I guess I need to be gentler tomorrow night.
What is knowledge?
- Thread starter stormbind
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Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
there will be no tomorrow. we shall slip into the void in t-minus 4 hours.
Perfection
The Great Head.
I'm not asking you to be gentle, I'm asking you to not make stupid assumptions about the way atheists think because you obviously have little clue us.
Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
time to get this thread back on track, baby!
Quake no more, my lover!
So I'm guessing that what you were getting at with "false justification" wasn't just that--because as mise pointed out, the justification was true. What you seem to be alluding to is knowledge as the right kind of JTB. The idea is that you want a JTB where the justification doesn't have some defeater attached. In the Gettier example, the defeater of the justification is the fact that your belief that (e) is based on Jones' pocket, not your own. So perhaps we can take knowledge to be undefeatedly justified true belief (uJTB).
If you're super-interested, I could go into the different kinds of dependence relations for justification (presuppositional, psychological, or epistemic), but I don't think that's crucial to show how the uJTB approach is flawed. All you need to do is consider a sweepstakes case. Here I quote from W.H. Audi's The Analysis of Knowledge:
"Recall the sweepstakes with a million coupons. You might have a JTB that you will lose, but you do not know that you will. You might win. What falsehood defeats your justification here? You are not making any mistake, but simply do not have the right kind of positive ground for knowledge. It might seem that your belief that you will lose the sweepstakes depends on the false proposition that the outcome of a chance process can be known beforehand by merely calculating odds. But does your belief depend on this? You might reject this and still believe--even justifiedly--that you will lose..."
"...We cannot plausibly say, then, that in the sweepstakes example either your belief or its justification depends on the falsehood about foreknowledge of chance outcomes."
There's more that could be said here, such as that even the uJTB approach doesn't account for the apparent non-instrumental value we place on knowledge, but suffice to say that what ends up happening with uJTB is that you are forced to accept more and more stringent probabilistic standards for something to count as knowledge, such that you end up eventually having to analyze knowledge as conclusively justified true belief, but that leads to an absurdly strong notion of knowledge which quickly falls apart for reasons outlined earlier.
Quake no more, my lover!
So I'm guessing that what you were getting at with "false justification" wasn't just that--because as mise pointed out, the justification was true. What you seem to be alluding to is knowledge as the right kind of JTB. The idea is that you want a JTB where the justification doesn't have some defeater attached. In the Gettier example, the defeater of the justification is the fact that your belief that (e) is based on Jones' pocket, not your own. So perhaps we can take knowledge to be undefeatedly justified true belief (uJTB).
If you're super-interested, I could go into the different kinds of dependence relations for justification (presuppositional, psychological, or epistemic), but I don't think that's crucial to show how the uJTB approach is flawed. All you need to do is consider a sweepstakes case. Here I quote from W.H. Audi's The Analysis of Knowledge:
"Recall the sweepstakes with a million coupons. You might have a JTB that you will lose, but you do not know that you will. You might win. What falsehood defeats your justification here? You are not making any mistake, but simply do not have the right kind of positive ground for knowledge. It might seem that your belief that you will lose the sweepstakes depends on the false proposition that the outcome of a chance process can be known beforehand by merely calculating odds. But does your belief depend on this? You might reject this and still believe--even justifiedly--that you will lose..."
"...We cannot plausibly say, then, that in the sweepstakes example either your belief or its justification depends on the falsehood about foreknowledge of chance outcomes."
There's more that could be said here, such as that even the uJTB approach doesn't account for the apparent non-instrumental value we place on knowledge, but suffice to say that what ends up happening with uJTB is that you are forced to accept more and more stringent probabilistic standards for something to count as knowledge, such that you end up eventually having to analyze knowledge as conclusively justified true belief, but that leads to an absurdly strong notion of knowledge which quickly falls apart for reasons outlined earlier.
Erik Mesoy
Core Tester / Intern
This thread is going too fast for me to keep up with until I'm past my exams (one today), so here'a sq uick reply to what seems to be the worst point:
Since Fifty and Perf agreed that having a convincing (to me) reason to believe something wouldn't constitute justification in the case of the sentient aliens, I don't see that this is different, in that you're putting a justified belief about (aliens/pizza) together with a truth about (other aliens/another pizza) and concluding that it isn't knowledge, which I agree with, but I say that you don't have justification, truth and belief all together.
More tomorrow unless I forget this thread.
But now the JTB elements point to different objects. You're not justified in saying that the new pizza is there, and your belief that the old pizza is there is false.
Since Fifty and Perf agreed that having a convincing (to me) reason to believe something wouldn't constitute justification in the case of the sentient aliens, I don't see that this is different, in that you're putting a justified belief about (aliens/pizza) together with a truth about (other aliens/another pizza) and concluding that it isn't knowledge, which I agree with, but I say that you don't have justification, truth and belief all together.
More tomorrow unless I forget this thread.
Mise
isle of lucy
That's okay, because I'm not claiming that I know specifically which pizza is there -- all I'm claiming is that I know that a pizza is there, based on the quite reasonable justification that I put one there. And I was correct, there is a pizza there.
Of course, in reflection of what Fifty just posted, the belief you are referring to is defeatable if I knew that someone had replaced my pizza with a new one.
What if you were, in fact, telepathic, and aliens were, in fact, communicating with you?
What if you didn't know you were telepathic, but it just so happens that you are?
Does a belief even need to be justifiable internally, or can a belief be justifiable to an external observer, but not to the subject themselves? I.e. if we ran tests on Fred, found out that he was indeed telepathic, and that he was indeed communicating with aliens, but Fred didn't know this, does Fred know whatever the aliens told him?
If not, then can a dog, who arguably lacks the intelligence to "justify", know that it's his owner who's calling him?
So either a dog can't know who his master is (which seems rather absurd to me), or Fred can justifiably know that he's being spoken to by aliens, if he believes, without justification, that he is telepathic (which, again, seems rather absurd).
If I was writing an AI for a game, I would still talk of the AI having knowledge of certain information, that it has access too.
Whether we define "knowledge" to mean only that which is a property of a conscious mind is just a word definitions debate. I don't see any difference between the two types - other than one being perceived by a conscious mind, of course.
Whether we define "knowledge" to mean only that which is a property of a conscious mind is just a word definitions debate. I don't see any difference between the two types - other than one being perceived by a conscious mind, of course.
Erik Mesoy
Core Tester / Intern
I still call shenanigans on the grounds that you're trying to merge a justified belief of one object with a true belief of another object and declaring that this constitutes a JTB about an undefined object of their common category.
I was going to have an analogy about dogs here, but the forum ate it.
Edit: Short version:
*I have at least two dogs
*I have at least one male dog
*I have at least one Labrador
Saying "Erik has a male Labrador" is not justified.
Sheesh, the analogy looks really crappy when I rewrite it from memory.
Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I still call shenanigans on the grounds that you're trying to merge a justified belief of one object with a true belief of another object and declaring that this constitutes a JTB about an undefined object of their common category.
I was going to have an analogy about dogs here, but the forum ate it.
Edit: Short version:
*I have at least two dogs
*I have at least one male dog
*I have at least one Labrador
Saying "Erik has a male Labrador" is not justified.
Sheesh, the analogy looks really crappy when I rewrite it from memory.
It sounds like you're going towards the "defeater" notion that I talked about in post 124. It really doesn't work because not all Gettier-style counterexamples have defeaters. Plus, uJTB doesn't account for the value we place on knowledge.
The best theory of knowledge I've heard is inextricably linked with virtue and moral theory. Its pretty dang cool! There may be problems with it, but I like it!
Bozo Erectus
Master Baker
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2003
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Knowledge is what you experience.
Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ooh man thats like, sooo deeeeep. 
punkbass2000
Des An artiste
angeleyes
mood indigo
Knowledge is the creator of Time and Space (doesn't this sound immensely deep? )
)
angeleyes
mood indigo
Knowledge is the interpretation of your experience.
Knowledge is the creator of Time and Space (doesn't this sound immensely deep?
Your idiot editorial aside, if you combine both of your posts, what you have said is profound in what it says about how you might view the universe. Short statements can be profound if there is depth behind the words that is understood. If I rearrange your post like so:
"Your interpretation of your experience [=knowledge] is the creator of Time and Space."
then you have actually made cosmological statement about the nature of the universe and mankind's place in it. If you spend some time thinking about it, you may come to interesting conclusions. Is this where I put the smiley? >>>>> X
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Knowledge... is half the battle.
Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
bj, you're sorta equivocating between propositional knowledge and perceptual knowledge. Not that you care.
No, because knowledge requires belief. Data by itself is not knowledge.
This follows from the classic "true justified belief" definition of knowledge.
Fifty
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I agree with the first part of what you said, but just so you know, the JTB thing is outdated. I explain it somewhere in the thread, which you could sift through and find if you're so interested.
I'll sift through backwords when I have time.
But outdated doesn't make sense to me. Even Plato claimed that the definition was insufficient. (plato used the term "knowledge as a true judgment with an account", which is essentially the same thing -- true belief with a justification)
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