:meh:

Why would you think that?

There is an odd anti-feminist feel to this view of personal isolation. — Paine

Yes, that seems to be one of the points being made...

None of these philosophers […] had any experience of living with women or children, which is, after all, quite an important aspect of human life […] I wrote [this] article drawing attention to this statistic and asking whether it might not account for a certain over-abstractness, a certain remoteness from life, in the European philosophical tradition. — Midgley

A philosopher is thought to need a room of one's own. But the Greeks did their philosophising in the public spaces of Athens. When did this change?

With Descartes?

I added a poll, without good reason.

(I suspect the bachelors will not vote.)

Then let's put an end to this silly analytic thing we call philosophy and instead enjoy the sunrise — Hanover

Good plan.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high over vales and hills
And there and then I came upon
My dog being sick on the daffodils! — Apocryphal, attributed to Spike Milligan.

Who is ‘we’? — Wayfarer

Those who pay for a BBC licence? Those who listened to Descartes, but then managed to move on?

Knowing and believing are language games, .

You are about to put food in the bowl. The cat knows that. That is a proposition. Searle rightly makes the point that the proposition is the content, not the object, of the belief:

Each intentional state divides into two components: the type of state it is and its content, typically a propositional content. We can represent the distinction between intentional type and propositional content with the notation "(p)." For example, I can believe that it is raining, fear that it is raining, or desire that it be raining. In each of these cases I have the same propositional content, p, that it is raining, but I have them in different intentional types, that is, different psychological modes: belief, fear, desire, and so on, represented by the 'S'. Many intentional states come in whole propositions, and for that reason those that do are often described by philosophers as "propositional attitudes." This is a bad terminology because it suggests that my intentional state is an attitude to a proposition. In general, beliefs, desires, and so on are not attitudes to propositions. If I believe that Washington was the first president, my attitude is to Washington and not to the proposition. Very few of our intentional states are directed at propositions. Most are directed at objects and states of affairs in the world independent of any proposition. Sometimes an intentional state might be directed at a proposition. If, for example, I believe that Bernoulli's principle is trivial, then the object of my belief is a proposition, namely, Bernoulli's principle. In the sentence "John believes that Washington was the first president," it looks like the proposition that Washington was the first president is the object of the belief. But that is a grammatical illusion. The proposition is the content of the belief, not the object of the belief. In this case, the object of the belief is Washington. It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions. — Searle, my bolding

The object of your cat's belief is presumably the imminent full bowl.

Some background.

The podcast that drew my attention to Rings and Books is Mary Midgley, public philosophy and plumbing

Ellie Robson's essay is Mary Midgley on Water and Thought: Is Public Philosophy Like Plumbing?

(Women) In Parenthesis is worth keeping an eye on.

It could also be asked to what extent is feminism an entire critique of philosophy? — Jack Cummins

'Entire"?

The perspective offered here is perhaps more obvious to someone who has carried another person inside their body. At the least it is a reminder of the privilege of masculinity. Descartes had the luxury of a warm chair and a stove. He did not have to collect the kids from school, wash the floor and cook dinner. But what was missed because of that privilege?

That's the gem; My moment of greatest certainty was when I held my daughter, smelling of vernix. Descartes' Second Meditation is too contrived to be taken seriously.

I can't separate my visual experience from the rain — jkop

Try this:

I suspect one can pick which replies are from Bachelors...

...being unmarried does not mean being celibate. — Fooloso4

For the BBC in the fifties, it did.

She misses the point of Descartes, for which I'd give her C on that paper, but since her missing the point was intentional, I give her a D. — Hanover

A Credit raised to a Distinction. A bit low - I'd have given the HD for the spark of originality.

I don't know enough to organize that complexity in my head. — Athena

Your posts show this not to be the case.

There are well known problems with historicism. That civilisations collapse is a Western notion, an expectation that we must reenact the fall of Rome. The collapse of the British Empire was felt keenly in the decline of Great Britain. It did not bring with it social collapse in Australia, Canada, India, and Africa, these nations seeing it instead mostly as an opportunity. The end of the 'mercan hegemony will similarly have the greatest impact inside that nation.

Notice the contradiction in "Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the general populace." Does soft despotism give the illusion of control or induce fear?

Sure, there were mistakes made in education, as there were in health, economics, International relations. None of these are determinative of the course of history.

Perhaps the problem is a turning against 'merca's own expression of liberal values. Or were they ever broadly understood?

The poor neck-beard can't afford heating. :worry:

:wink:

Yeah, not the forum's finest hour.

A page that allows us to show truth tables:

https://truth-table.com/#(p→q)→(~p→~q)

Useful for those who are not too lazy to be staring at Truth tables.

I am looking at what happens through time and what we know/think/have access to at any given moment. — Bylaw

Yep, understood. You are interested in the dynamics of belief.

you are still assuming that I think we can't know anything — Bylaw

Not an assumption. You did say, in italics,

All beliefs are the same and what people call knowledge is no better than any other belief — Bylaw

which presumably means that there is no knowledge, just belief.

I find your post confusing. You say we know things, yet the difference between knowledge and belief is at least that the things we know are true; and yet you say " take out the T".

There are true statements.

you may be working with too broad a brush — Janus

Yep. That was the plan.

Know-how involves skills that may not be dependent on knowing anything in a propositional sense. — Janus

Yep. And if know-how were a subset of know-that, that might be a problem. But if knowing-that is a subset of knowing-how, that is not a problem - is it?

I may know that my friend regularly arrives late to appointments, but I need not necessarily do anything with that knowledge. — Janus

Interesting. A good reply. Could you be said to know this if no action at all followed from it - including saying "You are always late!"? I think one could. So know-that extends past know-how, if only marginally.

I may know how to ride a bicycle and that knowledge seems to have nothing necessarily to do with belief. — Janus

Well, it implies belief in Bicycles and riding.

Animals know how to do things, and we commonly attribute knowing-that to them. The cat knows that the bowl is empty, and so on.

The temptation is there to draw a hard line between knowing-how and knowing-that. But they are not as distinct as folk might presume.

Please explain. — Athena

I take it that your topic is the apparent turn against democratic values, and to that end you are asking about conservative Christianity. While not solely restricted to the USA, a resurgence of Christianity is not a major feature of the almost ubiquitous turn towards autocracy.

Democracy is underpinned by a liberal system of values. that system was distorted to individualism and greed in the Seventies, and has been exposed to oligarchic alternatives with the opening of trade and travel since then. Libertarian absurdities abound, community institutions are underfunded, the common wealth has been striped to feed private wealth.

That is, there is more going on than is to be seen in the rise of conservative Christianity in the US.

And ↪fdrake laid out an excellent argument against the statement "Knowledge is merely belief" -- sometimes, to expand on fdrake, knowledge is action, and has nothing to do with what people say! A totally orthogonal category to yourthe notion that knowledge is merely belief. — Moliere

Yes, 's is a neat bit of linguistic philosophy... :wink:

Philosophical discussion tends to focus on the JTB account, with good reason, but even Socrates and Plato knew it was limited.

There is 'knowing how', there is the knowing of familiarity and there is 'knowing that'. I think the salient question in this thread concerns only 'knowing that' or propositional knowing, because the other two categories do not necessarily involve belief. — Janus

I'll argue that knowing-that reduces to knowing-how; so by way of an example knowing that water boils at 100℃ is knowing how to boil the kettle and how to use a thermometre and how to answer basic physics questions and so on. I take this as a corollary of meanign as use. The meaning of "water boils at 100℃" is what we are able to do with it.

Notice also that this approach makes knowedge more social or communal. It is part of our langauge use.

So, here you assert that all facts are a subset of beliefs. This does not accord with the common concepts of 'fact' and 'belief'. 'Fact' signifies what is the case regardless of what anyone believes. — Janus

If he'd said knowledge was a subset of belief, that what we know is a subset of what we believe, that might have made sense.

Say we have accepted some not-yet-falsified claim and count it as knowledge, and then it becomes falsified. Was it ever knowledge in that case? — Janus

Clearly not.

What distinguishes a 'fact' from a belief is that THAT PERSON ONLY (<--- yup) has decided that enough evidence exists to make that fact iota something that is fairly far along the match curve towards infinity, e.g. perfection. For them its a fact. — Chet Hawkins

Twaddle.

Facts don't care what you believe.

Trump can believe that he had the largest inauguration crowd ever, but it wasn't, regardless of what Trump chooses to believe.

Mike Hughes can believe that the Earth is flat, but he is still dead.

Reverend Jim Jones believed he would start a paradise on Earth. It didn't work out.

Not all beliefs are true. If you lose the capacity to be able to differentiate between true and false belief, you are headed for a confrontation with reality.

You get to decide what you believe, but you do not usually get to decide what is fact.

I'll take your word for it. :up:

My suggestion is not that we can't know anything, but rather that adding that it is true, creates a problem. We work with it as if it is true. We have rigor in what we decide to consider knowledge. We don't add on to it being well justified and not (yet) falsified that it is also true. — Bylaw

Foremost, you can't know something if it is not true. This is how the grammar of "know" works. If you hold it to be true, but it isn't, then you only believe it, you don't know it.

Secondly, it is plain that there are true statements. This statement is true. So are the theorems of arithmetic and logic. That you are reading this is also true.

Engineers and scientists are quite rightly taught scepticism towards some statements, but not others. If they question the conservation of energy, they will not get far in the profession. While they might give lip service to fablsificationism or to hyperbolic notions of truth, there remain some things that are indubitable.

I work with them as true or working, but I have no extra step where I justify X according to a rigorous methodolgy and/or note that others have, check to see if somewhere it has been falsified, and then I make the check to see it is true step. So far it is not false. So far it is working better than anything else. — Bylaw

This works only in limited cases. Some counterexamples have already been given. Here's another: Supose you are playing Checkers and your opponent reaches over and moves one of your pieces - yo say "You can't move my pieces!" Would you accept their reply if it were "HA, but there you have it - I have falsified that rule: I can move your pieces!"

This by way of showing that the situation around truth is quite complicated, and depends on what one is doing - ont he game being played.

And this:

Falsification was first developed by Karl Popper in the 1930s. Popper noticed that two types of statements are of particular value to scientists. The first are statements of observations, such as 'this is a white swan'. Logicians call these statements singular existential statements, since they assert the existence of some particular thing. They can be parsed in the form: there is an x which is a swan and is white.

The second type of statement of interest to scientists categorizes all instances of something, for example 'all swans are white'. Logicians call these statements universal. They are usually parsed in the form for all x, if x is a swan then x is white.

Scientific laws are commonly supposed to be of this form. Perhaps the most difficult question in the methodology of science is: how does one move from observations to laws? How can one validly infer a universal statement from any number of existential statements?

Inductivist methodology supposed that one can somehow move from a series of singular existential statements to a universal statement. That is, that one can move from ‘this is a white swan', “that is a white swan”, and so on, to a universal statement such as 'all swans are white'. This method is clearly logically invalid, since it is always possible that there may be a non-white swan that has somehow avoided observation. Yet some philosophers of science claim that science is based on such an inductive method.

Popper held that science could not be grounded on such an invalid inference. He proposed falsification as a solution to the problem of induction. Popper noticed that although a singular existential statement such as 'there is a white swan' cannot be used to affirm a universal statement, it can be used to show that one is false: the singular existential statement 'there is a black swan' serves to show that the universal statement 'all swans are white' is false, by modus tollens. 'There is a black swan' implies 'there is a non-white swan' which in turn implies 'there is something which is a swan and which is not white'.

Although the logic of naïve falsification is valid, it is rather limited. Popper drew attention to these limitations in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in response to anticipated criticism from Duhem and Carnap. W. V. Quine is also well-known for his observation in his influential essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (which is reprinted in From a Logical Point of View), that nearly any statement can be made to fit with the data, so long as one makes the requisite "compensatory adjustments." In order to falsify a universal, one must find a true falsifying singular statement. But Popper pointed out that it is always possible to change the universal statement or the existential statement so that falsification does not occur. On hearing that a black swan has been observed in Australia, one might introduce ad hoc hypothesis, 'all swans are white except those found in Australia'; or one might adopt a skeptical attitude towards the observer, 'Australian ornithologists are incompetent'. As Popper put it, a decision is required on the part of the scientist to accept or reject the statements that go to make up a theory or that might falsify it. At some point, the weight of the ad hoc hypotheses and disregarded falsifying observations will become so great that it becomes unreasonable to support the theory any longer, and a decision will be made to reject it.

In place of naïve falsification, Popper envisioned science as evolving by the successive rejection of falsified theories,rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are replaced by theories of greater explanatory power. Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of objects in everyday situations, but was falsified by Galileo’s experiments, and replaced by Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics extended the reach of the theory to the movement of the planets and the mechanics of gasses, but in its turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment and replaced by special relativity. At each stage, a new theory was accepted that had greater explanatory power, and as a result provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.

Naïve falsificationism is an unsuccessful attempt to proscribe a rationally unavoidable method for science. Falsificationism proper on the other hand is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. Both can be seen as attempts to show that science has a special status because of the method that it employs. — Banno

Salient here is that falsification relies on the indubitability of basic observations: Here is a black swan. In order for "All swans are white", to be shown false, it must be true that there are non-white swans. In order to know that "All swans are white" is false, one must know that there are non-white swans.

This may be of use:

A belief is a propositional attitude.That is, it can be placed in a general form as a relation between someone and a proposition. So "John believes that the sky is blue" can be rendered as

Believes (John, "The sky is blue")

B(a,p)

There's ill will in some circles towards this sort of analysis. Think of this as setting up a basic structure or grammar for belief. A belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition. That there is much more to be said about belief is not in contention; this is just a place to start. This is set as a falsifiable proposition. If there are any examples of beliefs that cannot be stated as relations between individuals and propositions, this proposal would have to be revisited.

It has been suggested that animal and other non-linguistic beliefs are a falsification of this suggestion. The argument is that non-linguistic creatures can have beliefs and yet cannot express these beliefs as propositions, and that hence beliefs cannot be propositional attitudes. But that is a misreading of what is going on here. Any belief, including that of creatures that cannot speak, can be placed in the form of a propositional attitude by those who can speak. A cat, for example, can believe that its bowl is empty, but cannot put that belief in the form B(a,p).

Belief does not imply truth
One obvious consequence of a belief being a relation between an individual and a proposition is that the truth of the proposition is unrelated to the truth of the belief.

That is, folk can believe things that are untrue. Or not believe things that are true.

A corollary of this is that belief does not stand in opposition to falsehood, but to doubt. Truth goes with falsehood, belief with doubt. And at the extreme end of belief we find certainty. In certainty, doubt is inadmissible.

If belief does not imply truth, and if one holds to the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge, it follows that belief does not imply knowledge.

The individual who has the belief holds that the proposition is true.

This is, if you like, the significance of a belief statement. It follows from Moore's paradox, in which someone is assume to believe something that they hold not to be true. For example:

"I believe the world is flat, but the world is not flat".

While this is difficult to set out as a clear contradiction, there is something deeply unhappy about it. The conclusion is that one thinks that what one believes is indeed true.

Note that Moore's paradox is in the first person. "John believes the world is flat, but the world is not flat" is not paradoxical - John is just wrong. "John believes that the world is flat and John believes the world is not flat" - John is inconsistent.

This perforative paradox comes about only when expressed in the first person.

One might think it so trivial that it is not worth saying: to believe some proposition is to believe that proposition to be true.

That is, talk of belief requires talk of truth.

One might be tempted, perhaps by pragmatism or by Bayesian thoughts, to replace that with measures of probability. You might think yourself only 99.99% certain that the cat is on the mat, and suppose thereby that you have banished truth. But of course, one is also thereby 99.99% certain that "the cat is on the mat" is true.

Belief makes sense of error
Austin talked of words that gain their meaning - use - mostly by being contrasted with their opposite. His example was real.

"it's not a fake; it's real"
"it's not a mirage, it's real!"
It's not a mistake - it's real"

and so on.

Belief can be understood in a similar fashion, as gaining it's usefulness from the contrast between a true belief and a false belief. That is, an important aspect of belief is that sometimes we think that something is the case, and yet it is not.

We bring belief into the discourse in order to make sense of such errors.

Belief is dynamic
Beliefs change over time. It follows that a decent account of belief must be able to account for this dynamism.

Beliefs explain but do not determine actions

Beliefs are used to explain actions. Further, such explanations are causal and sufficient. So if we have appropriate desires and a beliefs we can explain an action.

So, given that John is hungry, and that John believes eating a sandwich will remove his hunger, we have a sufficient causal explanation for why John ate the sandwich.

One may act in ways that are contrary to one's beliefs. A dissident may comply in order to protect herself and her family.

So given that John is hungry, and has a sandwich at hand, it does not follow that John will eat the sandwich.

An individual's belief is inscrutable
One can act in ways contrary to one's beliefs. It's a result of the lack of symmetry between beliefs and actions mentioned above - Beliefs explain but do not determine actions. Thanks due to Hanover and @Cabbage Farmer.

Any belief can be made to account for any action, by adding suitable auxiliary beliefs. — Banno

It would be wrong to argue from the observation that science does not produce certainty to the conclusion that we can never be certain. There are things other than science. Can you be certain that you are in pain? Or better, can you doubt that you are in pain?

If you believe something that's true, then it's justified.

If you believe something that's not true, then it's not justified. — flannel jesus

Nuh. It's not hard to think of examples in which you believe something that is true, but your belief is unjustified, or you believe something with a justification, but it's not true. Gettier-style problems, or Russell's clock.

It can't go unnoticed how various people "know" things that contradict what other people "know" as well. Some people know that Jesus is King, other people know Muhammad was the last prophet, other people know Krishna is the eighth avatar of Vishnu. — flannel jesus

Sure, we disagree on some things. And these tend to be the things we talk about, leading us to think we disagree more than we agree.

But think about all the stuff on which we have to agree for you to be reading this post - that there is a thread, in a forum, on philosophy, in English, about truth and knowledge and belief, that there are other folk participating in this thread, that your device links somehow to my device in such a way that we can have this discussion, that there are devices and networks and so on...

Overwhelmingly, we agree about more than we disagree.

Did we falsely think we knew before? — Bylaw

Wl, yes. Sometimes folk get things wrong. They think they know stuff when they don't. And the only way this can happen is if they believe something that is not true.

So there is a difference between believing and knowing: If something is known, it is true.

Folk think it cleaver to say that we don't know anything. The implication is that there are no facts. That leads to all sorts of inconsistencies.

But later we may realize errors or get new data and then we know X is false. — Bylaw

You can't "realise your error" unless there is error. Error occurs when you believe something that is not true. For you to occasionally be wrong, you must also sometimes be right.

, Pretty much. There being a difference between belief and knowledge is what allows us to correct our mistakes - we realise we only believed, but didn't know, because what we believed was not true.

Some folk (@Chet Hawkins?) will say that there are no true statements. But it is true that you are reading this.

You presumably don't know that...

There is no knowledge! — Chet Hawkins

Manne just isn't one on my account — AmadeusD

Interesting. I find her analysis of the social and practice-based motivation in metaethics quite interesting. What is it that you find unsatisfactory?

Good Moral philosophy from Dow Nunder.

So strong women bother you?

You only know stuff that's true.

You can believe whatever you like, true or not.

Ergo, knowledge is at the least restricted to those beliefs which are true.

Two grandparents English-born immigrants, the others, five or six generations back, were convicts, guards and settlers, Scots, English and Irish.

I had you pegged as an Englishman. — Leontiskos

A couple of generations back, yes, amongst other things.

Not Abbott? — Leontiskos

Ooo I stand corrected. I was looking after my mental health by forgetting the onion eating dropkick ever existed.