• Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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?
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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.
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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.
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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.

    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    , 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.
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    You presumably don't know that...
    There is no knowledge! — Chet Hawkins
  • The ultimate significance of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", and most of Friedrich Nietzsche's other books
    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?
  • The ultimate significance of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", and most of Friedrich Nietzsche's other books
    ↪AmadeusD
    Good Moral philosophy from Dow Nunder.

    So strong women bother you?
  • Is Knowledge Merely Belief?
    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.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    ↪Leontiskos
    Two grandparents English-born immigrants, the others, five or six generations back, were convicts, guards and settlers, Scots, English and Irish.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    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.
  • The ultimate significance of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", and most of Friedrich Nietzsche's other books
    Peterson always strikes me as a man having a breakdown in slow motion — Tom Storm

    I agree!

    You might enjoy this article - here's a taste...

    His idea (in chapter six of his book) that what leads to mass shootings in general, and school shootings in particular, is a kind of ahistorical, existential angst, or a “crisis of being” — that’s the phrase he uses! — about the despair and misery and suffering of human beings.

    Peterson thereby takes on a huge burden of explaining why white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential angst and despair in this way. Because, as you know, the vast majority of school shooters have been white men.     — A feminist philosopher makes the case against Jordan Peterson
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Lionino
    OK.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    I think you are right. — Athena

    Well, thank you.

    But the "we" might indicate a certain parochial nature in this thread. I am not a 'mercan.

    Dow nunder, we have had a fair run of atheist Prime Ministers, back at least to Whitlam in the early seventies. Only three PM's since then have been overtly Christian, Rudd, Abbott(ed.) and Morrison. Indeed too much of a display of religiosity will count as much against a politician as in their favour. Outright evangelism is a political death sentence.

    My suspicion, and it might be interesting to gather information on this, is that Overt Christianity in democratic political figures is a curiously 'mercan trait. In more democratic countries folk are not much interested in the religious virtues of their politicians. Other things far outweigh them.

    There is a tone of 'Mercan chauvinism in your posts. But your democracy is broken by far more than a touch of religious thinking.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Lionino
    The ghost in the machine. Ryle took care of that. Odd, that you cite folk who reject dualism, but apparently in its defence.

    We need to be very careful here.

    Is your claim that there are two substances, or that Descartes said there were two substances? If the latter, I will agree. If the former, then I will disagree.

    Also, given the topic, is you claim that you are 100% certain there are two substances?

    If not, then I suggest that this is too far from the OP.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    an enthytema often — Lionino

    It is usual for one to be able to state the missing premise. If not, the enthytema is presumably invalid.

    Labouring the point, we have (I think, ⊢ I am); and the missing premise is "If I think, then I am". Which is, it seems, what was to be proved...

    And as discussed, one might get around this by treating it as a definition, " I am that which is doubting".

    But if we do this, then "I" ceases to be when not doubting.

    And to get around that, as you explained, one needs to move to "I am at least that which is doubting". Hence the doubting self is at least part of, but not the whole of, what exists.

    Is that roughly what you would argue?

    And is dualism always the consequence here?
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    Downunder, we stop at the red light...
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    ↪Fire Ologist
    That just seems credulous. But whatever gets you through the night.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    ↪BitconnectCarlos
    Not to the extent that other folk claim. Tolkien is better.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    Why would we expect ideological uniformity from over 1000 years of texts? — BitconnectCarlos
    I don't.
    Read it and make your own judgments. — BitconnectCarlos
    I have.
    (God) does reveal certain things within the pages of the Bible. — BitconnectCarlos
    I don't think so. It reads like a patchwork authored by men, not the word of a omniscient being.
    God is inscrutable in his entirety. — BitconnectCarlos
    Yep. And whereof one cannot speak...
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    I'm just saying you truly have not presented any interesting criticism. — Hanover

    You've gone to a lot of trouble in response to a uninteresting criticism.

    A naive reader might well see the Binding as I have, yet a more sophistic reader, one who is a member of this or that School of Thought, will have arguments aplenty to show the poverty of such naivety. Thus they mark the difference between Us and Them.

    One lesson from the Binding is that faith is strongest when the faithful believe despite the facts, and act without question.

    I think that approach morally dubious.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    The positivists were right. Philosophy is nonsense. We should all learn coding instead. — Lionino

    :wink: The understanding of logic of some here who do coding leaves me doubting this. I taught coding for years, in the hope that it would improve my student's comprehension of and intuition for logic. It may have been to no avail.

    It seems that folk are able to follow the sequent in a deduction, but are unclear as to what the elements represent. Hence not recognising examples of p⊃q, or thinking commands are statements.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    I wonder if folk are interested in summarising where they think we are at, with regard to the title question?
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    The issue with a student who is "unavailable for learning" is that they can quickly unsettle a whole class - or in this case a thread. Throwing paper planes or insults, gratuitous comments, and so on. It's not possible to pursue the lesson, or topic, at hand while they are present. Confrontation doesn't help, since it only serves to emphasis the disorder. Removal, if only in order to sort their circumstances, is advised. But if that is not possible, one can try making explicit to the other students what is occurring, encouraging them not to give attention to the misbehaviour.

    or giving attention, even to excess, to the students who are on task, making their day pleasant despite the recalcitrant.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Metaphyzik
    Not sure what that means.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    woof, woof, growl. — Corvus
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    Amongst teachers, there is an expression reserved for some students, diverted by their circumstances to such a degree that nothing can be taught until the circumstance is addresses. Those with parents going through a vicious separation, or with severe health conditions, or who simply missed breakfast and are too hungry to concentrate. they are said to be "unavailable for learning".

    For some reason, unclear to us, @Corvus is "unavailable for learning".

    It is a pattern that can be seen in other threads in which he is involved. He puts up a pretence of paying attention and of understanding the discussion, then after a few days throws up a wall of nonsense. For some reason unknown to us, he is not able to take on new information.

    For a teacher the only workable remedy is to address the circumstances. To give the student breakfast, treat their condition or approach the parents. We can't do that for Corvus.

    Further conversation becomes like a child hitting the dog's cage with a stick. It will bark and growl back at you; fun, but progress will not be made.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Lionino
    Thanks, but you can save yourself the trouble of finding such references, if they are for my benefit.

    It would be wonderful to listen to Descartes and Wittgenstein discussing certainty.
  • Is the Pope to rule America?
    ↪Hanover
    ,
    ↪Athena
    asked if there were a problem with the "God of Abraham religions that we might resolve with reason.
    ↪Ciceronianus
    suggested that it's "not possible to reason with those who believe they already know what there is to know because their God has told them so". I am just pointing to a common root, the place from whence the idea that faith trumps rationality might issue.

    It makes you uncomfortable. It ought.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    Don't feed the troll?
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Metaphyzik
    I'm not sure you got the point, which had nothing to do with new ideas.

    Here's another p⊃q: "If the milk is sour, then your bank account is empty".

    Or "The first letter of the alphabet is 7, so Fred is a zebra".
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Lionino
    Not all my replies are intended for you. Sometimes the questions and issues raised are rhetorical, or intended for a particular individual in a way that might give them pause in their approach.

    I'm sure you do the same thing. Talking to multiple folk requires talking at different levels, or at least placing differing emphasis.

    You are at pains to defend Descartes against my probing, but there is no need. I respect his system, and have enough of a grasp of it to see it's consistency. But there are problems with it, as I am sure you would acknowledge.

    I seem to be the only one referring back to the topic. My position, again, speaking broadly, is that anything can be brought into doubt; and hence the notion of being "100% certain" is fraught. But also, not everything can be brought into doubt. And hence there are things of which we are certain. We are certain of those things for the purposes of the task at hand.

    To that end I attempted to sow some doubt as to "I think therefore I am", by pointing out that it is difficult to give an account of it as an inference. To some extent that has been a success.

    I'm not at present aware of a part of this discussion where you and I are at great odds.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Janus
    It was a joke.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪flannel jesus
    It's unusual, but it's been seen before. What is unusual is that Corvus has been around for so long without being banned. There are maybe one or two others in his class.

    One reaches a point where the only thing to do is laugh and walk away.

    ↪flannel jesus
    Thanks for attempting to explain this to @Metaphyzik.

    The other missing bits for them are that p and q in p⊃q need neither be related nor true, and p⊃q might itself be false. Unlike p⊃p , which is always true, and p⊃~p, which is always false.

    ↪Metaphyzik
    , you asked for an example of p⊃q. "That there are green crows implies there are no new ideas" is just that: with "There are green crows" for p and "There are no new ideas" for q. It is intended to show how hollow "p⊃q" is. Have a think on it.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    Meh. I tried.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    ↪Janus
    And some were struggling to get out, only to be pushed back in...

    :wink:
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    give me an real world example — Metaphyzik

    I did, you missed it, it's not going to help.

    That there are green crows implies there are no new ideas. — Banno
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    My overall impression is that logic is not a strong point hereabouts.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    The opposite of p->q is of course p->~q — Metaphyzik

    Actually, it's ~(p→ q).

    What I was pointing to is the triviality of your
    This covers it: q -> (p v~p) — Metaphyzik

    Both ¬q → (p ∨ ¬p) and q → (p ∨ ¬p) are valid.
  • What can I know with 100% certainty?
    Now let me ask you an honest question. Can you say what Descartes meant (or gets credit for for some reason even though any idiot knows “I am” for certain)? What did Descartes mean? — Fire Ologist

    Well, I'm not at all sure - that's somewhat the point.

    Some folk think he was making an inference - you seem to think otherwise, and no one has set the inference out for us in a valid way.

    Some folk think he was setting out an intuition. But if that is what he was doing, then can we coherently say the intuition is justified, as is needed if it is to answer the question in the OP - that we know we exist.

    Some folk think it a definition of "I" - that his argument is that I am what thinks. That has various novel problems, pretty much not considered so far.

    Now I've said quite a few times in this thread that I do not think we need be "100% certain" in order to get on with things. I think the phrase sets up a bad framework for dealing with doubt and certainty. I am being a pain in the arse in order to show that there are issues with the very notion of insisting on being "100% certain".
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