much is clear. In Smith's belief "the person..." refers to Jones, and only Jones. When regarding a general proposition, "the person" could refer to anyone and everyone who has ten coins in his pocket and gets the job.
We're taking account of Smith's belief.
Salva veritate.
Have the decency to read my example. In my example Jones gets the job and Smith's belief is true and justified but not knowledge.
Can you read??? First - no, you're just plain wrong. But second, even if you're not - read. my. variation.
In my variation Jones - Jones - gets the job and the belief is true and yet isn't knowledge.
You're wrong - read all about it.
I have not carefully read your examples. Let's stick to Gettier, for now. Resolve that first. Then we can move on.
Likewise. Have the decency to at least offer valid objection to what I've offered here tonight.
read them then. Have some bloody manners and read them. I read your junk and now I have to wash my eyes.
Read them and see how easy it is to refute you.
You need to deal with this properly first. I love these problems. I'd be more than happy to discuss your own barn facades or whatever other Gettier style example you'd like to provide. After you deal with what I've put forth here...
Easy question.
Since Smith believes that Jones will get the job, and since Smith believes that Jones is the person with ten coins in his pocket...
Who... exactly... is Smith thinking about, who is Smith's belief about, when he infers 'the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job"?
Who?
:brow:
Pots and kettles.
a) it doesn't
b) even if it did, it is a piece of cake to come up with variations where Smith's belief is clearly about Jones and is true and is justified and yet fails to qualify as knowledge.
Blather...
You've not offered a valid objection to what I've offered. Hand waving won't cut it. Bald assertions won't do either.
It's a silly point. As I explain in my replies to you. Replies you don't bother reading.
Read them.
And you have no manners. Read my replies. Actually read them and stop just saying I have no objections. Hundreds of bloody words of replies to you - hundreds of words of objections that you don't bother reading. Unbelievable!
Read them and learn a thing or two.
Really?
Are you saying that Smith does not believe that Jones is the person with ten coins in his pocket?
Are you saying that Smith does not believe that Jones is the person who will get the job?
Are you saying that Smith believes someone other than Jones will get the job?
:brow:
I'll look if you answer the simple questions I ask.
Well, I've already looked, and this...
Quoting Bartricks
I'm not granting the justification out of hand.
Argue for it, and I'll look again. What belief is justified to start with, and which belief is rightfully inferred from that(by the rules of entailment) that amounts to JTB, but not knowledge.
Spell it out.
There's your format.
Pots and kettles.
Looks fine by me. Jones got the job. JTB.
What's the pickpocket bit aside from a red herring? The part about how many coins Jones has in his pocket at the time of his interviewing and getting hired is not justified to begin with. I mean, who in their right mind would think that one was justified in believing that the quantity of coins in one's pocket would remain the same over that timeframe?
So...
Meh.
Like I said, I'm not granting the justification aspect out of hand.
Gettier got the belief aspect wrong, and you've gotten the justification aspect wrong, in this example anyway. Got another one?
I don't think... I know.
:kiss:
I don't think... I know.
What you believe you know is knowledge.
I think I know that what anyone thinks they know is not knowledge.
So, what do you think of my approach to Gettier here... the distinction between the inference(by entailment) as a proposition, and the inference(by entailment) as Smith's belief? Do you agree that those have different truth conditions, and thus meaning? Do you find the point about the rigid designator cogent?
Seems undeniable to me.
I think I know that what anyone thinks they know is not knowledge
Everything we know is what we believe to know. All knowledge is what we believe to be knowledge.
You believe you know that what anyone believes is not knowledge.
Interesting statement. That ought to stir some thinking. :up:
Oh yes, thinking of life as process instead of opposites is beautiful.
You mean like baking a cake?
:lol: Whoo, dude you are way over my head. I don't know if you are agreeing with what I said or disagreeing. This is a wonderful case of knowledge being wasted on the ignorant. :lol: What is knowledge? I don't know. I don't have it.
I speak out of total frustration. I have books on math and quantum physics and read them in a futile effort to understand what is being said. I get some of it, but not well enough to think in the terms of those fields of knowledge. Kind of like diabetes my head isn't sensitive to that insulin. :cry:
Totally with you there brother/sister. I just skim over the top with most of it. But I find thinking in opposites gives me great clarity in my understanding of things.
I wasn't aware that the goal was to come up with beautiful ideas (which is subjective). I was trying to come up with useful ideas. IMO, useful ideas are beautiful ideas. The theory of evolution by natural selection is a beautiful idea because it solves the dualistic dichotomy of man vs nature by making man part of nature.
What, are you 12 years old?
I was just reiterating what you said, so if I was inconsistent it was really you that is being inconsistent. What is Reason, and what is the thing that has a true belief? What is a true belief? How do you know the belief is true?
Wow, I like that thought. I love that thought! :heart: What a wonderful way of thinking of baking a cake. I don't think I have ever attempted to think of such things as process. It has always been a matter of reading and mixing the ingredients and rotely following directions but not actually thinking about what is happening. I could be wrong, but I think education for technology is more about rotely following steps than actually thinking what is happening.
I see a problem in our language. Spell check guides me to say "thinking about what is happening". That little word "about" separates me from what is happening. Come to think of it, how much can we know without the language to name the concepts? What does language have to do with knowledge and our sense of reality and being part of the spirit/earth or separate from it?
Ducks are a particular type of species - ones that produce fertile offspring. Ducks are part of the genus we call "birds", because they have wings and feathers. Human actors and robots are of a different category altogether with one of the attributes that defines them is their adaptive abilities and ability to mimic other organisms to a wide degree.
Quoting Andrew M
Bandwagon fallacy. When you can use the term in such a way as, "I know that I know nothing", then something is wrong with our understanding of the term. If we can use terms like, "God" without any clear understanding of what "God" is, then the way most people use words is not good evidence that most people know what they are talking about.
What is it that they are talking about? What is knowledge? What is propositional knowledge vs other kinds of knowledge? Saying that truth is a condition of propositional knowledge is also saying that false is property of propositional knowledge. Doesn't that mean that true beliefs are not a necessary condition of (propositional) knowledge?
What makes one bit of propositional knowledge true and the other false? Some people talk about using truth tables, others talk about justification. How do you know that some knowledge is true or false? What does it mean to know this? How is it that we can turn knowledge on itself - of knowing that I know?
Language both connects us to, and separates us from, reality. This is the reason we enjoy taking drugs, like magic mushrooms and cannabis. They tend to knock out our abstract thinking and allows us to 'truly' experience our surroundings.
I am loving this sharing of thoughts without judging each other as someone to look up to or look down on. :heart: I think education for technology has brought us to a serious cultural problem of looking up to and down to each other and unpleasant arguments about "the truth".
Quoting ovdtogt
Yes, thinking in opposites gives us clarity. I liked it when males were males and females were females, and what they did in their private lives was private, compare to today when I have to remember which girl wants to male and which male wants to be female, and hey, I want to be 30 years old again and that ain't going to happen in this lifetime. Life can be very confusing without opposites and this old brain is struggling to keep up.
I like the eastern yin and yang and in the I Ching the defines differences of oldest child, the middle child, and youngest child. The same and different.
I have read, the people who think of terms of black and white are less apt to feel crazy than those who are not sure of this division. But I think quantum physics goes beyond this or that, and that Eisenstein just had a hard time accepting the uncertainty factor?
Well you see that is where people go wrong. They don't understand that most things are a combination of what we perceive to be opposite properties and therefor can not be combined. In fact the human body is both male and female. It is merely that the female is more female than male and men are the opposite: they are more male than female. Once you understand this you will understand why all the gender bender issues exist. I remember my biology teacher telling me they can change a chicken into a rooster and back again by feeding it hormones.
I have not experienced drugs beyond sugar, carbs, coffee, and cigarettes, except for some pot and prescribed opioids which I definitely do not like. I don't notice the experience of being in the moment, just the resentment that I am having more trouble thinking than usual. But I am excited by your introduction into the fact that some people are very aware of nature, and that in our past, survival needs made humans very sensitive to what is happening around them. A form of intelligence we loose when we come thinkers, dependent on our knowledge that puts us in our heads and hinders of experience of life.
I have had retarded people in my life who have more of an animal instinct and I have to tell a story to express my appreciation for what they have and my displeasure with how our thinking can make us really stupid.
A friend and I visited someone in a nursing home, and on our way out we were stopped by a gate. It was obvious we were not going to pass that gate without knowing the code to release the lock. That is, that was obvious to me. My friend didn't hesitate to stick his hand through the gate and open it from the outside. I felt really stupid for allowing that gate to stop me, and I wonder about the intelligence of those who thought that gate would prevent a person from leaving.
Is it clear the answer to what is knowledge can be very different and it may have nothing to do with what we learn in school? Knowledge gained through experience is in some ways superior to what we learn from books and in classrooms. In fact, the knowledge we value can make us stupid. I have heard a primitive person will figure out how to create a bridge across the river, but a modern person is less apt to figure out how to build a bridge because we have become so dependent on what is known.
It is more complicated than your science teacher taught the class. Recent DNA studies have revealed some people are YY, some are XXYY, some are XYY and some people are XXXY. Nature gave us more variety than we knew and if we were reverent of nature, the way we judge each other could change.
Personally, I have a big problem with those who believe the Bible is the word of God. I prefer the notion that nature is our source of knowledge and math is the language of God.
Would anyone here argue that math is not very valuable in our quest for knowledge?
Oh no, beauty is not just subjective but has a mathematical component as well. We are attracted to symmetry and harmony. That is art and music as well as playing a role in the mating game, getting a job, or being convicted of a crime or found innocent.
Yes, useful ideas are beautiful for the same reason symmetry and harmony are beautiful. OMG, I am loving this exchange of thought! :heart:
Oh, oh can we say man is a part of nature? :wink: The concept of us being part of nature, is very important to our liberty and democracy. Knowing there is a mathematical component to beauty and harmony and that our brains are sensitive this may help us be a little reverent about our place in nature and what we believe is the best form of human organization. That is democracy versus the kingdom.
That's an excellent question actually. There's much to be said about it.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
[b]"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."[/b]
John Keats
Yes. So a robot could be built that had wings and feathers. In that sense it would be like a bird. But it would not be a bird even if we couldn't easily distinguish them. That's because a bird has other characteristics that it inherits from its genus (such as being a living organism) that serve to exclude robots.
Of course a different usage could arise that does combine bird-like robots and birds, but we're investigating the usage we currently do have.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Knowledge How - SEP
Quoting Harry Hindu
No it isn't. Per the example above, we know that the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. But no-one can know that they lost it, since they didn't lose it. That's what it means for truth to be a condition of knowledge (and not falsity).
I asked how do you know some statement is true when we seemed to agree that observations determine truth, not language use. So truth is a condition of observations, not of language-use.
I also asked how knowledge can be turned on itself to say things like, "I know that I know". Isn't that similar to saying that "I observe that I know"?
You can only observe that it is raining if it is raining (if that's what you're referring to).
Quoting Harry Hindu
If I know that it's raining because I observed rain, then I can also know that I observed rain (by reflection). In that case, I would also know that I know (that it is raining).
The connection with language use is just that this is how we ordinarily use terms like "observe" and "know". But, of course, we can be sometimes be mistaken about what we think we know (such as when reading the time of a stopped clock).
Knowledge (unverified) is belief. Only empiricism can verify this belief.
Only once verified (empirically) to be 'true' we may consider it knowledge.
Knowledge is information.
Thank you for considering language is important. Who realizes the word "human" means moist soil? We call ourselves humans because of the Sumerian and then the God of Abraham religions that tell us a god made us of mud. I wish people would pay attention to the fact in the Sumerian story, it was a goddess, one of many, who made a man and a woman of mud and breathed life into them. Might that be culturally different from a male god, the only god, making a man of mud and the woman from his rib? I am asking everyone not to think of the stories so much but to think about what they think and what is behind their thinking.
Our culture and words are rooted in a religion that promotes equality and war. How much of our "knowledge" is based on religious mythology? Up to this point in time, how much of philosophy comes from the consciousness of women? Might things have been different if we didn't have the God of Abraham religions and only a male voice until the present? Could what we believe of human nature and the reality of war be different if we held a different "knowledge"?
Quoting Athena
These are patriarchal concepts and totally false. Modern biology has already shown that men are made out of woman. Prior to sexual reproduction you had non-sexual reproduction. Life created life without sexual intervention. The male was created out of the non-sexual organism for the purposes of sexual reproduction.
Knowledge is a tool we use to measure our surroundings in order to better our manner of operating in life and on earth.
When I was coming of age the book "Black Like Me" was written by a White man.
Quoting Wikapedia
Do you think you have knowledge of being a Black person or being a White person, or native American, or Asian, male or female? If you lived before civilization do you think you would have the "knowledge" necessary for survival and that your consciousness would be the same as it is today?
Wow, I didn't see your post before I posted. What you said is beautiful (truth).
One of the philosophers said something about using measurements to help us be sure we are talking about the same thing with the same understanding of it. I forget which one.
However, as you said, although we may share knowledge of the same facts, the meaning of those facts can be totally different. We may agree the unemployment rate is over 7% but what that means is very different from those who are unemployed and those who have financial security? Some times what is good for the economy is not at all good for those living below the poverty line. If we are right or left kind of depends on our personal experiences. Our knowledge is different and both sides know the truth.
Right, so truth is a condition of observations.
Quoting Andrew M
Right. And you can then know that you reflected by reflecting upon the reflection, ad infinitum.
Is knowledge an infinite regress of aboutness? Or is knowledge some kind of set of rules for interpreting sensory impressions? To know that you reflected upon what you reflected seems to just be applying the same set of rules to some sensory impression or thought process. Sometimes the rules we have don't work and we have to come up with new ones.
Quoting Andrew M
Right, so mistaken, or false, is a condition of knowledge.
It is true that the clock says 3:00. You assume from experience (knowledge, or your rules that you have learned about what clocks do) that it is 3:00, until you observe another clock that says something different. Observations check our knowledge.
:lol: :rofl: :lol: No shit, men and even Jesus come out of a woman? Oh gross! I guess the truth can be pretty ugly. That is pretty scary. It might also mean we are mortal and that puts the t in moral.
Interesting, your question involves the phenomena of language. We might consider there is knowing without words. The whole animal kingdom has knowing without words (set of rules for interpreting). We also have knowing without words. Our words (set of rules for interpreting) separate us from our experience and interfere with our knowing.
Try this- you are naked except for some skins and you are crossing a mountain into unknown territory. You have few words for what is around you. What do you know? One reason the Sumerians could not advance is they didn't have a language for categorizing things. That is, they didn't have a word for bushes that made them distinctly different from trees, nor the word "trees" that made all things with the characteristics of a tree and tree. At this level of development, the thing is not separate from the spirit. We return to, out of the one came the many. All things come out of Brahma and are Brahma. Without our language, we are not separated from God. We have knowing but not the set of rules for interpreting.
You know absolutely nothing about biology do you?
Not true. Animal vocalizations are meant to convey information. So in that respect it is a language of sorts. They are sound packages with meaning (words).
They would not have evolved vocal chords if they had no use for them.
Our language is what separates us from God.
We don't have different ideas about what the definition of a duck can include. Acting like a duck entails all the acts of a duck, which includes laying eggs. Looking like a duck entails all the appearances of a duck. There is also the taste and sound of ducks. All of these things together make one a duck. Cherry-picking among them doesn't make one a duck.
We don't even have to use words to define what it is to be a duck. We just observe, over time, the similarities and differences between different organisms and group them in our minds without the use of language. Language is merely a tool for referring to those categories when talking about ducks when we're not around ducks (talking about the trip to the pond and feeding the ducks after the fact), or when teaching the behaviors and appearances of ducks (like in Biology class), or when teaching which scribble or sound refers to ducks (in English class).
Quoting Andrew M
The difference in the types of knowledge seems to depend more on what we are talking about. Referring to artificial social constructions as states-of-affairs that you have knowledge about (like who is President of the United States and who won the 2004 World Series) seems much easier than referring to natural states-of-affairs (like knowing when it will rain). In the former case, we have created our own truths, or pre-defined them. In the latter, we haven't. We are defining them based on experience and observations.
If we can only know what something is (like knowledge) by empiricism, then knowledge doesn't fall into your category of propositional knowledge. It isn't something pre-defined like who won the World Series in 2004.
No. I would say that the infinite regress of aboutness is a product of how we use the word, "knowledge". How we use the word is wrong because of this.
Using a set of rules for interpreting sensory impressions would just be another way of saying that you're going by experience. Experience is a synonym for knowledge. Also, knowing is often equated to observing. You know because that is how you always experienced it before. You know because you are looking right at it. And then we often refer to authority for our knowledge, or even computers now with all the information they store and accessible virtually anywhere with the right technology.
The problem is that philosophers find problems with all of these forms of knowledge. The problem of induction is the problem of knowledge by experience. The problem of illusions and hallucinations is the problem of using your senses to know. The logical fallacy of appealing to authority is the problem of using those in authority as the source of knowledge. So why do many philosophers then go and say things like, "Truth is a condition of knowledge"?
Hum, before I react to what you said I should ask, was it your intention to be witty, disrespectful, or humorous? :brow:
Quoting Voxy
I make this argument because I think it is important that we understand our language is a different thinking skill requiring the connectivity of several brain centers. Other animals do not have these brain connections. Perhaps we should not speak of the importance of language without also speaking of how our brains work?
It is amazing what a stroke can do to a person's ability to use language depending on which area of the brain is damaged. A person may have plenty of words, but not understand the meaning of them. Or common to us older folks is knowing the meaning of what we want to say, but not having the word for it. A person with a stroke may be able to understand the spoken word but not the written word or visa versa.
An organic brain disorder such as Down Syndrome or brain damage can effect our experience of life in many different ways. https://www.brainline.org/article/lost-found-what-brain-injury-survivors-want-you-know.
That is what language is. Communication.
The problem I encounter on this forum is the lack of basic knowledge concerning, history, biology and physics and chemistry.
Because knowing truth requires not only the language that makes us aware of concepts, but also knowing the laws of nature. We could not know many of the laws of nature before we had the technology to see far away, such as other planets, or see things invisible to the naked eye, such as bacteria. We could not know what we know today without the highly developed math we now use. Does that make sense?
Our knowledge is not a revealed knowledge like the Bible, but is the result of developed math, concepts (language) and technology. Because we can not unknow what we know, we can not experience the consciousness of primitive people, or early city people, or the middle ages. Human thought is forever changed by what we know and can not unknow.
Not even the most religious folks rely on witch doctors and we don't stand around sick people to see if demons come out of them. Those who have knowledge of modern medicine rely on doctors, drugs, surgeries. Praying helps but unless you are Christian Science, you will take a child to a medical doctor and thank goodness we have stopped beating the devil out of our children and torturing women to prove they are witches. We greatly increased our life expectancy when we accepted cleanliness and sanitation are important, and when with knowledge. And when we could grow more food and have full bellies year around, God went for a fearsome, punishing God to a loving God. If we think of holy books as abstract ideas instead of concrete truths, they are not so bad. But to do that we need to learn higher-order thinking skills.
Does that explain why it is said "Truth is a condition of knowledge", or was I just annoying with my babbling?
No, language is using words and understanding concepts. Crying babies are communicating but they are not using language and they have not learned concepts, such as an encyclopedia is a set of books that contains knowledge of many things. In fact, there is much young children can not learn until their brains are more mature. Unfortunately by then, their hormones turn on and they may get so focused on their feelings they have a near-zero interest in learning any of the subjects you listed. Trying to get a child from a baby to a well-informated adult is full of challenges. Getting them past the "know it all, I don't need you stage" is unpleasant for everyone. The words, "a baby will change your life", do not convey the necessary meaning to young people with raging hormones.
What does a basic understanding of history and biology mean to you? How much do you know of how our brains work and do you consider that to be biology?
To clarify, language is what goes on in our heads and what is going on in our heads is different from what goes on the heads of animals and small children. A preverbal child can be traumatized and experience post-trauma syndrome, without having the words to understand the event and emotions experienced.
Yes, I said it wrong and thank you for saying it right.
Bald assertions that do not even take a valid argumentative form aren't very compelling.
Yes crying is a form of communication and may be considered a primitive language.
Nah. That cannot be right.
No sounds or gestures in this format, but there is definitely language.
What format?
Online format.
You are going all cryptic on me.
You are reading a meaningful language. There are no gestures. There are no sounds. There is a meaningful language.
Nothing cryptic. Plain 'ole common sense. Your claim is false. Language is not just communication through sounds and gestures.
language is the vocalization of information. Chimps do it. Birds do it. Many animals do it.
Moving the goalposts...
Still wrong.
Clever response. You got me there.
OK. Another way to put it is that 'observe' and 'know' are achievement verbs (Gilbert Ryle's term). You can't observe what isn't there or know what isn't so.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, if you wanted to do that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Justification (or warrant) comprises the rules that warrant someone making a knowledge claim. For example, your looking out the window warrants your claim that it is raining (or not raining). If the claim is true then knowledge has been acquired. (Gettier counterexamples aside which imply a further condition.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. Note that I said "think we know". You can't know false things. So if a mistake is discovered then any claim to knowledge is retroactively retracted. For example, if I later find out that the clock was stopped then I also realize that I didn't know that it was 3:00 earlier despite my claim back then being warranted.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Observations check our knowledge claims. A knowledge claim (or justified belief) can be false, knowledge can't. You can be warranted in making a knowledge claim (such as with the 3:00 example) but such warrant doesn't guarantee that the claim is true.
Correct and that's important. But to say that a duck is all those things together that make a duck leaves us none the wiser about what a duck is. Neither does saying that a duck is whatever acts and looks like a duck. Both those definitions instead rely on a prior intuition (or definition) about what ducks are. For a definition to be useful, it needs a genus and differentia.
Quoting Harry Hindu
So differentiating and grouping (categorizing) just is the activity of defining noted above. Language is not fundamentally about arbitrary word symbols and sounds, but about the objects and activities they pick out. So we can ask about what people are doing when they use the word "know" or "observe". How are they using the term and what can we learn from an analysis of that use?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Knowing that it is raining outside is an example of propositional knowledge (the proposition being, "it is raining outside"). If you look out the window and see what looks like rain then you can justifiably claim it is raining. If it is raining (the truth condition), then you know that it is raining. Whereas if someone was hosing the window while watering the garden, then you don't know it is raining (even though you may think you do).
The principle is the same whether talking about rain or the Red Sox. People can be informed (knowledgeable) or mistaken about either.
I have been plugging the truth/knowledge is information message on this forum for quite some time. To no avail. People love complicated explanations. Simple ones are too boring.
Quoting informed - Lexico
Why do you insist on calling crying language? Language is the talk that goes on in our heads, and without it, we could not organize ourselves in such a way to have civilizations and develop technology. Language is abstract. That is, language expresses a quality apart from an object and that is what makes man godlike. Animals are not going to discuss how to build a bridge or why we should love our neighbors and have laws. Animals react to the world around them as a matter of instinct. It is totally reactionary, not a matter of reasoning. The Athenians focused on our ability to reason making as the gods. Without language, there can not be knowledge passed on from generation to generation so there is no way to build on what is known to new knowledge.
Language is anything that vocalizes information. That is exactly what the baby is informing you of: I am unhappy. Beeeeee is the only word she knows instinctively.
Okay, how do you figure that?
Evolution has 'given' us vocal chords for a reason and we are not the only animal that has them. Also animals that don't speak our language. They have their own language that they communicate with and understand.
Great short clip for you to watch.
Watch Leopard Monkey Alert! | Attenborough: The Life of Mammals | BBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-bxPLFt1vI
Knowledge requires a different order of thinking than being able to understand stories written for humans. The most important knowledge if one wants to understand the universe, is dependent on the language of math. We can understand basic laws of physics without math, but the knowledge that is beyond storytelling requires some understanding of math and some knowledge of cause and effect. This knowledge is not explained in the Bible and one should not think the Bible is the only important book to read and study. If we do not prepare ourselves to understand knowledge, we can read the books and watch the videos and attend college lectures, and not understand them.
If we were not prepared to know what we know today, we would not know it, no matter how much we stared at a mountain and its rocks, we would not know much about the mountain without some knowledge of geology to help us understand what we see.
Much of the information today requires knowledge of math and our schools are totally failing to convey what math has to do with understanding our world and universe. Students are graduating from high schools without even a basic understanding of maths and sciences and think they know everything they need to know. They really do not understand why some people get big bucks for their careers and they are lucky to get a job delivering pizzas. Our young are entering life totally unprepared for our technological society that is no longer labor-intense and is not willing to give them a liveable wage for low skilled work. They can not have available knowledge because they were not prepared to receive it.
But people use the term, "know", to refer things that aren't so. They don't know that they don't know. They think they do, which is why they use the word. We used to know that the Earth was flat until we learned that it wasn't. We can only know that we didn't know after the fact of saying that we did. So how people use the word isn't always about what is so. Knowing is only the belief that you have the proper information to form a conclusion, when you might not.
Quoting Andrew M
But what if I mistook someone washing the roof and seeing water running down the window for rain? I would claim to know that it is raining, and it would take another observation (moving outside of the house) to prove that I was wrong. If the prior observation was wrong, then what makes us so confident in observations? We used to think the Earth was flat based on observations. It took a more objective observation to show that we were wrong (looking at the Earth from space). How do we know when we have reached the most objective observation to say that we then possess knowledge?
Quoting Andrew M
Which isn't any different from saying that you know you know. You can know false things. You might say that people in the 14th century didn't know the Earth wasn't flat, but the way they used the word, they did. Saying that you know doesn't cut the cake, which is why my claim that how people use the term isn't good evidence for what knowledge is still stands. Observations aren't good evidence of knowledge because we can show how observations can be skewed or biased. So how do you go about determining the truth condition of some statement?
Quoting Andrew M
Knowledge claims are just sounds or scribbles that symbolize our knowledge that is made-up of visuals, sounds, feelings, etc. Observations check our knowledge - the beliefs that aren't composed of words, but are composed of visuals and actions in our minds that are merely communicated via claims.
Quoting Andrew M
"Duck" is a word, not an animal. There were species before words. There are similarities and differences before words. These similarities are what we group under the symbol, "duck". The only reason we need the word, "duck" is to communicate all those things together. It's much easier to say "duck" rather than all those things that make a duck that we can observe. We don't need the word "duck" to observe that there are organisms that share more features and behaviors with others, and others that don't.
Quoting Andrew M
When you ask a 14th century person what they mean when they know that the Earth is flat, they will point to the Earth and show that they know by observation, and point to how others are saying the same thing.
Quoting Andrew M
Like I said, if people say that they know that it is raining, when it isn't, then how are they using the word that is meaningful? How is how people use the term evidence that they know how to use it?
Did I mention coughing, sneezing, farting and banging your head against the wall?
No Athena I don't think that is your nose talking. Maybe in your case it is doing the thinking.
You hear of vocalizations? Have you heard of vocal chords? Do you think only humans have them? Ever hear a bird singing? Do you think it is doing that for our amusement? To entertain us?
I want to comment on your original post. My apologies to everyone else who has responded in the thread, for I have not read your comments, so I might be repeating content here.
I like this Russell example. I hadn't heard of it before.
We don't need to introduce the notion of luck into the conversation. For example, we can simply say that the person doesn't have knowledge because broken clocks do not lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time. No one who forms beliefs about the time based on a broken clock has knowledge of the time. So, we've explained why the person doesn't have knowledge without invoking the notion of luck, which suggests that you've attached undue significance to it.
Let me try to explain the undue-ness of it. We should ask ourselves, “What is the luck attached to in this case?” The luck is attached to having looked at the broken clock at precisely the one (of two) times in the day in which the real time corresponds to the time on the clock. In other words, had he looked at the clock at any other time, he would have had a false belief that it's 3 PM. So, the luck only explains why he has a true belief, not why he has a justified belief. But the failure in the example is one of justification, not one of truth.
The epistemic justification needed for 'knowledge' is relatively strong. There are three facets we should consider, which I will make specific to the Russell example: (1) The empirical fact that clocks in general are working clocks, (2) The empirical fact that clocks in general keep the time correctly, (3) The presumption, by way of inference from experience with clocks in general, that the clock I happen to be looking at is a working clock that keeps the correct time. All of these lend to the reliability of clockfaces as sources of truth about the time. In other words, looking at clockfaces ties our beliefs reliably to reality, which is why this manner of forming beliefs about the time is epistemically justified.
However, if you lived in a town in which the clocks intermittently stopped working, then looking at a clock in this town would not be an epistemically reasonable manner by which to form a belief about the time. This is an opinion which some might disagree with and which runs counter to what you say in your "counterexample" scenario, so I will defend it later in this post.
For now, we stick to the Russell example. So, again, why doesn't the person have knowledge? As we said, it's because his presumption that he was looking at a working clock was wrong. But he was not wrong to have the presumption that the clock he was looking at was working, as clocks typically work and keep the correct time, which is why, after all, looking at clockfaces is an epistemically reasonable manner by which to form beliefs about the time. The distinction to be drawn, then, is between the presumption being correct and it being "correct" to subscribe to the presumption. It is this distinction which I think you fail to make, and which will undermine your comments about the "counterexample" scenario and about the role of luck in knowledge claims.
Recall how the epistemic presumption that 'the clock I'm looking at is working' became epistemically justified. It's because it's an empirical fact that clocks are generally working clocks, meaning that looking at clockfaces is a very reliable way to arrive at the truth (this is "the tie" to reality). The presumption is based on the history of clocks, and unless we have reason to believe things have changed with clocks, we'll continue to believe that 'the particular clock I'm looking at is working.' That is, we will continue to subscribe to the presumption. The person in the example has no reason to believe things have changed with clocks, but things have indeed changed with clocks, at least with the ones in the town at that particular time, which are the only relevant clocks in the example.
If clocks are not generally working clocks, per this second scenario, then the empirical fact that grounded the epistemic trust in clocks (as a reliable source of truth) would disappear. In time, if the clocks continued not to work, people would realize that it is no longer justified to acquire beliefs about the time based on the clocks they were looking at. And this would be true even if there was one clock (say, one in a thousand) that was a working clock that kept the correct time, because without knowing which clock in town that was, the probability would be too low that you were looking at the one working clock in town, so no clock could lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time. The man in the example is justified in the sense that he is reasonably ignorant that things have changed. But this type of ignorance isn't epistemic justification, although it looks a lot like it. We might say that he is not wrong to still believe that clocks are working clocks, because, again, we wouldn't hold him to omniscient standards, but we can still say that he lacks epistemic justification because the tie between clocks and the correct time has been broken – he just doesn't know it has, so we forgive him his ignorance, but that is not the same as attributing to him epistemic justification.
And since I've explained the failure of justification in these examples without invoking the notion of luck, I've essentially argued why it plays no necessary role in the two knowledge claims you discussed.
Hmm, I do not think you're right, but it doesn't really affect my point, which I'll elaborate on shortly.
First, you say that in the original clock example the agent does not really have a justification because broken clocks are not reliable time-tellers and the agent is looking at a broken clock.
Several things: first, intuitively the agent 'is' justified. They could not reasonably have been expected to know that the clock was not working. So, they were justified in believing it was working, and so subsequently justified in believing it was the time that it represented it to be.
Second, for the sake of argument let's test your analysis. If it is correct, then any belief about the time based on a broken clock's report should fail to qualify as knowledge. But I can imagine a case in which a person bases a belief about the time on a broken clock and their belief 'does' qualify as knowledge.
For example, imagine the clock has broken, but it has literally just broken - that is, it has broken at the point at which its hands reach 3 o clock. It was working fine up to that point. The agent then looks at the clock. Now, the agent is looking at a broken clock and, on the basis of its report, he forms the belief that it is 3 o clock (which it is). This time it seems clear enough that the agent does have knowledge, yes?
Yet their belief is based on the report of a broken clock.
But anyway, I am not married to the 'luck' analysis either, for my point is not that this or that analysis is always and everywhere correct, but rather that whatever diagnosis we give of why the agent lacks knowledge in the relevant case, we will be able to construct another case in which that 'key' ingredient is present and the agent lacks knowledge (or absent, and the agent possesses knowledge)
That's not to say that the diagnosis of the original case was wrong. It is just to note that there is no stability to what is, and is not doing the work of making it the case that the agent has knowledge (apart from possessing a true belief). So it is to say that the diagnosis does not locate an ingredient of knowledge, even when it is correct - that is, even when it correctly diagnoses why the agent lacked knowledge on this particular occasion.
So, take 'justification'. I understand that term to mean 'has normative reason to believe'. Now it seems to me that in many cases an agent knows something due to the fact they have a justification for their true belief.
But there also seem cases in which an agent has a justification for their true belief and lacks knowledge.
And there also seem to be cases in which an agent knows something yet lacks a justification (in an example I gave earlier, I might acquire a true belief, but the belief is so trivial there is no normative reason for me to believe it - yet intuitively I may still have knowledge in such a case).
So the lesson I take from the many hundreds, if not thousands of failed attempts that have been made to specify what ingredients knowledge is made from, is that there is no stable set of ingredients beyond 'true belief' (though obviously 'true beliefs' often fail to qualify as knowledge too).
In turn that tells us something important about knowledge. It isn't made of those ingredients. Rather, it is something that those ingredients typically bring about.
For an analogy: take the property of being 'delicious-to-Bartricks'. Now, there are plenty of things I find delicious and they often have things in common - such as containing chocolate, or lots of sugar, or whatever. But it would be a mistake to think that because I often find something delicious due to it containing chocolate, that therefore anything that contains chocolate I will find delicious. No, in fact sometimes I might dislike something due to it containing chocolate (a potato stuffed with chocolate - no, that's not delicious at all).
What conclusion would it be reasonable to draw from that? Well, that 'delicious-to-Bartricks' is not something made of ingredients, but is rather an attitude that certain combinations of ingredients, in certain circumstances, produce in Bartricks. The whole project of trying to figure out what ingredients delicious-to-Bartricks is made of is misguided.
I am drawing the same lesson in respect of knowledge. Knowledge has no stable ingredients beyond true belief (just as 'delicious-to-Bartricks' has no stable ingredients beyond edibility). Thus it is reasonable to conclude that 'knowledge' is an attitude that a person is adopting towards true beliefs. Not, I emphasis, an attitude one of us is adopting towards true beliefs, but an attitude Reason is adopting towards them.
What attitude? Well, the knowledge attitude. The attitude we are referring to when we 'feel' that we know something. Only it has to be felt by Reason, not us.
Believing a broken clock is working is a false belief. False belief is never good justificatory ground...
That's the simple account already given that fiveredapples just elaborately echoed...
Hey Sam! My take on both Gettier cases is that he has Smith's belief wrong(an accounting malpractice). I've set that out as clearly as I can a couple pages back. I'd be interested in your take/opinion on my refutation of those cases...
May want to start on page six, because I had forgotten a few details prior to, and as a result my report on the paper was a bit confused/confusing..
:yikes:
Well done!
And that I just refuted. Only you've have to read what I said to realise that.
No. I read your reply. Glad to see you're serious again.
Our respective viewpoints differ... obviously.
I've just got one simple question...
Does false belief ever count as good ground/justification?
But, we both know that false premisses cannot validly lead to true conclusions.
Right?
:brow:
Hence why they are considered counterexamples to the justified-true-belief account of knowledge.
That's what you keep repeating, but...
False premisses cannot lead(validly/logically) to true conclusions.
Quoting creativesoul
You can't 'know' that, because it is obviously false! A valid argument with false premises can lead to a true conclusion!!
1. If it is Tuesday, then it is raining (false)
2 It is not raining (false)
3. Therefore it is not Tuesday (true)
Yes. THey. Can. Christ!! Remember: you're not the teacher! Your name should be 'Confidentlywrong'.
With Russell's clock, my objection is that the knowledge claim is based upon false belief, and false belief never counts as adequate justification.
With Gettier, I know many argue the justification aspect, but my own take on the belief aspect seems stronger, to me at least.
How is Case I not justified, by your lights?
Well, we disagree on that don't we?
Show me.
Read me.
Here: Quoting Bartricks
Read.
Confidentlywrong: we both know that pigs are dogs, don't we?
Bartricks: pigs aren't dogs. What are you on about?
Confidentlywrong: well, we disagree about then, yes? Can you show me an example of a pig that is not a dog?
Bartricks: Take any pig - it's not a dog.
Confidentlywrong: but dogs are horses. We all know that.
Bartricks: No, dogs are not horses. And pigs are not dogs.
Confidentlywrong: Well, can you show me a pig that is not a dog
Bartricks: I just did.
Confidentlywrong: But I do not read what you say. So, without writing anything, can you show me a pig that is not a dog
Bartricks: no.
Confidentlywrong: there you go - you see! Pigs are dogs, which are horses.
Denying the antecedent...
Not valid.
No, denying the consequent. Valid.
Look, confidentlywrong, you're confidentlywrong. Get on that.
Ah, your such a childish dick!
I consent. That is modus tollens.
Classy. Is you upset because the nasty man did some clever on you?
Oh, and it is 'you are' or 'you're' not 'your'.
Do you also agree that you're completely wrong about Gettier cases? If I remember rightly, in our last spat you seemed to think it is crucially important that one is called Smith and the other Jones. That's right, isn't it?
No. I have both cases right.
Gettier confuses the truth conditions of the general proposition "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", with the truth conditions of Smith's belief that "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job". In the former(a general proposition), anyone and everyone that has ten coins in their pocket and gets the job counts as "the person with ten coins in their pocket". But in Smith's belief only Jones counts, for it is not just a proposition, but Smith's belief about Jones.
Yes, but you're confidently wrong about that, Confidentlywrong. The relevant belief is about the person who will occupy the post, not Jones specifically.
And even if it was about Jones specifically - which is isn't - we could construct a case in which the belief is about Jones yet does not qualify as knowledge. I did that, but you didn't read it.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes - 'denying the consequent'.
Ah, perhaps my replies don't sound Latin enough. So, here goes: Yourvium understandium est Gettier cases hoc confused rubbishium.
You never directly addressed that by the way... or the following questions...
Who did Smith believe had ten coins in their pocket?
Who did Smith believe would get the job?
There's only one correct answer here my friend(s), and refutes Gettier because it show us all that Smith's belief is false, and therefore... not a problem for JTB.
That's false on it's face.
:brow:
Now you're just making yourself look bad. I consented the earlier point about false premisses, because that's what reasonable people do when they realize that they're wrong... and I was.
However, you are wrong about Smith's belief... and so is everyone and anyone else who thinks that Smith believed anyone other than Jones would get the job. Since we know that Smith knew Jones had ten coins in his pocket, and was justified in believing that Jones would get the job, we also know that when Smith deduced "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" from that that Smith was picking out Jones to the exclusion of all other people, including himself.
It's a novel approach, but dead on the mark.
Proposition is not equal to belief, which a careful assessment of Gettier's paper clearly shows, assuming the right approach. We can see this for ourselves...
As a general proposition(divorced from belief) "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" is true whenever anyone with ten coins in their pocket gets the job, including Smith himself.
...and that is the sleight of hand, because...
...as a deduction of Smith's belief, "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" is all about Jones... and no one else. So, it is irrefutable to say that in Smith's own mind, according to his own belief, the person being picked out to the exclusion of all others by the deduction is Jones, because Smith's belief is clearly about none other than... Jones.
Perhaps a substitution exercise will help drive the point home...
Smith's belief is that Jones will get the job, and that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Hence, by entailment he arrives at the following...
"The person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job."
The only correct substitution for "the person with ten coins in his pocket" is Jones. Anything else, and both the truth conditions and the meaning of Smith's deductive belief changes. That would render the deduction something other than Smith's belief. Anything other than Smith's belief is unacceptable, for it is Smith's belief that is being taken account of here. Thus, anything other than Jones would be an unacceptable substitution...
Salva Veritate.
Jones did not get the job. Therefore, Smith's belief was false. False belief is not a problem for JTB. Gettier's Case I is a case of false belief.
QED
If Alice looks out the window before claiming that she knows that it is raining, then her use of the term "know" is justifiable. If her claim is false, then she will not actually know what she thinks she knows. That is, she has used an achievement verb, but has not actually acquired knowledge. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly ordinary and acceptable use, and does not indicate that she doesn't know what it means.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Compare with "It used to be true that the Earth was flat" (which is an unconventional use). Since knowledge entails truth, people used to think the Earth was flat (as you say below), but they could not have known it was flat.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The issue is that in many scenarios, it's possible that the state-of-affairs is such that you could be mistaken no matter how carefully you investigated it.
Short of deductive proof, there is not going to be a guarantee of truth, only criteria that justifies the belief or claim (such as looking out the window when checking for rain). The same goes for finding mistakes. It's not an infallible process but it is a self-correcting process.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Consider the parallel with people saying that it is true that it is raining, when it isn't. Or simply that it is raining, when it isn't.
People know perfectly well what rain is (and how to use the term "rain"), but can nonetheless be mistaken in a given instance.
That's the case with the term "know". When Alice looked out the window and saw what looked like rain, her belief that it was raining was justifiable. If she later discovers that it wasn't actually raining then she would presumably agree that she didn't know it was raining after all - she was mistaken. So that demonstrates a consistent understanding of the meaning and proper use of the term "know".
Yes, veritable saliva.
No, Smith's belief is about the person who will occupy the role.
But even if it rigidly designates Jones - and it doesn't - we could easily construct another Gettier case in which Smith's belief about Jones's coin situation is justified, true, and not knowledge.
I described such a case. You either didn't read it, or didn't understand it
No? As if Smith's belief was not specifically about a particular person named Jones? As if Gettier did not say who in particular Smith's beliefs were about???
:brow:
I'll forward Gettier's own words here. I mean, there is no stronger ground for determining who Smith's belief is about in particular.
There it is, in Gettier's own words...
Jones is THE man who(Smith believes) will get the job!
QED
Or I did both and already responded.
Sigh...
Brother you're welcome to follow Gettier's formula all you like, and we'll examine it accordingly. As I said earlier, I love these mind puzzles. Shows that some logic is anything other than infallible when used as a means to take proper account of belief.
Let me respond to you first. I do want to address some of the other comments, too, though, but perhaps in subsequent posts.
What a curious response. I showed why there was no need to invoke the notion of luck in your treatment of the two knowledge claim scenarios. Your only coherent response is to argue why my objection is somehow mistaken or insufficient. Instead, you want to move on to some other point without admitting your error. Okay, go ahead, but I didn't address that point, whatever it is. I addressed your characterization of the two knowledge claim scenarios, and those objections stand.
No, intuitively he's not justified. Come one now, that just is the lesson to draw from our intuitions about knowledge. Yes, he is justified on the JTB definition, but the scenarios are meant to highlight how JTB fails as a definition. (I think Sam26 wants to argue that JTB doesn't fail as a definition, but that seems wrong -- unless we want to accept that knowledge is defeasible, which nobody wants to accept.) So, in both scenarios, there is something amiss with the justification. In other words, he's not justified. This is why people have moved from JTB to WTB (warranted true belief, where the "warrant" guarantees us that neither of the knowledge claims you described count as knowledge).
Hmm...maybe you didn't understand my post. I explain why you're conflating two separate ideas and, thus, equivocating on the term "justified." Yes, he can be pardoned for not knowing that the clock wasn't working. So, it's perfectly understandable that he believes it is a working clock and, of course, that working clocks keep the correct time. But broken clocks do not lend epistemic justification for beliefs about the time. That just is the intuition which informs our conclusion that he doesn't actually have knowledge. He used a broken clock to form his belief about the time; hence, he doesn't actually know it's 3 PM despite having a true belief that it's 3 PM. You seem to think, quite counter-intuitively, that a broken clock can provide the requisite justification for a belief about the time. Again, you need an argument or example to make it more palatable. You've yet to provide such an example, although you apparently think you have.
Not "for the sake of argument" -- for the sake of avoiding admitting that you are wrong.
Correct.
No, you cannot.
No, he doesn't have knowledge. He still lacks justification, the right kind. This example is in no meaningful way different from the original example, so I don't know what you think you've added to the discussion. Why would it matter whether it stopped working a moment ago, 24 hours ago, or 24 years ago?
To be fair, the luck analysis hasn't been correct once. Anyway, are you saying there's no indefeasible definition of knowledge? That seems like a rather strong position to take. I don't quite see the motivation for it, but I'm not saying you're wrong. I simply haven't put any serious thought to the matter.
I'm pretty sure I already proved it wrong.
Why is that the conclusion? If there are clear intuitive cases of knowledge -- which there are -- then there would seem to be coherent criteria for knowledge. That's just the take-away, right? Are you saying that because nobody has been able to spell out this criteria, it can't exist? Or, more likely, are you saying that nobody can spell out criteria for knowledge that isn't susceptible to counter-examples? Again, I don't see why that conclusion would follow.
I get that you're entertaining the question of what makes 'knowledge' impossible to define in an indefeasible way. That is, why are all the criteria for knowledge susceptible, according to you, to counter-examples in which the criteria are satisfied but in which our intuition tells us the person doesn't have knowledge. I don't think you're right about this, but I leave you to theorize. I've only objected to the two knowledge scenarios you mis-characterized.
I disagree. I don't think you can have knowledge that it's 3 PM based on a belief you formed by looking at a broken clock. You've yet to provide such an example. Without giving us reason to doubt our intuitions about knowledge, then your argument never gets off the ground.
No.
You're right I do want to argue that JTB doesn't fail as a definition. I want to separate the definition from it's actual application, i.e., the definition works, but it's application is fallible. The application of the definition, due to a number of human fallibility factors, is never infallible. We are always updating and changing what we think we know. So, built into the application of the definition (we could in a sense call it a kind of formula) is the understanding that for various reasons/causes it could turn out that my justification wasn't correct, thereby nullifying my reasons for thinking I was justified. If we later find out that the clock was broke, then we weren't justified - period. Just because you thought you were justified, doesn't mean you are or were justified. This is why often our justifications need testing, because we are often wrong. Fallibility always includes the possibility of being wrong, even if it's a very low probability.
If Alice knowing wasn't true, then she misused the word. You misuse a word when it is irrelevant to use. You misuse words when you don't know what they mean.
Quoting Andrew M
So they confused knowing with thinking? If knowing and thinking are indistinguishable so that you don't know whether you're doing one or the other, then how do you know that everything that you know is what you know and not what you think, including what knowledge is? If you can't ever attain knowledge as you've defined it, then what's the point in using the term?
As you have defined it, you'd have to know that you know it is raining in order to say that you really know that it is raining. How do you know that you know if knowing and thinking are indistinguishable? You've engineered a nice infinite regress of homunculi of knowing that you know that you know that you know, etc.
I don't think anybody would disagree that we sometimes make mistakes. So, yes, sometimes when we think we've satisfied the definition of JTB, we actually haven't. So far, however, you haven't addressed the objection we are making against JTB.
.
Now you're introducing the idea of infallibility, which no human is, but that doesn't mitigate against the objection that JTB fails as a definition. Your defense of the definition can't simply be that every time it fails, it's because of human error. That's way too strong a defense, which should be a red flag to you.
Okay, but not always about everything. We are advancing and making new discoveries, creating new methods, improving old methods, etc., but that doesn't imply that everything we've known in the past gets revised in the future in light of the "updating and changing" that we do. No, many things remain forever the same, maintain the same status as always, and do not change in light of human advancement. You're taking a common phenomenon and making sweeping generalizations so that it applies to the one case you want it to apply to.
Yes, but this simply says what you've already said: namely, that we're not infallible, so we might, on occasion, be mistaken about having attained proper justification. Infallibility, however, isn't a defense against the objection that JTB fails as a definition. After all, the objections come from hypothetical situations in which we simply stipulate the conditions. So, we can't be wrong about those conditions, as they are stipulations. In other words, the objections to JTB are theoretical objections, so your defense that we are infallible is actually a non-sequitur.
In the Russell example Bartricks gives, the man has justification under the JTB conception of knowledge. If he didn't, it would pose no problem for the JTB conception of knowledge. The problem is that our intuitions about knowledge tell us that something is awry. We don't think he has knowledge, pace JTB, and we pinpoint the problem to the source of his belief: namely, the broken clock. There is no human fallibility at play here. To think fallibility is at work here -- to respond that the man made a mistake in thinking the broken clock was a working clock -- is to not realize that the justification criterion, per JTB, has actually been satisfied in the example.
I suspect that you're using our intuitive definition of knowledge, not JTB, to defend JTB. In essence, you're saying that had he looked at a working clock, he would have had the right type of justification. Again, though, he already has the right type of justification -- he hasn't made any mistake -- according to JTB. That's why JTB fails -- because it doesn't square with our intuitions of knowledge, and human fallibility cannot save JTB from the objections we're making against it.
But as I explained, we were and remain justified under JTB.
I don't want to rehash my same objection about your fallibility defense. I think I've made myself clear. I do want to add that you seem to be turning the fallibility defense into a certainty requirement. Something like, "We can never be certain that we've satisfied the JTB requirements because we are fallible." That is not an adequate defense of JTB.
I think you are feeling frustrated and we need to agree to disagree. Maybe someday you will realize there is a difference between animals communicating and language but obviously will not be this day.
Before we spend more sweat and tears on responses to each other, I want to highlight a very important disagreement we have, which might be the source of most of our disagreements. You believe that a broken clock can lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time. I believe that a broken clock cannot lend such justification. Unless we address this disagreement, we're going to be talking past each other quite a bit. We might simply have different intuitions about knowledge.
The best we might hope for, then, is to let others say what their intuitions are on the matter. So, the question to others is, can a broken clock lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time? Or, in simpler English, if you come to believe that it's 3 PM based on your looking at a broken clock, do you have the right kind of justification for your true belief -- by sheer coincidence, the time actually is 3 PM ---- to count as knowledge?
Sam,
You seem to think that fallibility helps you defend JTB from the objection that it fails as a definition of knowledge. I've tried to explain why fallibility cannot help you defend JTB from the objections we're making against it. The one point of disagreement which we have to settle is that you think that the man doesn't have epistemic justification in the Russell example, but I think (as does Bartricks) that he does have justification. Although I believe Bartricks thinks he does because he thinks the broken clock lends epistemic justification. Nevertheless, the man in the Russell example satisfied the JTB definition. If you disagree with that point, then we too are going to talk past each other.
I think we need to take a look at how our brains work. We are slow thinkers and fast thinkers. I have argued that animals don't have language and that goes with understanding fast and slow thinking. We share fast thinking with all animals but other animals do not share slow with us. An animal is not going to argue "They don't know that they don't know." An animal is not going to argue A can not be B. I hope people will watch this video about fast and slow thinking and reflect on what "knowing" means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU
What god or part of nature made the clock in the first place? Without a clock, how can anyone justify the argument that it is 3 o'clock? Time is intangible and we are treating it as tangible when we agree it is 3 o'clock without realizing it is only our agreement that is 3 o'clock that makes it 3 o'clock. If we are on daylight savings time it is not 3 o'clock at 3 o'clock because everyone agrees it is 2 o'clock.
Or how about this, if we were primitive people without the counting system we have, making it possible to have an agreement that a day is 24 hours and that a day is divided between day and night, there would not be clock time to argue about. Is it a bit insane to treat time as a tangible reality? How about arguing socialism is good or bad? Is that a tangible reality or intangible? We can not agree on many things we argue about because of our arguments about intangible beliefs and we are not practicing awareness of what is tangible and what is intangible. Knowing socialism is bad, is like knowing God is good. This "knowing" can not lead to rational thinking.
I've read a little of what you say on the topic prior to the post where this quote comes from, but I cannot claim to have read everything you say in the thread. So, I might have an incomplete understanding of what you're claiming. That said, I have some comments.
You are making more work for yourself than necessary. You claim that false premises cannot lead to a true conclusion. Frankly, I don't know what to make of this claim, but I see that Bartricks has beaten you over the head with an obvious counter-example. Again, I'm not sure how your claim pertains to the Gettier examples, but I don't think you need to make this argument. You have, I believe, the correct intuition that broken clocks cannot lend the proper justification for knowledge claims. This is actually the main point of contention between you and Bartricks.
He believes the contrary, that broken clocks can lend the proper justification for knowledge claims. I think he's wrong, but we might have to chalk this up to contending intuitions. You don't seem satisfied with that and want, instead, to make a stronger argument against him. It's in this stronger argument -- this argument about 'false beliefs not supporting a true conclusion' -- where you are faltering.
He's right to say that the man (in the Russell example) in justified in believing that the clock is working and keeping the correct time. He thinks that's enough to get him the epistemic justification he needs for knowledge claims. After all, he says, if the man is justified in believing the clock is working (which he is), then that's all the justification needed. Here, I think he's wrong. Once we hash out how clocks lend epistemic justification -- namely, by working and keeping the correct time -- we see that this particular clock cannot lend such justification. He believes that because there is justification for this presumption -- that clocks work and keep the correct time -- he doesn't need to concern himself with whether that particular clock works or not. That's why he thinks, or is consistent with why he thinks, that a broken clock can sometimes provide the proper justification for knowledge claims. He is, in my opinion, simply not digging deep enough.
That one doesn't. It was about Russell's clock, and it's both wrong and unnecessary.
:wink:
Broken clocks are not good ground to base knowledge of time on. Simpler is better.
Gettier's cases have different issues, which I've explained at length beginning on page six, and again on the last couple pages. I've only touched on Case I, but II suffers the exact same flaw... conflation of proposition(conjunction that time) and belief.
(Nice posts, btw).
Why, or how, does the man know that it’s 3 o’clock? Only because he looked at the clock which, to his mind, was working properly. The obtainment of truth that it is 3 o’clock is thus here directly determined solely by the reality of there being a working clock.
As uncomfortable as this might be, remove the god’s eye view from the scenario. If the man goes about life from here on out without ever observing anything which contradicts with his conviction that it was 3 o’clock on account of a working clock so showing, to the man this belief will be a known. Hence, to him and all others that he interacts with, there will be no evidence that he did not obtain a true state of the world (the correct time) from observing a working clock (a reality to which his beliefs accurately conform). If enquiry was made into how he knows this, his justification (of a fact, rather than ethical justification for the acceptability of so believing – the two forms of justification sometimes get conflated) will be that a working clock informed him of it so being. Here, a working clock showing that its 3 o’clock is, again, the reality to which his true proposition of it being 3 o’clock conforms. And again, because nothing he encounters will contradict his justified true belief, that it was 3 o’clock will to him be knowledge.
Now, where he to any point in the future to discover things that contradict with what is to him a known, he at this point will know (as per the LNC) that some or all of the data involved are in fact mistaken. At this point what is and isn’t known becomes doubted to varying degrees. Say he then discovers that this same clock was not working properly via enquiry. Now, he gains awareness that his then held truth of it being 3 o’clock (on account of a working clock so showing) was in fact a belief-that (a belief of what is true) that did not conform to what was real – was in fact a false belief. He can now ethically justify his stance that it was 3 o’clock but can no longer factually justify it – for the reality on which it was dependent turn out to be bogus.
The person now knows that he was wrong in what he presumed to be knowledge.
None of us have a god’s eye view of the world. Factual justification of our beliefs of what is true in fact being true is all we have to go by. Most of the time, we don’t spend a lot of time in justifying our knows. They simply cohere into other knowns without contradiction and this, typically, serves as sufficient justification for them. But when there is a contradiction between what we take to be knowns, then we know that some of the givens we’ve taken to be knowns are not.
Placing the god’s eye view of the scenario back in, the terminology gets confused: the man only thinks he knows that its 3 o’clock – something we know on account of knowing that the reality of it being a working clock is bogus. But, because the person is unware of this, to the person his known is, at least for the time being, fully secure, and he has no reason to doubt his knowledge.
My take away from this is that declarative knowledge is: true belief that, on account of being true, can be factually justified without end were one to so want and be capable of doing. In practice, we never spend an entire lifetime factually justifying one single belief-that, so our justifications are never perfect but always approximate. Regardless, we assume that anything we consider a known could be so justified ad infinitum without and problems manifesting in the process. The shortened version of all this is then, imo, JTB.
Hi Javra,
May I ask which scenario you are referring to: the Russell example or the counter-example? In the Russell example the clock is not working, which leads me to think you're talking about the counter-example, as that's the one in which the clock is working, but you also say things which suggest the clock isn't working.
What you describe after your initial comment is Coherentism. I don't find much appealing about this counter-intuitive theory, so I'm not sure I need to take it seriously. If you're a Coherentist, it doesn't matter whether the clock is working or not, so I don't understand the emphasis on the working clock.
And I appreciate the head nod about my posts.
Would it be too much to have it all in one post? Reading someone's theory piecemeal is way too taxing for a sluggard like me.
Via the Russel example, I was addressing the understanding that the man can only know its 3 o'clock if his beliefs conform to reality. His primary belief is that he is observing the reality of a working clock, from which is derived the second belief of what time it is. In Russell's scenario, the second belief (is assumed to) conform to reality only via the first belief's (assumed) conformity to reality. Differently stated, in the stipulated case, it is only the (assumed) truth of a working clock that justifies the man's (assumed) truth of what time it is - which, in this example, luckily happens to be correct.
But the first belief is untrue.
Still, it is - or would be - the reality of a working clock that leads - or would lead - to knowledge of what time it is.
Because the man has no justification by which to deem that the clock to not be working, to him he holds knowledge of what time it is.
To those who are aware that the clock is not working, the man does not hold knowledge of what time it is - this because the primary belief upon which his second belief is founded is untrue, thereby making the second belief factually unjustified, despite if happening to be correct by mere luck.
I suppose the pivotal part of my previous post was this:
Quoting javra
From my perspective, since the man would not be capable of so justifying his conviction of what time it is, he does not hold what he and everyone else deems to be knowledge.
No, that's not enough. If that were enough, then he could simply guess the correct time and he'd have knowledge, according to your definition. This is an even weaker conception of knowledge than JTB.
At least JTB attempts to tie the belief to reality by way of a reliable source of truth.
Quoting javra
People are not the ultimate determiners of whether someone has knowledge. I feel like you're speaking as Coherentist, but I reject Coherentism, so I accept none of your premises. I pretty much know what Coherentism entails. If you want to argue for Coherentism, I'm all ears.
If you'll accept my premise that I'm omniscient, then know that you're wrong. See, it's not very compelling.
I will not repeat what I said in my previous posts, but this clearly did not take what I said in context.
Am I wrong that you're a Coherentist? Aren't you saying that as long as all his beliefs cohere -- don't contradict any other beliefs he has -- then he has knowledge that it's 3 PM?
In its pure traditional form, quite.
Coherency of beliefs applies, in part, to justifications - not to truth. Do you find that justifications for beliefs can be incoherent and yet valid?
Do you mean...Can I reasonably hold two beliefs which don't cohere? I think maybe I'm not understanding what you're asking.
No, that anybody can.
Can you validly justify a belief-that via use of givens that do not cohere?
In order to justifiably believe that it is raining, Alice needs to look out the window. If her belief that it is raining is true then she knows that it is raining.
In its simplest form, that is all there is to knowledge and that example captures how people ordinarily use the term.
There is no need to "know that you know". Your concern, it seems, is that Alice only has a justifiable belief but is no closer to (really) knowing that her belief is true. But that is to misunderstand the conditions of knowledge. Since she has a justifiable belief, she knows that it is raining just on the condition that her belief is true. There's nothing further she needs to do, or can do, in order to know it. And the same conditions apply when reflecting on her belief - if she knows that it is raining then she can further know that she knows it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What distinguishes them logically is that knowledge has a truth condition, thinking does not. (Or, in Gilbert Ryle's terminology, knowing is an achievement word, thinking is a task word.) Alice can think it was raining at 3pm and later discover that it was not. But she cannot know that it was raining at 3pm and later discover that it was not.
So the two terms have different uses. To say that people used to know that the Earth is flat, for example, would be a misuse of the term "know" given that it has a truth condition and that that belief is unjustifiable today.
Quoting fiveredapples
How is that curious? First, I showed why your alternative to my 'luck' analysis is false. Note, the only evidence you provided that I was mistaken was the putative truth of your analysis. So I refuted your analysis.
Quoting fiveredapples
No, we're not talking past each other. I refuted your view. How? I outlined a case in which a person forms a belief about the time based on a broken clock's report - and it was clear that the person's belief qualified as knowledge. Your analysis would insist it would not qualify as knowledge. It does - clearly it does - therefore your analysis is false.
There are other cases - fake barn cases - that also imply your analysis is false.
Quoting fiveredapples
No, there are cases and cases. Individual cases need to be described. Our intuitions are about particular cases, not about principles.
So, if you present someone with the original clock case then they may well agree that the reason why the agent's belief fails to qualify as knowledge is that it is based on the report of a broken clock.
Note, I do not deny that this is true of that case.
But if you then present them with 'my' broken clock case, they are likely to agree that the agent's belief does qualify as knowledge.
Likewise with Potemkin barn cases.
Sorry, I cannot wrap my head around this question. It's probably not complicated, but it doesn't make full sense to me, so I don't want to commit to an answer yet. Let me refresh my understanding later and possibly get back to you tomorrow. For now, it's off to work for me. Thanks for the responses.
I do not think this - I think they 'can' lend justification. I'm a holist about knowledge. That is, I think what transforms a true belief into knowledge in one context, may not in another.
So, sometimes an agent has a true belief about the time, but it fails to qualify as knowledge due to the fact it was based on the report of a broken clock.
But sometimes an agent has a true belief about the time and it 'does' qualify as knowledge even though it was based on the report of a broken clock.
That's going to be the case whatever condition you specify. It'll provide you with the correct explanation of why an agent lacks knowledge in some cases, but a false one in others.
To return to my analogy with deliciousness: sometimes I find something I am eating delicious due to the presence of chocolate in it. But sometimes I find something I am eating foul due to the presence of chocolate in it.
But aren't you answering a different question, namely "when is someone justified in believing they have knowledge"? The person in the Russell clock case - and other Gettier style cases - may well be justified in believing they have knowledge. But it still seems true (and would seem true to them too, were they aware of the nature of their situation) that they do not, in fact, possess knowledge.
Suppose I affirm knowledge that it will rain today. You ask me why. I then reply by justifying this belief to true with the following: there’s a satellite up in the sky and my cat is next to a plant out in the backyard – with this being the full scope of my justification. The two givens, even if true, do not cohere in any intelligible manner to my belief.
Here, I’d consider that my justification was invalid.
Now suppose that I explain things in a coherent manner as such: the satellite up in the sky has given a weather forecast of 80% chance of rain and my cat has always had a weird habit of sitting next to a plant in my backyard a few hours before it rains, next to which he is now sitting. The same basic truths are presented, but now the explanation provided makes them cohere with my belief that it will rain today.
Here, I’d consider that my justifications were valid – even if less than perfect.
In case it does rain – thereby evidencing my belief-that to be true – I can then maintain my claim of having had JTB in the latter case, but I can't claim JTB in the former case.
(edited the last sentence for better semantics)
As I believe I've addressed in my posts, I agree with this.
To me the conceptual problems only emerge when we presume (or else intend to gain) an omniscient perspective of reality and, thereby, possession of an infallible knowledge. We never hold such.
Still:
Quoting javra
True propositions that can be thereby justified ad infinitum without problems - where it to be feasible to so justify - occur. When they occur will always remain to some measure fallible for all of us non-omniscient beings.
I am not sure I am following you. What are these conceptual problems and how do they arise for my position?
So, my position - as described in the OP - is that knowledge consists of a feeling Reason is adopting towards true beliefs.
This explains why there will be nothing, beyond simply being a 'true belief' that all clear cases of knowledge have in common.
Gettier-style cases and other similar thought experiments show us that sometimes a true belief qualifies as knowledge due to the fact it was justified, sometimes not. Sometimes a true belief can be knowledge without there being any justification for holding it; sometimes a true belief fails to be knowledge precisely because there is no justification for holding it; sometimes a true belief fails to be knowledge despite there being a justification for holding it.
How can we make sense of that?
Well, consider the property of 'delicious-to-me'. Only something I am eating can be delicious to me. But sometimes something I am eating to me is delicious because it has flavour P; yet sometimes something I am eating it is not delicious to me because it has flavour P; and sometimes something is delicious to me and flavour P, despite being present, played no role at all.
There is nothing problematic in that. I am not contradicting myself if I like foodstuff A due to its having flavour P, yet dislike foodstuff B due to its having flavour P.
Likewise, then, if knowledge is a feeling. There is nothing problematic - nothing incoherent - in Reason finding that she has the knowledge feeling about one true belief due to it being justified, yet does not have the knowledge feeling about another true belief despite its being justified.
Notta problem... Gotta say five... your manners are impeccable nowadays! Not that we've ever been at rhetorical odds.
:wink:
Cheers!
Good to have someone like you here... I must say... and I know that I'm not alone regarding the sentiment!
As we once concluded a few days back, I’m not profound enough to understand the subtleties of your position regard Her: Reason. To which I again say, so be it! Off to the shallow tides with me.
But to give a reply given the best of my understanding regarding the position you affirm:
I have yet to encounter this person you refer to as Reason. But if I did, I’d do my best to explain to Her that truth is a conformity to what is real, that only if something is true can it be justified without error regardless of degree, and that there can be no knowledge in the absence of truth. I think I’d try to tell Her this even if Reason’s feelings might get hurt by me so saying. (I don’t like unnecessarily hurting persons, even if they are strangers to me.)
This may or may not be in accord to your position. But again, I’m not of that depth.
What nonsense. You're just insisting that your scenario shows what you say it does. Everyone is perfectly in his own right to say whether it strikes him as a case of knowledge or not. You proved nothing. It's absurd to think your scenario is anything other than a study case for everyone to decide for himself whether the man in the scenario has knowledge. I weighed in that he doesn't, and I explained why he doesn't. You've done nothing more than say otherwise. You haven't even bothered to explain -- because you don't know how -- why this new example is in any meaningful way different from the Russell example. You think "the clock just stopped working moments prior" is doing philosophical work for you. It's not. Yet somehow, magically, inclusion of this provides a case of someone having knowledge about the time based on looking at a broken clock? That's laughably bad.
Quoting creativesoul
That's my refutation of Gettier's Case I in a nutshell.
We're talking about Smith's belief.
That needs kept in the forefront of consideration. Gettier only begins by talking about Smith's belief. Gettier then conflates propositions and belief and loses sight of Smith's belief in the process.
The truth conditions of "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", when examined by us as a general proposition(which is what Gettier wants and needs us to do), and the truth conditions of "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" when examined by us as Smith's belief(which Gettier neglects entirely) are drastically different from one another. And remember, we're talking about Smith's belief.
So, the aforementioned distinction needs drawn and maintained.
The truth conditions of the general proposition "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", amount to any man that has ten coins in their pocket and gets the job. In other words, any man with ten coins in his pocket who gets the job counts as "the man". That's all it takes to satisfy the truth conditions of (e) when we examine it as general proposition. It doesn't matter who it is. However...
Remember that we are talking about Smith's belief, and the same just cannot be said about it...
Smith's belief (e) was based upon Smith's prior belief(s) that Jones is the man with ten coins in his pocket that will get the job. That much is undeniably clear. I mean, Getter himself writes... and I quote...
So, we can clearly see Smith's belief is Jones is the man who will get the job. The problem is that Gettier loses sight of the fact that that's Smith's belief, and he does so immediately afterwards. This is shown by Gettier's examination of Smith's belief as though it were equivalent to a general proposition.
That's just not the case.
Smith does not believe that just any man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job. Smith's belief is only true if Jones gets the job and had ten coins in his pocket. No one else matters. Smith believes that Jones will get the job. Gettier's own words stand in clear support of this. Let's look again for ourselves...
Here we can see - yet again - where Gettier offers Smith's own belief that Jones is the man who will get the job and has ten coins in his pocket. Gettier then claims those beliefs count as Smith's ground for believing the following...
That's a fair enough account, as long as we keep in mind that it is still Smith's belief. Gettier doesn't. When examining (e) - as Smith's belief - we know that that's about Jones and only Jones. I mean, with just a moments thought, there is no question whatsoever regarding who Smith's belief is about. Gettier said it clearly. The president of the company picked Jones out to the exclusion of all others when he told Smith that in the end Jones would get the job. Jones was the man that allowed Smith to count the coins in his pocket. Smith picked Jones out to the exclusion of all others when talking about the man that allowed him to count the coins in his pocket.
Clearly Smith is picking out one particular Jones to the exclusion of all other men when he deduces (e). So, there is no question who Smith's belief is about. Smith believes Jones is the man who will get the job as well as believing Jones is the man with ten coins in his pocket. Thus, it can only be the case - when interpreting Smith's belief (e) that the referent of "the man" is the exact same Jones that the president was talking about; the exact same Jones that allowed Smith to count the coins that were in his pocket; the exact same Jones that Smith believed would get the job; and the exact same Jones that was there with Smith throughout the very thought process Gettier describes.
Gettier neglects all of this, and conflates proposition and belief as a result.
Smith believes Jones is the man with ten coins in his pocket who will get the job. Jones is not the man with ten coins in his pocket who got the job. Thus, Smith's belief is false.
False belief is not a problem for JTB.
QED
In summary, Gettier confuses propositions and belief by conflating the truth conditions of the general proposition "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", with the truth conditions of Smith's belief that "the person with ten coins in his pocket will get the job". In the former(a general proposition), any man that has ten coins in their pocket and gets the job counts as "the person with ten coins in their pocket". Whereas in Smith's belief only Jones counts...
Smith's belief was about none other than Jones, and it was false. This also is more than adequate explanation for the intuitive dissonance that everyone who reads Gettier's paper has upon first contemplation. The logic is impeccable. Unfortunately, it's a bait and switch, going from truth conditions of a particular belief had by a particular person about another particular person to the truth conditions of a general proposition that is not about anyone in particular. Thus, it's nothing more than an accounting malpractice. Every Gettier example following that formula has the same flaw... the rules of entailment permit a change in both the truth conditions and meaning of P. That's unacceptable. Salva Veritate.
You keep referring to how people use the term and I keep pointing out that people don't use the term correctly if their belief didnt have a truth condition. We agreed on this so I dont see how it makes sense for you to keep referring to how people use the term when it is impossible to know when they used the term correctly (ie. problem of induction) when truth doesnt follow from justifications. It follows from the relationship between some belief and some state-of-affairs. It would be possible to have a true belief without any justification.
My argument is that they think they know what it means, but don't know what it means. If they really knew, then they'd know that knowledge, as they (and you) are using it, is an illusion.
Quoting Andrew M
This doesnt follow. If her belief is true then it qualifies as knowledge. Her belief can be justified, but not true. So she can't have knowledge unless she knows her belief is true. How will she know if her belief is true when she only has justifications from which truths don't necessarily follow?
My argument is that a truth condition is not a qualification for knowledge. Justifications are the only qualifications for knowledge.
Truth is some state-of-affairs. Knowledge can be true or false, which fits how we use the term in an objective sense - outside of our awareness of whether our knowledge is true or not.
Thank you. My brain is no longer capable of abstraction, so examples almost always help.
Well, I would assume that that satellite is providing information for the basis of your belief. I would assume that your cat's position next to the plant provided similar information. Of course I would dismiss the cat basis as superstition, probably, but there might be some science behind it: maybe cats are especially prescient of upcoming rain storms. Either way, without knowing what type of information the satellite is providing, without knowing the reliability of satellites in forecasting rain on Earth, or rain in your town (more specifically), it wouldn't strike me as a case of knowledge for two reasons: (1) I don't think you can have knowledge of the future. Well, that pretty much ends the discussion for me, but (2), in case knowledge of the future is something others subscribe to, I don't know of the reliability of your methods for acquiring your belief to say whether you have knowledge. But your reasons cohere with your belief.
As an aside, or maybe not so aside, I have always considered beliefs about the future outside the realm of knowledge -- for the simple fact that they could be defeated by things not turning out as you predict. If we allow beliefs about the future to count as knowledge claims, then we must allow that knowledge is defeasible. My intuitions about knowledge say otherwise. This, btw, is why the Gettier Case I scenario doesn't strike me as helpful in any way. But, back to your post.
Is validity used to talk about justification? Having studied a little logic, it has always bothered me when people use the colloquial use of 'valid' in philosophical discussions. Sorry, just a pet peeve. But do enlighten me, not that it matters to our discussion (as I understand you) if I'm wrong about validity as a term for justification.
Like I said, they already cohered, in my opinion, but now I might be swayed into thinking you have enough for epistemic justification for knowledge. I don't, of course, as 80% reliability, even coupled with your prescient cat, is not enough, in my opinion. And, again, it's a claim about the future, so I wouldn't care if satellite reports were 100% reliable to date. To me, you wouldn't have knowledge even then.
Yes, I'd say that you have perfectly good reason to believe that it's going to rain later today.
I don't subscribe to this formula of saying someone had knowledge after all because their belief about the future turned out to be correct or true. So, to me, in neither case you had knowledge, and in neither case you had JTB either.
No, not nonsense. Your reply is as inept as insisting that in Russell or Gettier's original they were just 'insisting' that the agent lacks knowledge.
Then you've just said "everyone's entitled to their opinion". Er, yes. That's not in dispute. That's what someone says when they've lost the argument.
In the original clock case it is clear to the reason of virtually everyone that the agent lacks knowledge despite also clearly possessing a justified true belief.
Now, you - you - have insisted that any true belief based on the report of a broken clock does not count as knowledge.
I provided a clear counterexample. I'll describe it again in case you just didn't bother reading it.
There's a clock that's been working fine until 3pm, when it breaks. Tom looks at that clock at 3pm - the moment it breaks - and forms the belief that it is 3pm. Now, does he know that it is 3pm?
Yes. Doesn't your reason tell you the same? Seriously, what does your reason say about the case?
Note, if you just reject such intuitions on the grounds that respecting them would require abandoning your thesis, then you're the dogmatist. You've now got an unfalsifiable thesis.
As if the position put forth in the OP is anything other than an unfalsifiable thesis.
The irony of pots and kettles...
Gettier and Russell put forth examples which they figured most people would agree with in terms of whether the person had knowledge or not. They relied on this general consensus to make objections of JTB.
Oh brother. You don't even understand your own posts. You have no argument for knowledge. You've never put forth an argument. All you're doing is putting forth scenarios with different circumstances and fishing for a general consensus. "Hey, guys, in this scenario, does the guy have knowledge? What, no? How about in this other scenario?" That's all your posts amount to. In other words, genius, you just are asking for everyone's intuitions on the matter, so when I say that "everyone's entitled to his own opinion," it's because that's all your posts ask for.
Oh! "it is clear" -- LMAO. Okay, dude. That's so compelling. Are you forgetting that I said the person in the Russell example -- "the original clock case" -- doesn't have knowledge? Yes, he has a justified true belief on the JTB conception of knowledge. Then, again, I've already said as much.
Insisted? I've stated my view based on my intuition of knowledge. And, might I remind you, that is the putative take-away from the Russell example: he didn't have knowledge because he used a broken clock to ascertain the time, which we can generalize to "broken clocks do not lend the right type of epistemic justification needed for knowledge." You've tried to run away from that inference by invoking the ridiculous idea that luck explained why he didn't have knowledge. I explained why your notion of luck doesn't explain anything. So, without this magical notion of luck, what explains why the man in the Russell example doesn't have knowledge?....Yeah, that's right, you still have to explain why the man doesn't have knowledge, as you've agreed, except now you can't help yourself to the silly notion of luck in your analysis. I'm waiting for the arguments you owe us. Until then, my analysis at least exists and is commonsensical, so you're absolutely getting destroyed in this argument.
A "clear counterexample" -- but I'm insisting! And, no, you didn't provide a counter-example of someone having knowledge based on looking at a broken clock.
CLEARLY NO. There is no meaningful difference between the Russell example and this example. I've asked you TWICE NOW to explain what the difference is. I've asked you to explain the philosophical work you think "a broken clock that's been working fine until a moment ago" is doing for you. You still haven't explained it. You want to know a secret? You can't. Why can't you? Because it does NOTHING FOR YOU. This is so preposterous. You're giving the same argument without realizing it, but I'm the dogmatist!
My intuitions say he doesn't have knowledge.
Now explain the philosophical force of "the broken clock was working up to a moment ago." And then explain why the take-away from the Russell example shouldn't be "the man lacked knowledge because he ascertained the time from a broken clock." We've already seen your "luck analysis" fail, so try something new.
To not beat around the bush, your reply doesn’t address the heart of the matter in relation to the one principle discrepancy you pointed out: coherentism (which I've just now seen you've amended in your first post to me). Cohrentism comes in two varieties: the coherence theory of truth, which I disagree with, and the coherence theory of justification, which I agree with. My question to you was whether or not it makes sense to you that justifications which are not coherent are to be deemed well grounded, acceptable, and/or correct (since you don’t like the colloquial use of “valid”).
Quoting fiveredapples
As to the details of your reply, you’ve addressed a presumption of how the two stated facts are intended to cohere into the belief which is claimed to be knowledge, this in the first example I gave – it seems by importing the details of the second example which is coherent into the first. I’ll try for a more forthright example: Can the knowledge that planet Earth is approximately spherical be to any measure justified by the two facts that a) pyramids are not square and that b) oranges have an orange color?
If so, how? Here there are no contradictions but I don’t find that there is any coherence between the two facts and the knowledge claimed.
My question, again, is bluntly this: Can a justification hold if it does not consist of givens that cohere into that which is justified, if not also into each other?
Quoting fiveredapples
Would you say that one does not know whether a rock that is to be thrown up into the air at some point in the future will fall back to down to earth?
There are also more worn-out examples such as knowing that the sun will rise again tomorrow.
Quoting fiveredapples
It's the colloquial use. Tell me of your preferred term for claimed justification that doesn't amount to a squat of beans, and I'll use it in our debates.
But more importantly, this asking me to enlighten you is to me a little irksome – maybe because of the day I’ve had. If you ever happen to seek some form of enlightenment, I’d recommend that you don’t ask other people for it. Simply because there are a lot of charlatans out there, as I’m certain @Bartricks would agree, and they all claim wisdom. From a song by Leonard Cohen called Teachers that I happen to greatly like: “’Follow me’ the wise man said, but he walked behind.”
To be fair to me, I wasn't trying to address your original question. I was simply trying to analyze and understand the scenario you put forth.
I don't know what the full meaning of "well grounded" is in this context, so I'm reluctant to agree or disagree. And, let me remind you, I found both scenarios to be cases of justifications that are coherent.
Maybe coherentism is too complex for me. I'm asking myself "acceptable for what?" and I can't come up with a good answer.
Quoting javra
Okay, now this is more my speed. My answer here is no, not on the face of that justification alone.
Quoting javra
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Quoting javra
Oh, I wasn't suggesting I knew the appropriate terminology. I just hope it's not "valid" and "invalid," so choose whatever you like.
Quoting javra
But it was a genuine request. I don't know the terminology.
So are we now cool with the claim that justification requires coherency of beliefs?
Quoting fiveredapples
Hm, I can understand your logic for so affirming, but it doesn't so far strike me as in accord to the term's common usage. I, for example, make numerous decisions based on things I presume within what I consider a context of knowns regarding the future - such as that gravity will apply or that the sun will again rise. But again, to me all knowns are to varying extents fallible.
Quoting fiveredapples
LOL. Yea, I get how "valid justification" might seem weird on it own. But "invalid justification" sounds about right to me. So until we can devise a different term for the matter ... I'll be peevishly using it.
Yes. But I'm now suspiciously cautious that my answers are going to walk me into being a coherentist.
Quoting javra
Heck, if your intuitions of knowledge are different from mine, I'm okay with that. I would point out that this commits you to knowledge that is defeasible, but you seem to be okay with this too. I am not okay with it.
It started with the Russell's Broken Clock scenario, which Bartricks lays out nicely, so I'll just use his words:
Bartricks states his intuition of knowledge on the matter:
Let's ignore the whole “to our reason” talk. It's unnecessary. In simpler terms, in less technically loaded terms, most of us probably agree with Bartricks that the man does not have knowledge. Now, the million dollar question is, “Why doesn't he have knowledge despite having a justified true belief, which technically satisfies the definition of knowledge as JTB (Justified True Belief)? Again, I believe most us would be drawn directly to the obvious answer: namely, the man lacks the proper epistemic justification because the broken clock doesn't lend him the epistemic justification needed for knowledge. Let's call this the “Broken Clock Explanation.”
Now, if the Broken Clock Explanation is right, there are two problems for anyone – ahem, Bartricks – who wants to offer a different explanation. Heck, even if the Broken Clock Explanation is wrong, it still presents two problems in virtue of being so intuitive to most of us.
(1) The first problem is that you're going to need a different explanation for the justification failure in the Russell scenario.
(2) The second problem is that you're going to have to offer an even more intuitive explanation than the Broken Clock Explanation; otherwise, why would we abandon the more intuitive and equally explanatory Broken Clock Explanation? Or, you're going to have to show us why the Broken Clock Explanation can't be right, which isn't the same as offering a different explanation for the justification failure.
Bartrick's attempt to tackle the first problem failed miserably. He suggested that the notion of luck helps explain the justification problem in the Russell scenario. (I'm being generous, here, as he didn't know what he was talking about.) But I pointed out that luck only affects the truth of the belief, not its justification. Basically, because the man luckily checked the time at precisely 3 PM, which happened to be the time on the broken clock, he was able to form a true belief that it was 3 PM. If you can't understand this point, then open up your coloring books and forget philosophy. The result of my devastating critique is that it leaves Bartricks without an explanation for the justification failure, meaning he owes us an explanation still. Meanwhile, the rest of us have an intuitive explanation: the Broken Clock Explanation.
Bartricks whimpered that the Broken Clock Explanation can't be right because broken clocks, according to him, can lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time. Notice that even if we're wrong about the Broken Clock Explanation, which is highly unlikely, Bartricks will still not have given an explanation for the justification failure in the Russell scenario, because his one weak attempt was thoroughly refuted.
Anyway, at this point, Bartricks says he has an example that refutes the premise that broken clocks can't lend epistemic justification to beliefs about the time. He says he has a scenario – let's call it the “Broken Clock 2” scenario – in which it will be intuitive to most people that the man in the scenario has knowledge that it's 3 PM despite having acquired his belief by looking at a broken clock. So, what is this scenario? Again, I let Bartricks speak for himself:
My intuition is that the man doesn't have knowledge. So, the same explanation applies here as in the Russell scenario: the broken clock doesn't lend him the epistemic justification he needs for knowledge. In both instances, the clock is broken, so what is different in this scenario? Well, in this scenario, the clock just stopped working a moment ago. Okay, but why is that different than the clock stopped working 100 years ago just as it turned to 3 PM? He's still ascertaining the time based off a broken clock, so what philosophical work is “but it just stopped working a moment ago” supposed to be doing for Bartricks? He doesn't know. My answer is that it's doing no philosophical work at all, so of course the original analysis holds – because, in essence, it's the very same scenario.
And, again, I remind everyone. Even if Bartricks is correct that we can have knowledge that it's 3 PM based off looking at a broken clock, he will still not have explained the justification failure in the Russell scenario. And we've already seen how his “luck analysis” fails miserably, so he offers no insights on the Russell scenario.
So, as I see it, both scenarios are essentially the same. If you can explain to me what is added philosophically by stipulating that “the clock broke only a moment ago,” then I'm all ears. Personally, I've grown tired of doing all the philosophical heavy lifting for every scenario Bartricks conjures but can't explain.
We didn't agree on this and it's the key issue.
People use the term "know" correctly if their belief is justifiable. It need not be true. They only misuse the term if their belief is not justifiable.
Whereas knowledge is acquired - that is, the conditions of knowledge are met - if, in addition to being justifiable, their belief is true.
There is no guarantee or proof that any particular claim to knowledge is knowledge, no matter how justifiable.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Your question assumes that she needs an infallible guarantee or proof. She does not. She knows her belief is true (if it is) by reflection on what made her belief justifiable (e.g., her observation). If her belief is not true, then she won't know that (unless she later discovers her mistake). That's the logic of the usage.
Quoting Harry Hindu
So, as you see it, knowledge is simply justified belief?
We agree on the first part. We seem to disagree on what "know" and "knowledge" mean. Maybe it's because we are using different definitions.
I see "know" as the act of recalling information and using it.
I see "knowledge" as that information that is recalled.
So to say that I know something is to say that I have information in relation to some state-of-affairs that I can recall and use if necessary. It says nothing about whether that information is true or not. I gain more trust in the knowledge when the use of the knowledge accomplishes the goals I apply it to.
Truth is the actual state-of-affairs. Accuracy would be more like an external relationship between the information/knowledge in one's brain and the actual state-of-affairs the knowledge is (supposed to be) about. Knowledge is more or less accurate in relation to the state-of-affairs (the truth) it is about.
So, to know something is to recall and apply the knowledge one has. If one talks about "knowing" then they are talking about recalling and using their "knowledge", so there is no difference.
For you, there seems to be a difference. You seem to be saying that we could use the term "know" correctly since it is based only on justification, which I have said and agree, but never use the term "knowledge" because we can never actually know our knowledge is true. For you, it seems, one could never say "I possess knowledge", but can only say "I know something". I don't see any difference in what those statements mean.
Quoting Andrew M
Right, so if aliens observed our usage if the term, then they'd see us using it in instances of when we do know and when we don't. We use it when our knowledge is true, and when it is false. Truth conditions would not be a qualification for it's usage. Only justification.
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, it is the justified beliefs that you recall and apply when you say that you "know".
The question is: "Do I have the right, i.e., within reason, to believe that I'm justified when looking at clocks to presume that a clock is giving me the correct time? The answer, and I believe most of us agree, is yes. We know based on our experiences with clocks that generally clocks (fiveredapples pointed this out too) give us the correct time. However, we also know based on experience that sometimes clock fail, and thus sometimes (say 3% of the time) they don't give us the correct time. In fact, if you asked the person in Russell's example, "Is it possible you're wrong about the time?" they would probably say yes. So, most of us know that there is a chance that we could be wrong, however small, i.e., the justification is probability based. It's rarely the case that I'm justified with 100% certainty.
Now the problem is the following: How can you not have knowledge (JTB) if you've followed the correct reasoning process in this example? After all, reason dictated that your conclusion (you had the correct time) was justified. So, in one sense you believe you have JTB based on your experiences with clocks. However, later you find out the clock is broken, and so you weren't justified after all. This seems to be contradictory, but is it really? Does it really show that JTB fails? No. Why?
Because no definition, at least few definitions, are absolute. An example of an absolute definition would be, "All triangles have three sides," an example of a definition that's not absolute, is the definition of a game. Those of you who have read Wittgenstein know that there is no definition of the word game that covers every possible use of the word. The point is, do we say that the definition is incomplete or doesn't work because we find some exception. Again, no. The definition is a guide, it's not some absolute that works in every possible use of the word. The same is true of the definition of knowledge as JTB. It's not some absolute that will work in every possible use, but, I believe it's the best definition as a general rule or guide.
Much more could be said about this, but it would take about 15 or 20 pages of writing.
Is this to say that everything you know is indefeasible? As an example pertinent to the discussion: Your knowledge that the last clock or watch you looked at was working properly and thereby gave the correct time will be indefeasible on what grounds?
Well, no, Sam, I don't think that is the question at all. The difference is this:
(A) Are we justified in believing we are justified in believing it's 3 PM?
(B) Are we justified in believing it's 3 PM?
You are asking Question A, but that's not the question in determining whether we have knowledge or not. That would be Question B.
To be justified in believing you're justified simply requires that you are aware of the sanctioned methods for acquiring beliefs (with regard to having knowledge) and aware that you're using one of those methods.
It goes like this: You ask yourself, "What method am I using?" Answer: method 3. You then check the list of sanctioned methods: "Oh, I see method 3 is on the list of justified ways to acquire true beliefs with regard to knowledge." Conclusion: "I'm using a justified method." In other words, because you know the list and you know which method you're using, provided it's one on the list, you are now justified in believing you're employing a sanctioned method, which is just to say that you're justified in believing you're justified. Of course all of this is unnecessary and outside the realm of knowledge.
Everyone should disagree.
That's why "looking at clockfaces" is a sanctioned method. Note that you have now switched to Question B. I don't know if you realize it or not.
Yes, in such cases, despite having applied one of the sanctioned methods, you will not have knowledge. This is in line with our intuitions of knowledge. Again, though, you are now discussing Question B.
Yes, because sanctioned methods don't guarantee true beliefs. Again, this is in line with our intuitions of knowledge. But the limitation of these sanctioned methods doesn't affect justification, it affects truth.
Invoking the notion of certainty is only going to make the assessment worse, not better. I've already noted that I think you've turned your analysis into a certainty requirement. Certainty and knowledge have nothing to do with each other.
This is a strange way to phrase it. It seems like you are misunderstanding the Russell scenario. The man has successfully satisfied JTB. He has a belief. The belief is true. And the belief is justified. If you think knowledge is JTB, then you must conclude that the man has knowledge. You seem not to appreciate this fact. You're wanting to object that he doesn't have knowledge because he was looking at a broken clock. But you can't make that objection if you subscribe to JTB.
You of all people cannot say the man made a mistake, because it's irrelevant if you subscribe to JTB, as the man has satisfied the requirements. You must say that he has knowledge. I don't know, have I missed something about your views? Frankly, I'm not sure what you're committed to, which tells me you haven't been all that clear, as I possess immaculate reading skills.
Yes, everything I know is indefeasible.
My KNOWLEDGE that the last clock I looked at was working properly and gave me the correct time is indefeasible, mainly, because the last clock I looked at was working properly and gave me the correct time.
OK. Now I know your point of view. Thanks.
Well, of course I have discovered many times that what I thought I knew was not in fact knowledge. That's just to say I didn't really know back then, so of course it wasn't knowledge that got defeated.
Yes, exactly.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. Just above you were talking about our usage of knowledge terms ("know", "knowledge", etc.), but now you're talking about our knowledge itself (what we do know), which is always true, never false.
So Alice can justifiably say, "I know it is raining" (if it appears to be raining) but if it is not raining then she does not know that it is raining. She has failed to acquire knowledge.
That difference between the usage and the reality is what the observing aliens notice. But Alice also notices it as well if she subsequently discovers her mistake. She becomes aware that her prior claim was an instance of using a knowledge term when, in fact, she did not know it was raining.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes. The truth condition is only a qualification for acquiring or having knowledge, not for the use of knowledge terms.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Just to clarify this, one can say both, and they have the same root meaning. So Alice could justifiably say them in the example above. However one only possesses knowledge (or knows something) when one's belief is true. In that example, Alice did not possess knowledge that it was raining (or, equivalently, she did not know that it was raining).
The key point is the distinction between Alice's knowledge claims (which can be false) and Alice's knowledge (which can't be false).
So, five. I want to see if I understand you correctly.
You're granting Russell's clock as qualifying for a justified true belief. Do you find that false belief counts as adequate justificatory ground for a knowledge claim based upon that belief?
In Russell's example, the person believed that a broken clock was working. On my view, false belief never counts as adequate justificatory ground from which to deduce/infer knowledge.
By the way, a couple days back I answered your request for a one page summary regarding Gettier's paper. I'm of keen interest to get your take on it.
I think that people would ordinarily think that your belief was justified (reasonable, warranted, etc.). Here's a filled-out example to illustrate.
Alice: What's the time?
Bob: 3pm
Alice: How do you know?
Bob: I looked at the clock just now
Alice: Ah, OK.
That Bob looked at the clock is what justifies his claim that it was 3pm. He didn't just guess or make something up. I think that, with Alice, we would normally be satisfied with his justification.
If so, then Bob's claim was justified even if the clock were broken and it was really 4pm. In which case he would have had a justified but false belief.
If the clock stopped exactly 24 hours prior and it really was 3pm, then he had a justified and true belief. But he didn't know that it was 3pm. Which is the Gettier problem.
Now we could raise the justification bar and require that Bob check that the clock is working first and perhaps also verify the time against other clocks. But even that could conceivably fail to produce a true belief. And, more importantly, it starts to get away from what we ordinarily require for knowledge claims.
Don't we ordinarily require them to be well grounded, to be based upon true belief? Bob believed that a broken clock was working.
I'm granting that the man has a justified true belief, yes.
This question strikes me as odd for two reasons. One, the man in the Russell example has a true belief, so I'm wondering what motivates the question about a false belief. Two, the truth of the belief and the justification for the belief are separate things, so I'm not sure I know what is meant in asking if a false belief counts as adequate justificatory ground for a knowledge claim. But in case you're simply asking if a false belief ever counts as knowledge, then the answer is no.
I'm not sure this is something we need to consider. Nobody is asking you to verify whether the clock you used to ascertain the time is actually a working clock, nor whether it's keeping track of time accurately, so I don't think you have to have a belief about either of those two circumstances. I can simply say that I looked at a clock, which is on the list of sanctioned methods for acquiring epistemic justification, because clocks generally work and work properly. So I can just deny that I had a false belief that the clock was working on the grounds that I had no belief on the matter.
Yes, I saw it. I had to do a refresher on Gettier Case I, and I remembered why I don't like talking about it: I don't think it's a case of knowledge. I think I'm the wrong person to discuss the case, as I don't think it has much of anything to teach us about knowledge. I could be wrong, a distinct possibility, so I try to keep quiet about it. But from what I read of your response, which is basically the point you're making in this post, I've answered it: I needn't concern myself with this false belief you want to attribute to me or to the man in the Russell scenario.
I suggest that we be careful with this distinction. 'I know that X' is a statement that we know how to use.
Perhaps we should also be wary of grammar. 'Knowledge' is a noun. Therefore knowledge is a definite entity?
Quoting Bartricks
I agree. We use 'I know X' in a system of conventions that we mostly [s]know[/s] 'unconsciously.' I don't think we can exhaustively catalog these conventions. That said, I'd tentatively translate 'I know X' as 'X is true and I have reasons that you'd also find convincing to believe so.'
We can also contrast 'I know X' with 'I think X.' To merely think that X is to indicate less certainty or mere opinion. It makes a lesser claim on the listener.
This seems correct and well expressed. This JTB & clock example is new to me and illuminating.
Thank you. I find the Russell scenario illuminating, too. I am grateful to Bartricks for the thread -- even though we have become mortal enemies!
I agree with all of this. At the end you hint at just how complex the problem actually is. Our 'toy' examples are great for showing the problems with 'knowledge = JTP.' To figure out what we do mean ('intuitively') by 'knowledge' is something like an endless task. This noun can be understood as a tool employed by members of a community to many purposes. Only some of our knowledge about 'knowledge' can be made explicit.
Yes, for a true claim to be knowledge it must be well-grounded (i.e., all the premises that the claim depends on must themselves be true). But it's impractical to expect Bob to check every premise before he can justifiably make a claim.
That's why there is a difference between knowing that it is 3pm (which Bob doesn't know) and merely having a justified, true belief that it is 3pm (which Bob does have).
I tend to agree with you. I wonder whether you'll agree with me that this follows from convention. We just don't tend to use 'knowledge' for false beliefs.
Right. Roughly he can say 'I know X' when he has done what is roughly expected to justify such a claim. Since we actually use the word 'know' all the time without an 'infinite check,' we should instead look to what tends to be accepted as justification. The problems of the word 'knowledge' aren't so different from those of the word 'justification.' We learn to act and speak within a system of conventions. In this sense, meaning is exterior to the subject.
Awesome. We agree. 'Pragmatic middle ground' is a good phrase.
Do you believe that such a denial is adequate here?
Are we to say that when we look at a clock to see what time it is that we do not believe that the clock is working? Surely we all do. We need not wonder to ourselves at the moment of looking in order to believe that we're looking at a working clock. If we did not believe that it was working, we would not have looked at it.
Right?
So, in Russell's clock example, the belief is justified but not well grounded?
The motivation is regarding whether or not the true belief about the time is well grounded, and/or justified.
Yes, where well-grounded means that the belief as well as all the premises that the belief depends on are true.
Yes, that's what I want to say. I think we can assume that it's working. I don't think assumptions count as beliefs. After all, if you look at a clock to form a belief about the time, are you really checking to see if the clock is working? Don't we check it because we expect it to be working?
And how about its accuracy? Do we check its accuracy? How do we do that? Do we check with a verifying source -- another clock? And, then, I may ask, what source you used to verify the accuracy of the first verifying source -- and so on ad infinitum.
No, we don't do that when we check the time. We simply glance at our cell phones or watches or clocks and form our beliefs.
But, as I said, I simply assume that it's working because clocks generally work and keep time accurately. Are you saying assumptions are beliefs? If assumptions are beliefs, then do correct assumptions satisfy JTB?
Yes. That's what makes sense to me as well; especially if we are drawing a distinction between being justified and being well grounded. If proponents and/or advocates of JTB find Russell's clock to be a problem, then I'm no such advocate.
The difference between assuming that the clock we're looking at is working and believing it's working is what... exactly?
I cannot distinguish between the two,
Quoting fiveredapples
No. That's precisely the point. You already believe it is, otherwise you could not possibly trust it as a means to tell the time.
So, we assume a clock is working, we do not check to see, we have a long held practice of looking at clocks to tell the time, but when we look at a clock to check what time it is...
...we do not believe that it is a reliable means of telling time(that it's working)?
That's nonsense.
Hmmm....
Would that exclude language less creatures' belief from being well grounded? That would be at odds with my current leanings.
This is a good point. We can extend it. We don't check the meanings of the words we use as we use them. All our conscious decision making depends on unconscious/automatic/embodied skills of staggering complexity. Even much of our language use is effortless. This sentence (this one now) is immediately intelligible. In theory we could check every sentence in a simple text again and again to make sure that it said what we thought it said. Am I sure that I read and speak English?
I think he's making a useful distinction. While I understand the temptation to interpret trustingly reading a clockface as 'belief,' the event is so automatic that denoting it a 'belief' has a retrospective artificiality.
Do I believe that there is an external world? Do I believe that my words have meaning? Do I believe that I know what 'believe' means (or how to use 'believe')? At some point doubt becomes unintelligible.
In short, I see what you mean, and it's reasonable. But the gap between automatic trust and conscious belief seems important.
I don't think so. You, as a language user, could in principle identify the premises of any belief and check if they're true (and thus whether the belief holder could be said to have knowledge). But those premises are true (or not) independently of whether anyone does identify them.
Quoting Andrew M
Well yeah, because in using knowledge terms you are referring to your knowledge. What else could you be doing with those terms? What do you mean by "use" when you say people use words? What are you doing mentally when you say that you "know" something? What are you doing mentally when you tie your shoes? I just want to make sure you're not a p-zombie.
Quoting Andrew M
But you're not taking this to it's ultimate conclusion and that is how do we know that the aliens know the truth? How do you know that you have acquired the truth when you only have justifications to go on? Again, as you are defining it, you'd need to know that your knowledge is true, not only justified, in order to use the term "knowledge" correctly. If you're not referring to your knowledge when using knowledge terms, then what do you mean when you use the terms? When I say "use" I mean making a particular sound or scribble to refer to the information one possesses about a particular state-of-affairs, like the steps one takes to tie their shoes, and the reasons why one should tie their shoes. What do you mean by the word "use"?
I think the difference is about the attitude you take towards a proposition. I say this because Person A and Person B might take different attitudes, one of assumption and one of belief, respectively, with respect to the same proposition given the same evidence and given the same background knowledge.
For example, if I see you leisurely walking in the park holding hands with a girl of about your age, which we'll say is 16 years of age, then I might assume that she's your new girlfriend. In this example, I have the assumption that she's your new girlfriend, but I haven't the belief, because for belief I hold myself to a higher standard of evidence.
But now let's take Johnny, our mutual friend, and he also sees the same scenario. He might form the belief that the girl is your new girlfriend, because Johnny forms beliefs with much less evidence than I do. He might say to me, "Oh wow, I can't believe CreativeSoul has a new girlfriend already. He just broke up with Sally a week ago." And I might respond skeptically, "Maybe." Johnny might reply, "Come on, of course that's his girlfriend. Didn't you see them holding hands at the park?"
So, in this example, Johnny seems to believe that you have a new girlfriend, while I remain skeptical enough to not assent, but of course I recognize that there's some evidence in favor of this opinion.
In the Russell scenario, the man might assume that the clock is working without believing that the clock is working.
Hmmm...I think this is a somewhat unsatisfying answer because then we'd be committed to the view that you can form beliefs based off assumptions, which I'm not exactly happy with, but let me say no more for now. I'm also not so sure the analysis is correct. So, let this post stand as a tentative response until I can think through it more.
But I hope to have at least given you an intuitive account of the difference between an assumption and a belief, which of course might be a wrong account and, more importantly, one which still leaves open your objection.
The former is existentially dependent upon the latter.
The gap is nowhere to be found aside from the gap in our knowledge base and thus our explanations. Trusting clocks is not always automatic, to be as clear as possible. That's learned thought, belief, and/or behaviour. It becomes operative thought and belief(automatic) when we do not consider our belief and it's role in what we are doing while we're doing it.
We learn to tell time with clock usage. Somewhere during this learning process we also learn to distinguish between working clocks and broken ones. We learn that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. We learn that working clocks are a reliable means for time telling, but broken clocks are not. Thus, we are justified in knowledge claims about what time it is when we use a working clock as a means to check, but not when using a broken one.
So...
I struggle to make sense of the notion that using a broken clock offers the same justificatory ground for knowledge claims about what time it is. And yet... that's exactly what's happening in Russell's example. Those who grant that the belief is justified are completely forgetting that broken clocks are not a reliable means to tell time, and neglecting to take into consideration that the person believes that that particular broken clock is reliable(is a working one).
It's not.
In summary, belief about the time that is based upon using a broken clock as a means is not well grounded. I want to say that it is not a justified belief, because I'm partial to my own notion of JTB which seems to be significantly different than academia's if advocates for JTB tend to grant the justification aspect regarding this case.
The only difference between assumption and belief that makes sense to me involves metacognitive endeavors.
There are times when we are thinking about thought and belief. In such situations, we can say something like... "for the sake of argument, let's assume X", where that means we are going to assume that X is true(grant the truth of X), solely as a means to follow the consequences. Here, there is a definite difference between granting the assumption and believing it's true(between assumption and belief).
That's just not applicable in the scenario of Russell's clock though. The person is not taking an attitude towards a proposition. That person's belief was not at all about propositions. It's about what time it is, and it was based upon a broken clock. Our considerations are about whether or not looking at a broken clock is a justified means to know what time it is.
In our assessments, we examine propositions... the person's knowledge claim. It does us all a disservice of understanding to neglect assessing the person's pre-existing belief upon which that knowledge claim rests it's laurels.
I agree that it is rather unsatisfying. It looks like a performative contradiction of sorts...
I do not believe that this clock is a reliable means of telling time, but I'm going to look at it anyway in order to know what time it is.
Well, you're stating it far worse than it is. You're saying that you do not believe the clock is reliable, so that alone would discount that you have justification. Then you're adding that you believe it can give you justification, in saying that you'll be able to "know" the time. I'm not saying anything so blatantly wrong.
I'm saying that I'm not comfortable with the idea that we form beliefs (justified ones) on the basis of assumptions about the source of those beliefs. But, that's not to say that this doesn't happen all the time. I think it obviously does. The question, then, is whether we want to count those beliefs as justified such that they can be knowledge. That's the question I'm thinking about, but what you've stated is not that -- it's much worse and obviously wrong.
Ok.
I suppose I'm struggling to understand the difference between being skeptical about the reliability of the clock and not believing that it is reliable.
If one believes a clock is working then they are not skeptical about whether or not it is a reliable means to know what time it is.
If one is skeptical about whether or not a clock is working, then they do not believe it is a reliable means to know what time it is. Such people would perhaps check to see, but that doesn't happen in Russell's case. So, I find that claiming the person could be skeptical and not believe that the clock is reliable to be quite a stretch, and an unnecessary one at that.
That's not the only type of assumption. And in this scenario, the truth or justification is not in consideration. It's simply a stipulation.
That's not what I've been considering. I have flatly rejected the view that a broken clock can lend epistemic justification for knowledge.
I didn't say it was. What's at stake right now is the difference between assuming the clock is working and believing it is.
I said it was the only situation in which there is a definite difference between a person's assumption and that same person's belief, which is what's at issue here. You want to say that the person in Russell's clock scenario assumes the clock is working, as if that is somehow definitely different from the person believing that the clock is reliable(working).
Yes.
I think that we are largely in agreement here aside from granting that the belief was justified.
You grant JTB to the person in the scenario, whereas I do not. That is puzzling to me.
Perhaps you should, because that's what happened, and you granted that that knowledge claim was justified.
Quoting Andrew M
This seems to arrive at a problem regarding the origen and/or content of belief. It presupposes that all belief is premiss based. I've an issue with that as a result of the fact that premisses themselves are belief.
Seems to me that it would have to be the case that some rudimentary belief are not premiss based. If they need to be in order to qualify as being well grounded then such belief cannot count... by definition alone... for if the definition is good... they do not have what it takes.
Sounds right, provided he believes working clocks keep the correct time.
Sounds right.
In the Russell case, there is no thought paid to the working of the clock. It is simply assumed to be working. The man is neither skeptical nor not skeptical. He takes it for granted that it's working. You want to say that he must have some epistemic attitude towards the working of the clock, but I don't think 'taking X for granted' implies (or means) that you have an epistemic attitude towards it.
Again, I'm just speculating right now. I'm not committing myself to much of anything in this post or in the previous post, as I indicated.
I'm not sure I follow this. Who claimed that the man is skeptical that the clock is reliable and that he does not believe it is reliable? And isn't this consistent?
It was a carry over from your example about the new girlfriend. I think we can leave this aspect be. We seem to be making headway elsewhere. I want to give the middle portion of the post that the quote above was copied from subsequent due attention...
I think you are confused here. Recall that we're working with two different conceptions of knowledge in the Russell scenario. One conception is JTB. The other conception is our vague intuition of knowledge.
I have consistently said that the man in the Russell scenario has satisfied the JTB conception of knowledge, because JTB doesn't care about the source of the belief. That's why I've been holding Sam's feet to the fire on this issue. He says he believes JTB and our intuition of knowledge are one and the same (at least that's what I think he's been saying), so he cannot object about the justification -- because, again, the man has met the justification requirement per JTB.
However, I've also consistently said that the man doesn't in fact have a justified belief given our intuition of knowledge. My intuition of knowledge dictates that a broken clock cannot lend epistemic justification for knowledge, because my intuition is more demanding than JTB -- it cares about the source of the belief.
So, I granted that the man has knowledge as conceived as JTB, but that he in fact doesn't have knowledge per our intuition of knowledge.
My apologies for any confusion.
Hmmm...
It seems we're even closer than I thought earlier. We're both rejecting the JTB criterion for what counts as being justified. It just seems that we've different reasoning for doing so...
In addition, I'm attempting to show and/or explain why the case offends our intuitions... because it forgets to keep in mind that the clock is broken.
You and I agree that the justification failure is due to using a broken clock to ascertain the belief. Bartricks doesn't agree with this assessment. He first said that the justification failure could be explained with the notion of luck. After I pointed out that luck can only explain the truth of the belief, he has been suspiciously silent.
Frankly, almost everyone agrees that the problem is the source of the belief, namely the broken clock. Well, everyone but Bartricks, but that's only because he's committed to some other silly view that's inconsistent with this obvious analysis. Talk about dogmatist.
What I don't understand about your position is that after you say that the broken clock can't lend epistemic justification, why the need to say more? I mean, doesn't that fully explain the justification failure? You're wanting to do some logical deduction based on having a belief about the reliability of the source and whatnot, but to me it's extraneous and puts you on dubious philosophical grounds.
Psychological I suppose.
:wink:
We're working from significantly different notions of belief. That alone could be the culprit in much of the possible confusion and/or misunderstanding.
I'm still struggling to understand how you ground the claim that the person does not believe that a broken clock is working.
I don't think it does when the failure was a result of false belief that goes unaccounted for.
Of course, we should be clear about the difference between (A) "He doesn't have a belief about the clock's working or not" and (B) "He believes the clock is not working." Sometimes (B) is stated as "He doesn't believe the clock is working," which sounds like (A) -- but it's not.
I'm saying he doesn't have a belief about the reliability of the clock he's looking at. You're saying that he must have a belief that it's working, or that it's not working. This is what I disagree with.
Why must we attribute to him a belief? Isn't there a difference between having a hunch, an opinion, and a belief? Does taking something for granted constitute having a belief?
Yes, but why insist on the existence of this belief? If we take away this alleged belief in the clock's working, then we still explain the justification failure by saying broken clocks don't lend epistemic justification for knowledge. Then what philosophical work is the belief you're attributing to him doing to explain the epistemic failure? Ostensibly, no philosophical work, so it looks not just unnecessary but wrong.
Denying that he believes a broken clock is working neglects both, the fact that the clock is broken, and the fact that reading clocks is a traditional practice that is steeped in belief. It consists of belief. If he did not believe that a broken clock was working he would not have looked at one as a means to know what time it was. But, that's exactly what he did.
Neither of which properly accounts for his belief that a broken clock is working. He looks at a clock. He believes that working clocks are reliable. He believes he knows what time it is, but he does not...
Because he mistakenly believes that that broken clock is working(which is clearly shown by his trust in using it), and false belief does not count as acceptable ground upon which to infer knowledge.
We also know that broken clocks are not acceptable justificatory ground for claiming to know what time it is.
Quoting fiveredapples
His belief IS the focus. Focusing upon the fact that the clock is broken neglects to consider that he had false belief to begin with.
First of all, he doesn't believe that a broken clock is working. He believes falsely that the clock is working. Those two statements are different. But nevermind the difference. Why think he falsely believes that the clock is working? Do we need to attribute to him a belief here?
The clock is broken. He believes it's working. He believes that a broken clock is working.
As I said, we're working from significantly different notions of belief.
I'm appreciative of the thought provoking nature of this exchange.
:smile:
No. That's not right. He falsely believes that the clock is working. You must capture the content of his belief, which is 'the clock is working'. The fact that it's not working is not part of his belief, so you can't include it in the content, or in the that-clause (which states the content of his belief).
What you're doing is leading you to confusion and mistakes.
:smile:
I think you are missing the fact that if the clock has stopped working then the belief, although true, is not justified. You might want to say that he is justified in believing that his belief is justified, but that belief is not true, since the clock is not, contrary to his perfectly natural expectation, working.
Also, earlier you mentioned "Warranted True Belief" as an alternative to JTB. I'm not seeing any significant differences, on the face of it, between the two terms.
Edit; I note that @creativesoul has already mounted a similar objection.
I agree. It's an intermediate phenomenon. But trusting language (as you did when you wrote the sentence above) is usually at least as automatic as trusting a clock usually is.
Being-in-a-world and being-with-others is (in an important sense) prior to the subject that examines her mind and questions her beliefs. We live in a world with others of spoons, stairs, books, and clocks. They don't exist primarily as objects for ratiocination but as 'transparent' tools-in-use through which we see our thousand worldly purposes. Language, I'm claiming, has this tool-in-use kind or mode of being.
Along these lines, our 'blind' know-how concerning words like 'know' is prior to our retrospective attempt to define 'knowledge' so that the definition fits our intuition.
In any case, on the basis of what I have read, we seem to be in agreement, and I believe we are also in agreement that the Gettier cases are red herrings, and do not constitute legitimate objections to the idea of knowledge as JTB.
You're repeating my own position to me. I said he's not justified under my conception of knowledge. I said he is justified under JTB. If you think he isn't justified under JTB, then you don't understand JTB.
Well, I personally would never want to say that. I was characterizing creativesoul's position.
This tells me you don't understand either JTB or our intuitions of knowledge. Whether he's justified or not has nothing to do with whether his belief is true or not.
Warranted True Belief is supposed to take into consideration the source of the belief. So, while under JTB, the man in the Russell example has justification, under WTB he would not.
Yes. And that's a way to show Heiddy's relevance...
Well at least you've granted that the person has some belief or other about the clock.
That's a start.
Would you further concur that the belief is about a particular clock; the one he used as a means to tell time?
How do you decide whether a belief is justified? Can a belief be justified and yet untrue? Does 'justified' mean, to you, merely something like understandable (given the circumstances or context)? If so, then knowledge would be understandable true belief. How would understandable differ from warranted then?
Quoting fiveredapples
What does it have to do with then according to you?
I would prefer to do away with what seems
to be your sense of 'justified' because it is too subjective, and say that knowledge is belief in what is true for true reasons.
Right. Heidegger, indeed. But (and I hope you'll agree) not on his authority but rather on his successful unconcealment of the phenomenon. Since I've been exposed to Heidegger, I find myself discovering his insights in less explicit form in Hegel and Feuerbach. How does language exist? The basic insight seems to be that we are social on a deeper level than we are individual. So analyses that start from an isolated subject gazing at pure meanings, while possibly illuminating, are also trapped within a tradition obsessed with an epistemological problem while neglecting an ontological one.
What say you?
That depends on which conception of knowledge you're talking about. For JTB, you're justified if you use one of the prescribed methods (or sanctioned methods) for acquiring true beliefs. For our example, visual observation of a clock's minute and hour hands, provided you know how to read a clock, is a sanctioned method by which to form a true belief about the time. This is what the man does in the Russell example, so he is justified, according to JTB.
For my intuitions of knowledge, that's not enough. The clock would also have to be working and keeping the correct time. So, for my intuitions, he's not justified, as there are two parts to justification under this conception: the method and the source.
For JTB, yes, but it wouldn't count as knowledge.
For my intuitions, I'm not sure. Let me think about it.
For JTB, justified simply means that you used one of the prescribed (or sanctioned) methods for acquiring true beliefs. It doesn't guarantee you truth, though, which is why you can be justified and have a false belief.
For me, it involves using a very reliable method for acquiring true beliefs (pretty much like in JTB) and satisfying certain criteria with regard to the source of your belief. In the Russell example, the man's source was a broken clock, which fails to satisfy the source criteria, however that gets spelled out.
Well, I didn't agree that "justified" means something like "understandable," so this doesn't apply to me.
Specifying these conventions is an infinite task. If I had reason to think the clock was broken, I lose the justification of my false belief. I should have known better. Or perhaps I act on news from a source that I should have known was not to be trusted. Then my actions are not justified. If we zoom on all the beliefs that would have warned me away from the broken clock or bad source of news, we repeat this logic. At some point explicit justification is revealed as an infinite and therefore impossible task.
Moreover we can question whether the words we use tend to have pure meaning for an ideally aware subject or (more likely the case) we largely employ these words with the mindlessness of a knife used to slice tomatoes. Perhaps we retrospectively falsify our thinking when asked for reasons. Perhaps we mostly glide on the surface of the world, responding with skill to the demands of the day.
That's the intention, but there is no guarantee of success. Compare with using the word "raining". Alice might look out the window and say, "It's raining" when it's not raining (e.g., she instead sees water from a hose).
Her use is justifiable, but unsuccessful.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The justified claim only needs to be true in order to use the term "knowledge" correctly or successfully. It is the same in this respect to the use of the word "raining" above.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The intention is to refer to knowledge. The reality may be different.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Employing words to accomplish things, such as communicating something about the world. Whether that use is successful or not depends on a lot of things coming together in the right way.
Bob looks at the clock and forms the belief that it is 3pm. That's a basic or rudimentary belief with no implication that he needed another belief prior to forming that belief, which would just result in an infinite regress.
However we can nonetheless investigate the premises of Bob's belief. Those premises emerge as part of our analysis, not something we need to suppose were Bob's beliefs at that time.
A case can be made that knowledge isn't something other than our conventional use of the word 'knowledge.' To learn a language is to learn how to use many words in the context of living in a shared world. Just because 'knowledge' is a noun doesn't mean there's a definite entity called 'knowledge.'
This also applies to 'reason' (used as a noun).
While philosophers have often trafficked in decontextualized essences, other philosophers have pointed out the problems with this approach. We can imagine Descartes trying to achieved certainty. Only his doubting voice is certain. At least this doubting voice exists. But this doubting voice speaks a language learned in a world with others. It's already in the world, intelligible to others, the product of convention. The signifier is arbitrary, conventional. What are the consequences of all this?
[quote=Wittgenstein]
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.
[/quote]
This 'element' is being-in-a-language-with-others, which includes knowing how to use 'knowledge.' Only too late do philosophers arrive to (try to) decide what knowledge 'really' is.
[quote=Dreyfus]
There is...something that average everyday intelligibility obscures... that it is merely average everyday intelligibility...This is what Heidegger called 'the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation....What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate 'ground' of intelligibility is simply shared practices...This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation.
[/quote]
'No deep interpretation' doesn't mean we shouldn't further clarify our existence. Indeed, suggesting that 'knowledge' refers to no essence is part of that project.
I don't all claim that this is a final word on the matter. On the contrary...
Right. So how do you know that you or someone else is using the term, "knowledge" correctly, so say things like, "I/You are using the term, "knowledge" correctly."?
Yes.
The content of his belief included a particular broken clock. He believed that that particular broken clock was working, and hence used it to form the subsequent belief that it was 3PM.
No, the content of his belief didn't include the concept 'the broken clock.' The content of his belief is captured by what he thought, not what was true or can be inferred from what he thought.
For the sake of getting clear on this point, I'll just pretend he actually had this thought, but I don't concede that he actually thought this: "This clock is working." How you can you object to this analysis? He looked at the clock and thought, "This clock is working." The clock's not working is a fact about the clock. You can't include this fact as part of his belief, because he never thought that the clock wasn't working. So, you can't say that his thought was "This broken clock is working."
The following comments are an aside. You should really get clear on the above first.
As someone has already pointed out, doesn't the fact that you're attributing to him a self-contradictory belief give you pause? Furthermore, the fact that it's obviously self-contradictory should suggest to you that he can't believe it.
This serves to further drive the point home that I made earlier about the significant difference between our notions of belief. Given that the topic is all about belief... what counts as JTB... it seems that getting belief right is crucial to getting JTB right...
The first thing that needs to happen though is to clarify what I'm saying, as compared/contrasted to what you're attributing to me as if I'm saying, or as if it follows from what I'm saying. This may be a tough road. I hope not.
Quoting fiveredapples
I did not say that though, nor would I.
What I said was that he believed a broken clock was working, and he clearly did. His belief was about that particular clock, and that particular clock was a broken one. The content of his belief most certainly included that particular broken clock.
He did not know it was broken. He did not believe it was broken. He believed it was working. He believed a broken clock was working.
I note, and earlier mentioned, that the belief that approach is underwriting your position on this. While that is a perfectly acceptable method for examining belief statements, which treats belief the same as propositions/statements, it fails miserably to take proper account of operative unspoken belief such as the ones we're dealing with here.
I'm not saying that he believed that "a broken clock is working" is a true statement. I'm not saying that those words went through his head. I'm not saying that that statement is a belief of his. The content of his belief regarding the clock is not equivalent to a statement.
That's where we are at odds...
What counts as the content of belief.
It would if I were. I'm not.
I would agree that there are deep-seated issues with JTB particularly regarding the belief aspect... and it's an ontological problem.
I find that Heiddy's notions of being in the world, ready at hand, and others all seem to make a valiant attempt at further discriminating between kinds of thought and belief, particularly those which are informed and/or mediated by language use.
I also find his method far too complicated.
We're working from different notions of what counts as a basic or rudimentary belief. Our exchange led us into the notion of whether or not a language less creature's belief could possible count as being well grounded. If it requires being based upon other beliefs, then we arrive at the notion of infinite regress... Somewhere along the line, some belief or other is not based upon prior belief.
Can those be identified and/or isolated, and can they count as being well grounded true ones?
It also seems clear to me that there are a plethora of pre-existing belief underwriting the very ability to participate in time telling practices such as looking at clocks, so... To say that there is no implication that he needed another belief prior to forming that belief is most certainly wrong.
But... when we're offering an account of Bob's belief, they must be Bob's beliefs... right?
I have a model for what knowledge is. For example, my model says that knowledge is always true. So if Alice says that she knows it is raining, but it's not raining, then Alice's claim doesn't satisfy that model. So she didn't use the term correctly (in the veridical sense - her claim may still have been justifiable).
Whereas her claim may be satisfied on your model (that doesn't include a truth condition for knowledge).
I'm curious whether you think there can ever be justified but false beliefs. If not, then the T condition in JTB would be redundant since the J would already entail truth. Thus knowledge, on your view, would be justified belief (where justified entails the truth of the belief and its premises).
It's only definitional and contextual; we never know truth or have any knowledge in any absolute sense. Actually, I prefer to think of "knowing that" as a specialized form of "knowing how" and "knowing how" as a specialized form of what I like to call "knowing with". So knowing is most generally a matter of being able to do various different kinds of things.
But I agree with @Sam26 that the idea of JTB best presents what we mean by knowing that and that the clock example and Gettier cases are impotent in that they do not work against it because they rely upon an ineluctably subjective idea of what constitutes justification. It's not that we can ever know with certainty that we are justified, just as we can never know with certainty what is true, and hence whether we have indefeasible knowledge.
The point, as I see it, is a definitional one that if we had justification for a belief and the belief was true (which I would say are actually the same thing) then we would have knowledge. So we may indeed have knowledge, it's just that we can never be sure, except in some exclusively contextual sense or other, that we have knowledge; but we do know according to JTB what the idea of having knowledge means.
(Just saw that @Janus addressed something of the same. Notwithstanding, I’m still interested in your answers)
From a theoretical view of what knowledge is, I say of course. From the stance of practice (praxis), however, I’m very curious to better understand:
What is your contention against the following position: All of our claims of knowledge are to be treated as instantiations of knowledge until they become falsified by evidence, if such falsification were to ever occur.
Importantly, the underlined portion, to me, is what makes all our claims of knowledge less than indefeasible in practice. This being the stance you previously mentioned you’re not OK with.
For clarity, according to Wiktionary, “indefeasible” is given one definition: “not liable to being annulled or declared void”.
Or are you suggesting that unlike some past experiences, everything you currently (claim to) know can never be "annulled or declared void" as knowledge regardless of what evidence might be discovered?
Again, I'm trying to better understand you're affirmations.
I think so, at least in principle.
Quoting creativesoul
What I was referring to here is the idea that Bob first needed to think about whether the clock was working before he believed it was 3pm. And before that he needed to think about whether the clock was real or a hologram. And before that ...
He didn't do any of that. He just glanced at the clock, saw that it showed 3pm, and then got on with the rest of his day.
I otherwise agree that we can infer that he has other related beliefs (such as that clocks are generally reliable, that clocks are usually real and not holograms, and so on).
Quoting creativesoul
We're asking whether Bob's belief that it is 3pm counts as knowledge (and why or why not). It doesn't really matter if Bob simply believes that space aliens implanted his mind with the correct time. We only care that Bob believed the time that the clock showed and that the clock was working correctly. If he did and the clock was working correctly, then we say that Bob knew it was 3pm, regardless of his personal theories of things.
Ok. My aim is to do it in practice.
Quoting Andrew M
I think that I overlooked the importance that "at that time" had in what you were saying and misunderstood you as a result. It seems we agree that our report of Bob's belief must include what Bob's beliefs are/were. If you're aiming to hone the focus upon the immediately relevant beliefs... then I'm pretty sure that we're in agreement, with the important one being about the broken clock.
The only thing still sticking in my side between our respective views is the notion that all beliefs are premiss based, which I do not agree with. However, when we're talking about candidates for knowledge claims per JTB, that seems to hold good.
I've already mentioned this, but it bears repeating. Built into the application of JTB (not the definition, the application) is the idea of probability. So, when I look at a clock there is a low probability that I'm going to arrive at an incorrect time. This is built into the application of JTB, just as it's built into the application of a mathematical formula, that sometimes we're just incorrect. Knowing this, explains the conflict in the clock example, at least to my satisfaction. The man (again) isn't justified, he merely thinks he is.
Andrew asked me if we could be justified, and yet have a false belief. Yes, in the application we can think we're justified and yet have a false belief. However, in terms of the definition of JTB, if we're really justified, then it necessarily leads to a true belief. This doesn't mean that what we're really saying is that JTB simply amounts to JB, because we're not talking about any belief, we're talking about true beliefs. Again, being justified leads to the truth under the definition of JTB (justification and truth are different concepts), but not necessarily in its application.
My main point about prior beliefs is that Bob would presumably just glance at the clock and automatically form a belief about the time. He's not consciously reflecting on it, weighing up evidence, or making inferences from one belief to another. How he forms his belief happens "under the hood", so to speak, as part of the brain's internal processing.
However we can infer his beliefs and construct a chain of inferences as a representation of what's going on in Bob's subconscious.
This isn't anything different than what you've already said. Your model is useless if you can never know when it's appropriate to use. Knowledge would be this state-of-affairs that we'd never know about because we can never know that knowledge is true because we only have justifications and justifications are not truths. They might be, but we'd never know.
There is no getting around the fact that no-one has an infallible guarantee that any specific claim is true. So there's no point criticizing the model on those grounds.
It happens to be the model that people ordinarily use, including yourself, except that you also allow justifiable, but false, claims to be knowledge. Your model is no more (or less) useful, it's simply a different choice of language to represent the same reality.
Bingo! You finally got it! So if this is common knowledge - that there is no getting around the fact that no-one has an infallible guarantee that any specific claim is true, then that means people use the term, "knowledge" in the way I have described it, not you. People understand that their knowledge is fallible and so don't use the term in a way that implies truth - only justification.
Not only does your version of "knowledge" not fit how people use it, it relegates truth into meaninglessness as well. If there is no infallible guarantee that any specific claim is true, what does it mean to be "true"?
I'm thinking much the same thing...
Quoting Andrew M
That's one way of putting it. Although I agree with the description as a commonly understood one, I'm very hesitant to employ the terminology as an explanation of his belief. I think we can do better, with less verbiage.
This is false. It all depends upon the claim under consideration.
Depends on the claim, yes, which we may say depends on the domain of discourse. Empirical knowledge is always contingent, so there is no infallible guarantee that some claim is true; pure rational knowledge is always apodeictic, which is its own infallible guarantee that some claim is true.
Sure. Like I said before: we can make our own truths like who is the current President of the United States, or what the capital of France is, but when it comes to the things we didnt design ourselves, like nature, we can't be sure that our knowledge is infallible because the truth is some state-of-affairs that we had no role in making.
That's a traditional way of thinking about it. I reject nearly every dichotomy underwriting such discourse.
I reject this notion of truth...
Fair enough. How would you explain it?
I've been saying it from the beginning of our exchange, but I'm glad you've finally caught up! ;-)
Quoting Harry Hindu
That people are fallible means that they sometimes misuse the term "knowledge" or "know". They sometimes claim to know things that they don't.
Here's the definition of use from Lexico: "Take, hold, or deploy (something) as a means of accomplishing or achieving something; employ." In the context of our discussion what are being deployed are words and sentences.
Now what has Alice accomplished or achieved when she claims to know it is raining when it isn't (as she may later discover)? She hasn't accomplished what she intended, because she has a mistaken belief.
As I mentioned earlier, this issue is not just confined to knowledge terms. That people are fallible means that they can mistakenly misuse any word (according to their own definition). They can point out the window and say "rain" when it's not rain (for example, it's water from a hose).
Quoting Harry Hindu
It means that a claim describes a state of affairs as it has been defined. For example, we understand what the phrase "it is raining" means. So if Alice claims it is raining when it is raining then her claim is true. That is a correct use. Whereas if she claims it is raining when it is not raining, then her claim is false. That is an incorrect use (or misuse).
That's nice. I reject your rejection. Now what?
Why do they claim to know things that they don't? If they claim to understand what knowledge and knowing is, then how can they misuse the terms?
Quoting Andrew M
What is it that we are trying to accomplish or achieve in deploying words and sentences? What caused words and sentences to appear on this screen for me to read?
Quoting Andrew M
This means that a claim is accurate or inaccurate.
Accurate: Free from error, or conforming exactly to truth.
Truth is the actual state-of-affairs.
It can be true that you make a claim, but the claim itself might not be accurate. Claims can have a range of accuracy. Some of it can conform to the truth while some of it might not. Truth is what is the case regardless of whether claims are made about it or not.
The way that I have been seems adequate enough, and without all the subconscious stuff.
Well, it seems to me that you've no way of talking about what sorts of things can be true - such as knowledge claims - and what makes them so. Given that the thread is about JTB, where truth is held to be a property of true propositions/statements, it seems to me that your using the term "truth" as states-of-affairs and then arguing about it is akin to using an american football in a world cup match and arguing about which football to use.
That's what.
:smirk:
This is why we shouldn't be looking at how people use the terms to understand what "knowledge" is because how they use them can be ambiguous or not meaningful (because it gets misused). This is why we have philosophy of epistemology - to try and ask what knowledge is. If people already knew what knowledge is then why this thread? Why would we ever ask, "What is knowledge"? if we already knew what it is we are talking about? "Knowledge" is the same as "God" in this sense. We just regurgitate what we see and hear without really delving into what it really means.
I no longer believe in "God" as most people use the term because no one could ever give a consistent explanation as to what "God" is, so I've adopted "God" as a synonym for "Universe". I've done the same with "knowledge". Since no one can give a consistent explanation of what "knowledge" and "truth" entail, then using "knowledge" as a synonym for "justified belief" rather than JTB, works perfectly.
If it is a common understanding that what we claim we know can be faulty (which doesn't mean that it necessarily is all the time), then it should be obvious that when we claim we know something, doesn't mean that truth is necessarily involved. Truth has to be something separate.
Isn't that a fundamental philosophical problem - What is truth? If philosophy is questioning what truth and knowledge is, then it seems to me that there is a problem in what truth and knowledge is, and we are having a difficult time in doing it. So you've basically explained the philosophical problem we have. You may think that you know what you're talking about when you say, "truth" and "knowledge", but others obviously disagree or else this wouldn't be a major philosophical problem.
If you have no way of talking about what can be true, then what is a justification? It seems to me that justifications can get us close to the truth without actually getting all the way (indirect realism). Some statements are more justified than others and are closer to the truth than others, but truth would be like "perfection". Our justifications are never perfect, which is why they can be fallible.
To get the truth, you'd have to be what it is you're talking about. You do have direct access to your consciousness, so you have access to some truth of reality. You can speak truths about what is on your mind, or how you are feeling. When we talk about things other than our minds, we are referring to justifications. We know other people have minds because our observation of their behavior justifies it. We don't know if it is true or not, hence the philosophical problem of other minds. We have philosophy because we are skeptical. We are skeptical because we have all experienced moments where we found that what we claimed we knew was wrong, but was justified at the time we knew it.
What makes a knowledge claim true if its premises are just other JTBs? You're using circular reasoning if truth is a property of knowledge claims. You seem to be saying that what makes a knowledge claim true is that it is a knowledge claim.
Cases can be made for anything. What matters is the quality of the case, not its mere existence.
Quoting softwhere
Who are you attacking here? Where have I said that there is an 'entity' called 'knowledge' (I am arguing that there is not)? And where have I inferred that from the fact that we have a word 'knowledge'?
Quoting softwhere
Reason does exist and any case you make for thinking Reason does not exist will presuppose Reason's existence.
Quoting softwhere
Why not just address the case made in the OP rather than engaging in philosophical journalism?
In the OP I argued that knowledge is not a thing, but is rather an attitude Reason adopts towards some true beliefs. No-one has actually addressed that view yet. Rather, they're just fiddling with Gettier cases, even though this is a hopeless task given that anything one adds to 'true belief' in an attempt to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge will have to fall short of guaranteeing the truth of the belief in question (for then it will be implausibly strong) which is all that's needed for Gettier case construction. Hence why since they were first outlined, no-one - but no-one - has been able to do it.
It can't be done, and rather than continuing trying to do it - which appreciation of the nature of the cases reveals to be impossible - one should instead extract a moral from it. Which is what I did. A moral others have ignored.
Because people can make a mistake when they deploy those terms to describe a state of affairs.
Alice looks out the window and claims it is raining. It is not raining (someone was hosing water on the window). Therefore she made a mistake. Yet she understands perfectly well what the word "rain" means.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The standard use in philosophy is that a state of affairs is a truth-maker while a claim or a belief is a truth-bearer. So states of affairs obtain or fail to obtain (e.g., it is raining) while claims are true or false (e.g., Alice's claim that it is raining).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, and no-one disagrees with this. There is a language distinction between what we claim we know (which can be false) and what we know (which can't be false). When someone claims to know that it is raining when it is not, they have made a mistake - and they don't have knowledge.
I agree. To be more blunt, strong cases have been made (later Wittgenstein, for instance) against thinking that knowledge is something definite like an attitude of 'Reason.' And what does the capitalization add? It suggests that 'Reason' is a kind of divinity. As I've written in other posts, there's some historical truth in that. But it's dicey in this context, is it not?
Quoting Bartricks
You define knowledge as an 'attitude,' an entity, 'a thing with distinct and independent existence.' Knowledge is something definite, you write, an attitude taken by (personified) Reason.
Quoting Bartricks
If you look at my posts in this thread, I started to sketch a different approach, along the lines of Wittgenstein. Roughly speaking, language is just one part of a form of life that depends on conventions that are mostly inexplicit. In the real world we use lots of words together, in particular context. Language is not primarily a nomenclature, a code-book referring to independent/atomic concepts.
As philosophers we are tempted to use our intuitions to invent essences for nouns taken out of context. So we play the game of 'knowledge is really X,' as if we could legislate for a living language.
It's a nice game, and perhaps there's value in it. But perhaps there's also value in grasping its limitations and assumptions consciously.
I don't find it to be.
It's certainly a commonly asked philosophical question. We look to how the term "truth" is used. We find out what is being said in those different uses(what is meant).
No problem.
I was hoping you'd answer this:
Quoting Harry Hindu
What is it that we are trying to accomplish when we say, "I know
Quoting Andrew M
Then why does it feel like you possess knowledge when you don't? When you've already had the experience of claiming you have knowledge and then find out that you didn't, then that should cause some concern for any other knowledge you claim to possess AND cause concern about your very understanding of what "knowledge" is. When having knowledge and not having knowledge are indistinguishable at any given moment you make a claim, then how can you really know what you are talking about? How can you ever say that you are claiming some truth at any given moment?
Contradiction.
If people use the term in asking what it is, then doesn't that mean that there isn't a clear understanding of what it is?
What is the relationship between use and meaning? What does it mean to use words? What entails "use"?
A justification for one may not qualify as justification for others.
What if looking out the window wasn't proper justification for knowing that it is raining. You'd have to go outside and then you'd have the proper justification.
What if looking at the Earth from the perspective of standing on it wasn't proper justification for knowing its shape. You'd have to change your perspective to being out in space to have proper justification for knowing its shape.
But this still begs the question of knowing when we ever have the proper justification. Is it when we obtain an objective perspective of what it is that we are talking about?
No...
We use every term when asking what they mean, so if what you said were true, it would mean that we do not have a clear understanding of any term...
:yikes:
We do though, so... you're quite wrong.
You say this: Quoting softwhere
But I made a case for my view, and once more you are merely reporting that there is some mysterious counter-case. Why not make that case?
As for why 'Reason' has a capital R, it is both in order to distinguish Reason - the source of the norms of reason - from the faculty, 'reason' that we use to detect those norms, and from 'reasons' which are the directives constitutive of the norms themselves. So, reasons are norms, norms have a source - Reason - and we have faculties of reason by means of which we detect them.
Quoting softwhere
But what's wrong with my analysis? There is patently a difference between simply believing something is true and knowing something (it is implausible that it is just some arbitrary linguistic convention). Our reason tells us this - tells us that under some circumstances a true belief qualifies as knowledge, and under others not. Yet there seems nothing that any clear case of knowledge has to have in common with any other, apart from involving a true belief (as Gettier cases and variations thereon amply demonstrate).
That's how attitudes behave. Hence my conclusion (which I do not claim follows of necessity) that knowledge is constituted by an attitude of Reason.
I think this forum is great for discussing our readings away from this forum, but I don't at all think that online debate is a substitute for that reading. I recommend looking into Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations). Recently I discovered this short text, highly recommended: http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf
As as general opening, this short video is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8
The 'big idea' is that meaning isn't located 'inside' the individual 'mind.' Language is radically social and embodied. Human reason is a social and not an essentially private phenomenon, despite an obsolete philosophical tradition to the contrary. Descartes writes the following.
[quote = Descartes]
The first [rule of thought] was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/#DescViewPineGlan
What is neglected in such a principle is the nature or way-of-being of this 'I' and this stuff, language, that thought is made of. Also accepted is the background idea of a mind-stuff connected to extended matter (perhaps through the pineal gland,) a theoretical prejudice taken for granted.
There is much more to the case against language as a nomenclature for mind-stuff essences, but this is a start.
Quoting Bartricks
What's the case for this source of norms? If you look into thinkers like Hegel, you'll find the idea of cultural evolution, where ethical norms and the norms of intelligibly are unstable. To postulate to some fixed, definite source looks like a rigid and unjustified theology. That reason is a (post-)theological concept is something I'd assent to, and indeed I've written about that in the 'What God is Not' thread. But, importantly, reason (our notion of it) evolves as we reason. In that sense, philosophy is the conversation through which reason attains 'self-consciousness.' This 'self' of reason is necessarily social, a 'we' rather than an 'I.' The case for this is related to the the one provided above.
In my view, the 'case' is not conceptually but only emotionally difficult. If we are profoundly social and historical beings, then we radically depend on our inheritance. Along with this comes the staggering difficultly of saying something new and important and 'starting from zero.' The 'individual' primarily has value and interest as an intellect through the assimilation of what has already been thought, an assimilation that merely continues the learning of a language. Our vanity whispers to us that we are geniuses who don't depend on the centuries of thinking now concentrated for accelerated digestion in a philosophical tradition.
Quoting Bartricks
That the siginifier is arbitrary is well established. But I understand that we have what we call 'intuitions' and 'mental experience.' So it's really just an issue of seeing how thoroughly permeated these intuitions are with social conventions. Indeed, only social conventions make talking about them possible. What I'm getting at is not the denial of meaning but a holistic conception of meaning that sees it as part of a entire 'form of life.' I don't claim to have originated any of the thoughts I've presented here. I've just digested some greater thinkers (which one is never done digesting) and am trying to share what I understand so far.
We are trying to describe a particular state of affairs - the way the world is. If our claim is true then we have been successful in that endeavor.
Suppose Alice says "I know it is raining". Her intention is to describe a particular state of affairs - that she knows that it is raining. She achieves that if and only if that state of affairs has obtained.
So if she does know that it is raining then she has a justified and true belief that it is raining. That is, she has looked out the window (resulting in the formation of her belief) and it is, in fact, raining.
If any link in the chain is broken, the whole chain is broken. In which case the speaker has failed to accomplish what they intended.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Because a mistaken belief doesn't feel mistaken when you have it.
To people several hundred years ago it looked as if the Sun went round the Earth. But what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?
As far as appearances go, both look the same. The difference is in the explanatory hypotheses.
(The example is from Wittgenstein.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
Consider a parallel example. Does discovering that it wasn't raining when you thought it was cause concern about your understanding of what "rain" is?
It shouldn't, unless there were some further reason to think there was a problem with your understanding (e.g., people consistently referring to what you call "rain" as "snow").
The notable difference is that rain is a concrete thing whereas knowledge is an abstraction. But being mistaken about what you think you know is usually just being mistaken about something more concrete, such as whether it is raining.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You can make a claim when it is justifiable to do so (such as looking out the window for the rain scenario). But there is never an infallible guarantee that a given claim is true, and knowledge, to obtain, does not require one.
But this forum is a place for arguments. You're not presenting any.
Quoting softwhere
I don't see the relevance to the question (and thoughts aren't 'made' of language, they're states of mind).
Quoting softwhere
What start?
Quoting softwhere
So I have to read Hegel now?! The case is this: norms of reason exist (so, prescriptions, demands, that kind of thing). Only a subject can issue a prescription. Therefore norms of reason are the prescriptions of a subject - Reason.
Anyway, I don't really understand the rest of what you said, but it looks suspiciously as if you've got some fixed convictions based, it would seem, on fallaciously inferring that as we have to use language to talk about the world, the world is made of language, or some such.
Existentially codependent.
That question is ill conceived.
So is that one.
I'm trying to tell you that maybe you shouldn't take this old view for granted.
[quote=Wittgenstein]
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
[/quote]
Apply this to 'knowledge.' We learn how to use it as children. We don't know the 'states of mind' of others as we do so. As long we our behavior conforms to largely tacit norms, all is well. We 'know English,' without ever having direct access to others' minds. This applies not only to knowledge but the words 'mind' and 'matter' also. This situation suggests that we look for 'meaning' in the way that the signifier 'knowledge' is traded between us in the total context of our lives, including actions. Meaning is 'outside the mind' and 'between' us. The 'beetle in the box' is inaccessible by definition and cannot play a role.
Quoting Bartricks
All the stuff you didn't quote and respond to. If you don't understand something, then please ask for clarification. Pretending that I didn't go to any effort is silly.
Quoting Bartricks
I'll give you some useful pieces of Hegel for this situation.
[quote=Hegel]
Science lays before us the morphogenetic process of this cultural development in all its detailed fullness and necessity, and at the same time shows it to be something that has already sunk into the mind as a moment of its being and become a possession of mind. The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there.
...
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
[/quote]
Quoting Bartricks
If you grasp the 'beetle in the box' point, then you should see that the most important norms, those of intelligibility itself, exist between 'subjects.' I can never know if we both 'see red' in the same way, nor whether our 'private intuitions' of the 'meaning' of knowledge are congruent. All we can do is trade signs within conventional/'exterior'/'material' 'norms of intelligibility.'
The way we can (roughly) make sense of your 'Reason' as a subject is think of our shared practices as a kind of foundation of the 'private subject.' To enter a language is incorporate the norms of a community and be trained to 'make sense of' that culture's signs (including things like turn signals and handshakes.) In that sense we are 'Reason' and also individuals who contribute to the invention of new signs and the transformation of the norms governing the signs we started with.
Last comment: lots of what I'd call illusions about language are generated by working with toy examples. A strong theory has to make sense of its own possibility and explain the meaning-effects of the most advanced philosophy --or at least not ignore them. Or consider this infinitely suggestive passage from the end of Finnegans Wake.
https://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-627.htm
It means that you can't tell the difference between rain and water hosed on the window until you go outside. So, you don't have proper justification to claim that it is raining by just looking out the window, just as you don't have proper justification to know the shape of the Earth or it's movement in space without the proper view to inform you of what actually is the case.
Another path is saying, "I know that it is raining" is talking about your knowledge, not the rain. You are talking about the state-of-affairs that is your knowledge, not the weather. So, while you may know what rain is, you don't know much about your knowledge because it isn't raining outside.
Quoting Andrew M
Exactly, so our observations aren't proper justification for knowledge. I already said that since our justifications can be flawed, then we can never know whether or not we are using the term in the correct way, unless we obtain the proper perspective in order to have proper justification.
If they both look the same, how did you ever come to know what knowledge is to use the term?
It seems to me that you don't have proper justification to claim to know anything until you make the proper observation from the proper perspective. Since it is possible to confuse a hosed window with rain, you don't know that it is raining until you go outside. It is possible to mistake rain for something that isn't rain when you are outside? Is it possible to mistake the shape of the Earth when out in space? If not, then it can be safely said that that is when you possess knowledge, and not before.
So, it seems to me that you simply have to know when you're taking an objective view of what it is that you are talking about and you know you have the objective view because there isn't some other possible view to take, or this view doesn't allow mistakes in identifying what it is that we are talking about.
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, because from the perspective of being on the surface of the Earth, you can't tell the difference. Well, you can if you take other observations, like the movement of the Sun across the background stars and the movement of the planets, but this just proves my point - that you need other observations, not just one, to claim knowledge. Once you go out in space, you see the difference. So only in making the proper observation can we say that we possess knowledge and we obtain the proper observations when we are objective in our perspective. One observation isn't enough justification to make a knowledge claim.
I don't see anyone asking what "dog" or "house" means unless your an infant. I do see grown adults asking what "knowledge" and "god" is, so maybe there is something different with these terms. Maybe if you'd stop being so facetious we could have a respectful back and forth.
You just assume I am taking it for granted. Reasons. Provide reasons not to - that is, actually try arguin for something. Quoting softwhere
You haven't argued anything, all you've done is quote. You can't argue by quote, you need to express it afresh, otherwise I'm debating with Wittgenstein, not you.
Quoting softwhere
What do you mean?
Quoting softwhere
What do you mean by a 'toy example'? This word 'toy' is all the rage at the mo - what do you mean by it?
I'm not being facetious.
Many folk have different ideas about what "knowledge" is. The same is true of "god". The same is true of "truth". The same is true of "meaning".
That's not adequate ground to conclude that because people use the word when asking about what it is that there is no clear understanding of what it is... especially when and if it is something that exists in it's entirety prior to our naming it.
It could indicate a clear case of the listener knowing that there are a wide ranging number of different notions that all use the same name, and not having a clear understanding of which notion the speaker is employing.
Right?
Yes, that is my view. We can be mistaken about whether we know it is raining just as we can be mistaken about whether it is raining.
Quoting Harry Hindu
With the rain example, if we went outside we presumably shouldn't be mistaken about whether it is raining or not. But that still falls short of a guarantee or proof. People sometimes have hallucinations, holograms are possible, and there will be other possibilities I haven't thought of. (And that's before getting to the more skeptical hypotheses of brains-in-vats, Descartes' evil demon and the like.)
Consider the clock example of the OP. Normally we just glance at the clock to find out the time. In order for that to count as knowledge, should we verify that the clock is working first, as well as check it against other clocks? But even if we did that, we might still be mistaken (e.g., perhaps the clocks are wrong because of a daylight savings time change, or someone else just set all the clocks incorrectly).
These extra requirements would normally be overkill for forming a belief about the time or reporting it to others. Even if fulfilled, they still fall short of a guarantee or proof. And, in the end, they fail to match our ordinary use of knowledge terms.
That is, glancing at the clock or looking out the window for rain is normally considered a sufficient justification for our beliefs and claims. If someone asks how we know what time it is, they are normally satisfied when we say we looked at the clock just now.
Quoting Harry Hindu
However if only deduction provides a guarantee or proof, then the only mistake-proof claim we could make would be of our own existence, per Descartes. Which is a very different thing to ordinary knowledge of the time of day or whether it is raining (that doesn't require a guarantee or proof).
I don't like the wording here. It doesn't make any sense to say that some state-of-affairs is a truth-maker, as if some state-of-affairs makes some other state-of-affairs called the "truth". Which state-of-affairs are we talking about when using our knowledge - the state-of-affairs that made the truth, or the state-of-affairs that is the truth? Claims don't bear truth if they are wrong.
All you have done is state what makes truth and what bears the truth, but haven't explained what the truth is and how it is made by some state-of-affairs or carried in a claim.
Quoting Andrew M
Now it sounds like you've taken my argument. If we are brains-in-vats, do we know what rain is? All of these alternate possibilities, while I concede are far-fetched (brains in vats) or not the norm (hallucinations), are what make one a skeptic of one's own knowledge and skeptical of our understanding of what knowledge actually is. If we can't have proof that one's knowledge is actually true, then it is illogical to say "truth" is a property of knowledge.
Quoting Andrew M
What is "proof"?
I did mention before about our minds being the only thing we can say that we know anything true about because to say anything true would require you to be the thing you're talking about.
Quoting Andrew M
That sounds like the same thing.
It seems to me that we can only ever talk about our knowledge, not the actual state-of-affairs. If we say, "I don't know if it is raining", then we're still talking about the state of our knowledge. We can't talk about things we don't know - only things we know. In this case, you know that you don't know that it is raining, and it is true. You actually don't know if it is raining.
You can only speak truths about the state of your own mind. Thankfully, the world, like minds, establishes patterns and we can make predictions about what the other things, like other minds, can do, and the patterns work for us most of the time. It's just that each time is a unique time and we tend to confuse the pattern with the state-of-affairs that we are talking about.
To me, at least, you’re addressing things outside of their proper conceptual order. So I would address things in this way:
Firstly, is truth - conformity to that which is real - possible? To argue that it is not is to obtain a contradiction. Briefly expounding on this: if conformity to reality entails that there can be no conformity to reality, then conformity to reality will both occur and not occur at the same time and in the same respect. I thereby take it for granted that we agree that the obtainment of truth (of conformity to reality) is possible.
Secondly, wherever truth is obtained, will it be possible to not hold factual justifications for the given truth? If claim X conforms to reality, then (I presume we both agree) one will be capable of factually justifying claim X by means of other facts without end.
Therefore, those beliefs that happen to be true will also necessarily be justifiable without error regardless of extent of justification involved.
At this point, fallibilism takes this form: because we are not omniscient, we cannot hold an awareness perfectly devoid of all possible errors regarding all that is. The reality of this then entails that a) we are sometimes wrong in what we believe to be true and b) we are incapable of providing a perfectly complete (i.e. absolute) justification for those claims that do happen to be true. This, of itself, however dispels neither that true beliefs can and do obtain nor that, when they obtain, they will be capable of being justified without any error.
That a belief taken to be true might not so be is the very reason why justifiability is a requisite part of JTB – the factual justifiability of our beliefs of what is true is the optimal guarantee we can hold in practice for our beliefs in fact being true. Again, just in case they are true, they will then be justifiable without error and without end.
As with the principle of falsification as it applies to empirical claims of what is, until a claim of knowledge becomes falsified, we hold no grounds by which to assume that it is not a true belief - which, on account of so being, can thereby be justified without end by us in manners perfectly devoid of error.
Then, to ask, “How do we know when we in fact know,” either equivocates between two implicitly referenced forms of knowledge - one infallible (which, for example, is obtainable via omniscience) and the other fallible - or, otherwise, can be answered thus:
We hold no reason to doubt that we hold true beliefs that are thereby justified (i.e., knowledge) of holding true beliefs that are thereby justified (i.e. of holding knowledge) whenever the former and the latter cannot be evidenced false via the scrutiny that is either directly or indirectly placed on it.
This is fallibilism. There here is no denial that beliefs of what is true can in fact be true. And if there’s no evidence of their falsity, there’s no reason to presume them untrue. One freely trusts that one’s beliefs are in fact true when one can justify them without error - for their truth would require that they be so justifiable. One just simply doesn’t presume oneself to be infallible - but this doesn’t diminish the trust just addressed.
As to the more explicitly asked question, “How does one infallibly know when one’s fallible claims of knowledge are in fact unassailable and when they are not,” the answer from a paradigm of fallibilism is, “Never; for infallible knowledge, as with infallible awareness of anything, is not something we are capable of.”
It’s not that one knows nothing; it’s that one is fallibly knowledgeable - in manners not yet falsified by any evidence - of not being endowed with any infallible knowledge.
The personification of thinking about one's own thoughts and belief(reason). Equivocation of a number of different terms, including "reason". Failing to properly quantify premisses(not specifying "some" and implying all when it is not).
:wink:
Since you asked.
I have not equivocated over the term 'reason'; rather I have carefully specified the different uses to which it can be put. Can you?
For instance, explain to me now what the difference is between an explanatory reason and a normative reason.
Quoting creativesoul
Where?
You really are serious?
:brow:
Do you believe what you write?
Yes, I believe what I write.
Now, kindly do what I asked. What's the difference between an explanatory reason and a normative reason?
And where did I say 'all' when I meant 'some'?
And where did you refute my proof that Reason is a person?
You really are serious, aren't you?
:snicker:
As David Lewis said "you can't refute me with an incredulous stare"
"Over the term"...
Nonsense.
"while using the term"...
Yes... you have.
When an author uses different senses of the same term in the same argument it results in equivocation at best, and self contradiction at worst.
We're not in disagreement about the fact that there are a plurality of accepted sensible uses of the term "reason". We all know that to be true.
We're in disagreement for all sorts of reasons...
...not all sorts of people. Moron.
You are equivocating the term "reason" because you are using it in more than one sense in the same argument. This can be easily proven by means of substitution. The same practice will also clearly show that Reason is not a person.
Oh look! There it is directly above!
Quoting creativesoul
Er, what? Are you calling me a moron?
Quoting creativesoul
What the hell are you on about? Do it. Show the equivocation. Stop playing for time while you desperately look up the different meanings of the term 'reason'.
In the Alice/rain hypothetical, the state of affairs is that the window is being hosed with water (i.e., it is not raining). When Alice looks out the window, she forms the belief that it is raining.
Her belief represents a state of affairs that has not obtained. Thus her belief is false. However if it were raining (i.e., if that state of affairs had obtained), then her belief would have been true.
That defines the ordinary meaning (or use) of our truth terms.
The standard model for knowledge is JTB. Since Alice's belief is false, she does not have knowledge. If it were raining, she would have had knowledge (since her belief would have been true and also justified by her looking out the window).
That defines the ordinary meaning (or use) of our knowledge terms.
Note that the logic of the use of those terms is demonstrated in that hypothetical. They are, in effect, formal models where claims are satisfied in particular scenarios (and not in others). Also, the models can themselves be contested, as with the Gettier problem (or with your claim that knowledge can be false).
In reality we're in the position of Alice in the hypothetical. Instead of stipulating a hypothetical world with full knowledge of what claims are true and false in that world, we are instead a part of the world we're seeking to represent. However the logic of the terms defined above apply in exactly the same way. That is, if we were in Alice's situation and formed the same belief, our belief would also be false and we wouldn't have knowledge.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. See above. If Alice's belief were true (i.e., if it were raining), then she would have had knowledge. Yet the justification for her belief (that she looked out the window) did not amount to a proof.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A proof is a guarantee of the truth of one's claim.
Quoting Harry Hindu
In that case yes, but if we say, "It is raining" and it is raining, then we are talking about the actual state of affairs.
So truth is a state-of-affairs where one's claims accurately represent some other state-of-affairs.
Now you just need knowledge of this state-of-affairs called truth in order to make an accurate claim that knowledge entails truth. But you can't because it would require a level or perception that we can never attain - like being the thing you are making a claim about.
Quoting Andrew M
How do you guarantee the truth of your claim? Isn't this the same as saying that you'd have to know that your claim is true? In order to guarantee the truth of a claim, you'd have to know the actual state-of-affairs, but you don't know if you do, so how can you say that knowledge entails truth? People use "know" and "knowledge" not to claim truth, but to claim justification for their belief. Since we can't have proof that our beliefs are accurate, we only have proof that our beliefs are justified, we don't use these terms as if they bear truth rather than justifications.
Quoting Andrew M
What if we're brains in vats? How do you know your not a brain in a vat, or hallucinating when you say "It is raining."?
There are prescriptions of shit; only a person can issue a prescription; therefore shit is a person.
Er, no there aren't. I mean, what's a 'prescription of shit'? Have you been hitting the home brew again? (But on a positive note, that argument was valid. It's just it was rubbish, due to the first premise being false/incoherent).
Feigning ignorance of form...
:lol:
You don't. Knowledge doesn't require proof. It requires that one's belief is both justified (a standard that is lower than proof) and true.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Ordinarily the model is applied to the natural world of everyday experience (where we can point to what we mean by rain), not a supposed brain-in-vat world. So that renders the first question inapplicable (at least for ordinary claims). For the second, the question of knowing that it is raining is just whether your belief is justified and true. You don't need proof that all the things that could go wrong didn't go wrong (though, per Gettier, it does need to be the case that things didn't go wrong in ways that undermine the claim - i.e., that one was hallucinating would preclude the claim from being knowledge).
If knowledge requires that one's belief is true, but you don't have any guarantees (proof) that your knowledge it true, then how it is that one can claim they have knowledge if they can't prove to themselves or anyone else they are using the word with, that their knowledge is true? If we have no guarantees that something is the case, then we don't ever know when we possess knowledge in order to use the word. If we can never be sure that what we say is true, then how can we attribute truth as a property of knowledge? "Truth" would be ever-elusive, and we would never know when to use the word, "truth" appropriately because we never have any guarantees (proofs) of what the truth is.
We know when to use the word "truth" when we have a justifiable belief for when to use it and our belief is true.
Note that you keep presuming that one needs a guarantee (proof) in order to know something. But that is an infallibilist definition of knowledge, not the ordinary definition.
So I agree that one can never prove that one has the truth. It doesn't follow that one can never know that one has the truth. That's because the standard for knowledge is an ordinary and pragmatic one, not an infallible and unattainable one.
So what can know about string theory and how can we know that? :naughty:
If we were brains in a vat, what could we know and how could we know it? We experience life with our bodies and without them, we might record and regurgitate facts, but we would know not the meaning of them. Without a body what does time or rain mean?
No, that's the way you used it in this thread. If we use the word "know" to imply more than just a justification for our belief, but also truth, then we'd need proof that our belief was also true to use the word, "knowledge" correctly. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too.
It is you who has provided an infallibist definition of knowledge by making truth a requirement. My definition is the one that would be the "ordinary" definition, as it allows knowledge to be only about justifications, not truth - of which you need proof the claim is true to say that you are using the term "know" correctly.
It appears that either you are just being inconsistent, or we are talking past each other.
OK, let's test our claims. I'll outline the three distinct models for knowledge that we've discussed here (K1, K2 and K3) and what they imply for two distinct hypotheticals (H1 and H2).
(K1) Knowledge requires proof and truth
(K2) Knowledge requires justification and truth
(K3) Knowledge requires justification
Note that the truth condition in K1 is redundant but I'll leave it there for clarity. That is, if there is a proof that it is raining, then it is true that it is raining.
Also, as we have discussed it, justification falls short of proof and so doesn't imply truth. That is, a justified belief can be false.
Finally, I haven't indicated belief (to reduce clutter), but it should be implied for each model.
--
(H1) It is raining. Alice looks out the window and forms the belief that it is raining (since it appears to her to be raining).
Per K1, Alice does not know that it is raining. That's because she lacks proof - she has not definitively ruled out all other possibilities such as water from a hose.
Per K2, Alice knows that it is raining. That's because her belief is justifiable and her belief is true.
Per K3, Alice knows that it is raining. That's because her belief is justifiable.
--
(H2) It is not raining. However Bob is hosing water on the window. Alice looks out the window and forms the belief that it is raining (since it appears to her to be raining).
Per K1, Alice does not know that it is raining. That's because she lacks proof - she has not definitively ruled out all other possibilities such as water from a hose.
Per K2, Alice does not know that it is raining. That's because her belief, while justifiable, is false.
Per K3, Alice knows that it is raining. That's because her belief is justifiable.
--
I'll leave it there for the moment. Do you agree with the above conclusions for each hypothetical?
Quoting Andrew M
Quoting Andrew M
How do you guarantee that your claim is true? How do you show that your claim is true for it to qualify as using the term "knowledge" correctly?
Quoting Andrew M
But the only way to know it is true is to have proof. Until you do you don't know when to use the word, "know". If you can't prove your claim is true, then you are misusing the term, "know". If you can't ever show that your claim fits one of the requirements of knowledge, then how can you ever use the term?
So, you seem to be saying that knowledge is something that we can never attain because it requires it to be true, but we never know it is true, so how is it that we know when to use the word, "know"?
In H2, K2, who is claiming that Alice does not know it is raining, and what proof do they have that their claim is true?
There is no guarantee. Alice can show that her claim is true in H1 by pointing out the window since that is what justifies her belief. She can't show that her claim is true in H2 since her claim is not true in that hypothetical.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You're asserting K1 here and the rest of your questions assume it. Knowledge on K2 and K3 does not require proof. They require justification, which Alice has since her belief was formed by looking out the window. Thus she knows it is true in H1 on K2 without proof. Interestingly, she knows it is true in both H1 and H2 on K3 (again without proof). That's because she can have false knowledge on K3.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That it's not raining is the state of affairs stipulated in H2. That's prior to any claims.
That's strange. It was your claim that it is raining, not some state-of-affairs that it actually was raining. How do I know that you are right, when all you have to show is your justifications. If you can make a claim and assert that that is the state-of-affairs stipulated, then somehow you have gained true access to the world. How did you do that?
Quoting Andrew M
If there is no guarantee, then you can't know that you ever used the word correctly. There is no way to correct it's use, if you can't guarantee that your use includes the truth.
Quoting Andrew M
You can prove you have justification, but you can't prove you have truth? What do you have to know in order to use a word correctly? Do you agree that word-use can be picked up and used without really knowing what they mean? For instance, when a toddler hears their parent say "Damn it!" when they get angry, and then copy it, do they really know what they are saying? Is there a difference between using words and understanding what words mean? It seems to me that we can use words that appears to be the correct use, because everyone else uses it that way, but there are cases where mass delusions exist and people use the same words like "I know the Earth is flat" without knowing the truth.
I didn't. There's a difference between making a claim that it is raining (which I did not do) and presenting a hypothetical within which Alice makes a claim (which I did do).
To ask how I know that Alice exists, for example, or how I know that it is raining is misplaced. We're discussing a hypothetical state-of-affairs that I've stipulated, not an actual state-of-affairs. The premises of the hypothetical are taken as a given or as a basis of agreement (unless there is some reason to take issue with them).
Quoting Harry Hindu
You're using the word "know" in the sense of K1 again. On K2, you know that you used a word correctly when you have a justified and true belief that you did. You don't need a guarantee, you just need those conditions to be met.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, you can't prove you have a justification either. Nor did Alice have such a proof in hypotheticals H1 and H2. She hadn't ruled out the possibility, for example, that she was looking at a virtual (VR) window instead. Whether something counts as a justification assumes a particular model for justification, itself contestable. Taking it further, suffering a hallucination may preclude one from having any (or very few) justifiable beliefs at that time.
No claims are provable except within the context of a deductive proof.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes. In those cases, only on K3 would they have knowledge (assuming their claim was justifiable, which is contestable). On K2, they thought they knew that the Earth was flat, but didn't actually know that.
Then your talking about something that no one knows anything about. So how does one get to know it is raining?
Quoting Andrew M
How can you claim that your belief is true without proof? If you don't need proof that you are using the term correctly, then it seems that thing you don't need proof of isn't a necessary component of "knowledge", or it's not important to know when you're using "know" correctly.
If you can't enforce the rules for the use of the term. "knowledge", then that is to say that there aren't any rules when using the term.
I've presented three models (K1, K2, and K3) that each provide a potential answer. Hypothetical's H1 and H2 demonstrate the consequences of each model for Alice's claim that it is raining.
On model K1, Alice never knows it is raining since proof is unobtainable.
On model K3, Alice knows it is raining whenever her belief that it is raining is justified. The problem is that in H2, she knows it is raining when it is not raining.
On model K2, Alice knows it is raining in H1 but not in H2.
Of those three models, K2 is the best explanation for ordinary usage. It's also the model philosophers generally accept (Gettier aside).
So imagine yourself in Alice's position where it appears to be raining outside. You can't easily distinguish H1 from H2 (nor would all the claim-defeating possibilities like water from a hose even come to mind). But per K2, if you are in H1 your belief meets the conditions for knowledge. If you are in H2, your belief does not.
So to answer your question, you get to know it is raining when you are in scenarios like H1, but not when you are in scenarios like H2. If you wish to, you can also do things like go outside to check. The benefit is that you can potentially rule out or discover some H2-like scenarios (though not all), but it also bears the practical cost associated with the checking. The standard for justification is a pragmatic middle-ground between not bothering to look at all (i.e., guessing or believing whatever one wants to believe) and endlessly checking (which will still fall short of proof).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Because it is justifiable to do so - that's the normative rule for when we can make knowledge claims. If we needed proof, no claim could ever be made.
Now that means that we can sometimes inadvertently make false claims. That is, we can use the word "rain" when there is no rain, which would be a misuse. Normatively, that is okay - we're not infallible and we don't hold anyone to that standard. But veridically, we would have made a mistake. If we have made a mistake then it's not knowledge. That's a logical consequence of the model K2 - it doesn't depend on anyone ever discovering the mistake.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We ultimately want true claims, not false claims. That's why truth is a condition of knowledge. But we also recognize that the possibility of mistakes shouldn't preclude people from making claims at all. It just won't be knowledge if the claim is false.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The only way to enforce the rules upfront is either to require proof (per K1), which makes knowledge unattainable, or to allow false claims to count as knowledge (per K3).
What we do instead is to enforce the rules retroactively (per K2). That is, if we discover a misuse it is retroactively corrected. For example, suppose in H2 Alice later discovers that Bob was hosing water on the window. In that case, she recognizes that she didn't know it was raining at the time, she only thought she did.
Exactly. Which is to say that justification is the only requirement for when someone uses the word, "know".
Quoting Andrew M
I think we got mixed up again. Are we talking about the state of one's knowledge, or the state of the weather? When the window is being hosed, what is the distinction between, "I know it is raining" and "It is raining."? The latter stems from the prior. You can't say, "It is raining." and say that it is about the weather without having some justification. It would be more like guessing.
Quoting Andrew M
I thought you said that we can't have proof, yet you are now saying that you can have proof retroactively?
If Alice was using the term in the normative way, then she is using it as I have defined it. The veridical use would be your definition. But you have shown that the veridical use refers to something unattainable, while the normative use refers to having justification only. I think we are pretty much in agreement, it's just you haven't realized it yet.
Alice has formed a belief about the state of the weather (in H1 and H2). We are talking about the state of her knowledge (in terms of K1, K2 and K3).
Quoting Harry Hindu
When Alice forms the belief, "It is raining", her belief is about the state of the weather. Per K2, she knows that it is raining in H1 but not in H2.
If Alice further forms the belief, "I know it is raining", her belief is about the state of her knowledge. Per K2, this latter claim is justified in both H1 and H2 but only true in H1. Therefore she knows that she knows it is raining in H1 but not in H2.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That statement is still about the weather even if you are guessing. An unjustified claim can still be true, but it wouldn't be knowledge under models K1, K2 or K3.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, a revised claim is subject to the same conditions for knowledge as the original claim. Which is to say, there is no proof for the revised claim either.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The veridical use is attainable - see H1, K2 where Alice has a justified and true belief that it is raining, and therefore has knowledge on that model (K2).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Here's a question for you. In H2, suppose that Alice later discovers that Bob was hosing the window with water. Thus she now knows that it wasn't raining earlier.
Did Alice know that it was raining at the earlier time?
How does she know it wasn't raining while Bob was hosing the window? Bob hosing the window isn't justification for it not to have rained earlier.
This goes back to what I said about making objective observations. You seem to be saying that we check our knowledge when we get outside of the thing we are talking about. So, if we know that to really know whether or not is raining is to go outside and look, then looking out the window isn't proper justification for knowing it is raining. If this is the case, then no, Alice didn't know it was, or wasn't raining, because she didn't have proper justification. If all she needs is justification, then yes, Alice knew it was raining and now she knows something different - that it wasn't.
If you want to bring up the possibility of Alice hallucinating while outside, how do you retroactively show she is hallucinating - by asking someone else? How do we know that they aren't hallucinating, or lying? If all you can have are justifications and truth is something elusive, then it stands that the only requirement for knowledge is justification. No one can ever know if Alice used the term, "know" correctly, if truth is a requirement for its correct usage, which is the same as saying it isn't a requirement at all.
OK. Suppose Bob (who she believes to be honest and reliable) told her that it wasn't raining earlier and that he was hosing water on the window. Thus Alice would justifiably form the belief that it was not raining earlier.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, there is no proof (or getting outside the thing we are talking about).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Alice never has a "proper" justification if proof is required. That is model K1 (which we both reject). Alice's initial belief that it is raining is justifiable in both H1 and H2.
Quoting Harry Hindu
OK, that is model K3 (which you seem to accept and I reject). The consequence is that per hypothetical H2, Alice at the earlier time knew that it was raining when it was not.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If you have reason to believe someone is hallucinating then you factor that into your judgment. But, as discussed, any reasons you have will fall short of proof, and there is always the possibility of being mistaken despite your belief being justifiably formed. That's the way it goes sometimes when proof is not obtainable.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Alice has no proof that she used her words correctly. It doesn't follow that she didn't, in fact, use her words correctly. Which she did in H1 on model K2.
You seem to think that rejecting model K3 means that one therefore requires proof of the truth. That's not the case. Proof is not a requirement for K2, only truth and justification is. Since Alice's belief is both true and justified in H1, it follows that Alice has knowledge in H1 per K2.
A thread worthy of careful revisitation...
Around page ten, it gets interesting...