Well, just so. Largely.
But look at what you say:
My position doubts this. And I presume yours does too.
What my position does not doubt is that there is at least one person in the world - however I conceive it. And that is me. And, I presume, in your case, that is you.
Do not forget that all the words you are reading here are a product of your own mind.
So if any of them make no sense, blame yourself for "writing" them.
Best wishes![]()
No.
I won't define knowledge.
I prefer the "sometimes I know it when I see it" approach.
As should anyone who knows a few things about cognitive psychology on the one hand, and the long philosophical controversies in epistemology on the other. Cognitive psychology provides truly massive amounts of evidence that the cognitions we can perform far outstrip those we can encapsulate in a formula. We recognize objects, but typically have no clue how we recognize objects - that's a big part of why Machine Vision algorithms were so hard to develop, for example. There is no reason to think that "knowledge" is among the few things we recognize by applying a consciously accessible formula.
If you want to understand knowledge, I recommend getting out of the armchair for a long while, and into the psych lab (or psych library).
...
Without recourse to my elegantly simple proof, can you prove that I necessarily exist?
(PS proofs by analogy are kind of dumb, on this particular subject.)
It's not my field, but I have taken some philosophy and have a hobbyist's interest in it. I have read some Socrates.Empirical? Theoretical? Spiritual? Ideological? Philosophical?
Do ideas have substance? Do we know them less than factual observations?
Have you read any Socrates and other ancient/medieval philosophers? Studied epistemology?
So this effectively states that knowledge is a term that varies depending on context with respect to how confident a person is, and how sound the evidence is.You can turn to statistics to try to answer these questions.
For example, basic statistics parameters (means, variances) will help you decide what you know, out of a large mass of data.
For example, calculating confidence intervals around measured parameters, can help you decide how certain your knowledge is.
Constructing a CI in fact has a degree of arbitrariness, since the choice of the degree of confidence to calculate is arbitrary.
Would you be satisfied with 50% confidence in your knowledge (that's like gambling)?
Would it matter to you to be 99% confident or 99.5% confident in your knowledge (would you go to great lengths for an extra 0.5%?)?
I don't feel the above assertion, that the definition of knowledge is context dependent, is outside the scope of this thread, and unrelated to the rest of the discussion. And that assertion does answer, or at least suggest an answer to, the question "How many different things can 'know the capital of Canada' mean?"Now that is just semantics. You can know the name, or know sections of town "first-hand". In other words the difference between the abstract/theoretical and the empirical. You might abstractly know the capital and a map of the capital, but never have had empirical knowledge of it. On the other hand you can use empirical knowledge to judge the accuracy of an abstract representation (map)
I think this amounts to asking if truth is necessary for knowledge.Another question to ask: is our knowledge and the means of our knowledge, fallible?
No.
I won't define knowledge.
I prefer the "sometimes I know it when I see it" approach.
As should anyone who knows a few things about cognitive psychology on the one hand, and the long philosophical controversies in epistemology on the other. Cognitive psychology provides truly massive amounts of evidence that the cognitions we can perform far outstrip those we can encapsulate in a formula. We recognize objects, but typically have no clue how we recognize objects - that's a big part of why Machine Vision algorithms were so hard to develop, for example. There is no reason to think that "knowledge" is among the few things we recognize by applying a consciously accessible formula.
If you want to understand knowledge, I recommend getting out of the armchair for a long while, and into the psych lab (or psych library).
...
@Global Skeptic
You've argued that we can't know the universe was created 5 minutes ago, and I agree with that, but I still think that it is meaningful to say that I know I exist and am thinking. I may not be who I think I am, but I am me.
To put it another way, if you're willing to assert that something is having the thoughts you associate with yourself, you may as well call that something yourself. And the assertion "Something, called my self, exists" seems to be a known truth.
There's all sort of reasons why [a propositional analysis of knowledge] would be valuable.
If you need a hint which famous philosopher that is, check my avatar.It'll never work. But it's certainly worth a try!
Why not?I understand where you are coming from, but I wouldn't call it a known truth.![]()
So you draw a sharp distinction between being told something happened from a trustworthy source, and experiencing it for yourself, and claim that the latter has a better claim for knowledge.I am not trying to equate it with knowledge. To me, it is the difference in "I believe the sun came up this morning", and "I know the sun came up this morning." Most people take that simple fact for granted. Only the person who saw the actual sun rise knows for a certainty. IMO most people assume their faith, not really experience it or even know it. Allowing a fact instead of faith to be the starting point though, is my attempt to remove the concept of God (or any religion for that matter) altogether out of the equation. One can add that back in later, if they choose to. This is not about who is right or wrong.
It is about who believes in God, and who does not believe in God. Or further more, who believes in the concept of a god or who believes there are not any gods (has no belief in the concept of god-the common term for athiest). If one believes in God or not, that makes God a given. If you only believe in the concept of, then any god will do, or even the lack thereof. Nothing in this paragraph has to do with knowing though, it is still stuck in the belief or IMO the I can not say for certain stage.
I am trying to keep it in the reality common to posters here and not something just made up in my mind as to reality. Most of this is coming from what I think I know compared to what I am hearing other posters say they know or believe.
When did the notion about the sun revolving around the earth come into being? I would say that is a fact that was proven wrong, upon further revelation. The prevailing thought is that humans had no concept of the universe other than the sun came up in the east and went down in the west. The earth was their only focal point, until they had the tools to find out more facts on the matter. The fact that the earth revolves around the sun was there. No one had experienced the reality of it.
The fact boggles my mind that "we" have seen human created track marks on the surface of Mars. Do I know for a fact that they are there? Do I believe they are there? How do we determine if a fact is true or not? Can we know by believing? Or do we only know by knowing? That is my conundrum with human knowledge. At what point in time is a "fact" just a belief, common knowledge, reality, or proven wrong? Do they follow the same pattern, change, or were always there?
So knowledge is a property of the mind?No.
I won't define knowledge.
I prefer the "sometimes I know it when I see it" approach.
As should anyone who knows a few things about cognitive psychology on the one hand, and the long philosophical controversies in epistemology on the other. Cognitive psychology provides truly massive amounts of evidence that the cognitions we can perform far outstrip those we can encapsulate in a formula. We recognize objects, but typically have no clue how we recognize objects - that's a big part of why Machine Vision algorithms were so hard to develop, for example. There is no reason to think that "knowledge" is among the few things we recognize by applying a consciously accessible formula.
If you want to understand knowledge, I recommend getting out of the armchair for a long while, and into the psych lab (or psych library).
So you draw a sharp distinction between being told something happened from a trustworthy source, and experiencing it for yourself, and claim that the latter has a better claim for knowledge.
But aren't the senses fallible? Can you not hallucinate?
So knowledge is a property of the mind?
"It won't work, but I'll give it a try"
Why not?
For as the old hermit of Prague that never saw pen and ink very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc:
"That that is, is. For what is 'that' but 'that'? And 'is' but 'is'?"
Twelfth Night
The assertion that I exist seems stronger, more certain, than other assertions of the same category. We assert that our senses usually reflect reality. We assert the principle of induction. We assert that some reality exists outside our minds. What puts the assertion that I exist above all these? If it's just like the others, why are we more confident of it?Well, to me it is a core assumption or if you like dogmatic assertion from which we can construct different accounts of the meaning of life. So since I am a skeptic, I don't use knowledge and truth, but rather absurd/meaningless/doesn't make sense and meaningful/makes sense.
"Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Protagoras
Measure equals the cognitive process of absurd/meaningless/doesn't make sense and meaningful/makes sense.
Yes. But my take on this is "What can we be certain of?"