Not so odd. I miss a lot. Can you fill it in a little for me?

What an odd response.

After I give examples with the intent of showing the difference between being interested in someone's words, on the one hand, and what they're talking about, on the other, you suggest it will all be clearer to me if I focus on how people use words.

No need to turn this into another Wittgenstein thread, though...

I would say, as per the context of this thread, that true and false are necessarily not part of the conceptual framework of non-linguistic animals. — Sam26

I get that. True and False are concepts we might naturally think of as applying to linguistic artifacts, so in that sense at least they're "linguistic concepts".

True is funny though.

If I ask someone whether they thought what you said was clever, I'm expressing an interest in what you said and how you said it, among other things. If I ask someone whether they thought what you said was true -- I might be investigating your character, or I might be very interested in the state of the world suggested by what you said. (Are the barbarians really within the walls?) Not so much in your phrasing or diction or use of periphrasis.

So even as it seems to apply to linguistic artifacts, True is a somewhat odd duck. Not alone, though. Many such usages come to mind, especially 'modal' adjectives like ”probable", "likely", "impossible", and so on.

Anyhow, I don't have any particular agenda here. Was just curious what you were thinking.

There is also quite a bit on Nietzsche and Nazism. That does not mean he supported such thinking and practices or that the work on it supports the connection. — Fooloso4

But it does mean people feel the need to address it, with, I assume, something beyond "No, that's a misreading."

I tend to think this sort of thing is interesting, just as other commonly misunderstood phenomena are. To "save them appearances", you want not just to point out that the moon is in fact much smaller than a star, but also explain why it appears to be so much larger.

So it is with texts. In some cases a misreading can be explained by knowing deception. In some cases, it's a failure of the intellectual conscience. But in some of those cases and in others, a widespread misreading indicates something there in the text that people are hanging their interpretation on. So it might be understandable, even when it's wrong, or at least not as perspicuous as other readings. People took Wittgenstein for a behaviorist, and that's probably wrong, but it's not like there's *nothing* in his writing to suggest that.

Here's how I understand the argument.

You can conceive of a moment as a boundary between the past relative to that moment, and the future relative to that moment. Geometrically, this would be like picking a point on a line -- let's make it the usual line from school and call that point "0" -- and using that point to define a ray $(-\infty,\ \ 0]$, and a ray $[0,\ \ \infty)$.

So that's a moment, "a beginning of future time and an end of past time."

*** Edit ***

Except of course we're not entitled to put it quite like this, and Aristotle doesn't.

All we need for Aristotle's version is for there to be no first or last moment, that is, all of time just has to be unbounded: $(first,\ \ 0]$, and a ray $[0,\ \ last)$.

There's still infinities all over the place, but we don't get arbitrary points in time like 100 trillion years ago.

******

Aristotle also says that the moment is our only "point of contact" with time, that time is unthinkable "apart from the moment." So any point in time we can imagine must be a moment. That is, he's arguing for something like the uniformity of time: every moment is like this, a boundary between past and future, and conceiving of time is, for us, conceiving of such moments.

Well then it's perfectly clear that time can't have a beginning or an end. If it had a beginning, there would be a moment that was unlike every other moment, that was only the beginning of a future and not the end of a past. Likewise for the end of time. And a moment unlike every other moment is not a moment at all, and cannot be part of our conception of time.

So far as it goes, the argument seems clearly right. (I didn't quite get it until I thought of "our only point of contact" in a sort of Flatland way -- imagine that all you know of the line is what you know as a point on it, take its point of view, and to be such a point is to see a neverending expanse of line to either side of you.) Indeed, no matter what cosmology tells us, we cannot help thinking it makes sense to ask what happened before the big bang, or what would happen after the big crunch. Time seems to us to go on uniformly from an infinitely distant past to an infinitely distant future.

In modern terms, it's a bit like taking the tripartite structure of the A-series, and arranging such moments as a B-series. Aristotle doesn't speak here directly of a moment changing from future to present to past, but he insists that a moment is a boundary between a past and a future. You can line up such boundaries in B-series fashion, but that doesn't change them into simple points that have only (tenseless) relations of before and after to other points; they each define two infinite sets of other points, all of which also define two infinite sets of other points, and each and every such point is a boundary between two such sets, between a past and a future.

*** Edit***

And then this is interestingly wrong, because we can mistake being unbounded for being infinite in magnitude. It's still true there's no first moment of time, and infinitely many before any given moment, but that doesn't mean they add up to an infinite amount of past time.

How would this be about concepts, as opposed to their brain's relationship to a moving object? — Sam26

I'm not quite sure what to say to this.

(Yes, I believe the original experiment was looking for rudimentary physics-related expectations among infants -- that something moving along that way will continue to do so, and it turns out as long as something does, even a different something, they appear to be satisfied.)

What I'm unsure about is the implication that concepts don't have to do with the brain's relationship, as you put it, to objects. I mean, sure, "mind" is probably a much better starting point, but you went with brain, so brain it is. Is that not more or less exactly where we expect to find concepts?

Maybe not, if you think the social is being given short shrift here. But then are we going to say that societies have concepts but individuals, even individual members of societies, don't? That sounds terribly odd. So if the social demands to be brought in, how exactly? And is the social, shall we say, aspect entirely linguistic?

Maybe you could have an experiment — Sam26

Well, this was part of my question, whether experiments were relevant to your position, or whether you understood concepts to be inherently linguistic phenomena in some sense. So are you saying that this is an empirical question after all?

I asked why we should watch, and you answered that I don't have to.

That is not logical, Captain.

But I'll take your "suggestion" to go away. Best of luck with your new blog.

Let me put it this way.

A forum on philosophy ought have threads on the basics of logic. — Banno

I disagree. I've done my share of teaching some basic logic here, helping folks with homework, answering questions. We should do that. But we should point people learning from scratch, especially on their own, to better resources.

In fact, for many sorts of questions, stackexchange is a better resource than us.

I understand why you might want to brush up, but why should we watch?

Maybe I just don't understand what sort of conversation you expect to have by presenting textbook material. Are we going to do philosophy of logic? If so, why the textbook review?

Why not just send everyone to Peter Smith's blog?

It might be better for you not to try that again. — skyblack

Did you mean for this to sound like a threat?

I take it that concepts, are necessarily linguistic, unless you can demonstrate how they're not. — Sam26

That's an interesting way to put it.

I'm not sure how to debate whether concepts are linguistic, but in the meantime I'm just curious why you would take such a strong position. Are concepts by definition linguistic? Or do you think they're just obviously linguistic?

Can you give me a thumbnail of your thinking here?

I'll give an example. Infants, I understand, have a sense of object permanence before they have a sense of object identity. If a toy is moved across their field of vision, passes behind a screen, and comes out as something else, that doesn't bother baby. If it doesn't come out at all, that does.

There's something in the ballpark of the conceptual going on there, I'd say, but what exactly, it's complicated.

When I refer to beliefs (pre-linguistic beliefs in animals or humans), it's completely devoid of any conceptual framework for them, but not for us, as linguistic users. So, it seems that the tendency is to impose our conceptual framework onto them. — Sam26

Some of my intuitions run the other way, but it's a messy area for sure. Research into the cognitive states of pre-linguistic children and animals is bound to be more difficult and less conclusive.

But I'm a little surprised to see you say, quite definitely, no concepts here, no conceptual framework whatsoever. It sounds like you take this to be true by definition and I wonder why. Is it all about language? Or about what enables language? What's the story here?

I don't even remember that!

And I correctly retrodicted its result.

And only 41 people voted.

I've always assumed we have that Pareto thing here, 80% of posts coming from 20% of posters, and the percentage of members who post is tiny, right? So part of the complication is for whom are we moderating? For the regulars? For the discouraged newbies? For the lurkers? For the sometime posters who get fed up and quit?

This is the sort of stuff online games go through regularly, and there are no solutions known to make everyone happy.

a crappy job — fdrake

It's also crappy if you don't like treating adults like children.

this type of modding strictness question comes up periodically and it's never been possible to discern a clear majority either way, which suggests to me the community is roughly evenly split on the issue — Baden

I don't think that follows, especially since part of the issue is whether some members are less inclined to raise their hands.

I absolutely agree there's no clear mandate for doing either more or less moderating.

You could, right here on the site, do a poll. Probably of limited value, but it might be interesting. I'll bet if you offered the goldilocks options (too much, about right, too little) that "about right" would win in a landslide, which I think would tell you basically nothing.

the part I think sounds good but question how that would be done — Amity

My approach involved threats, so yeah there's enforcement behind it. Roughly, I would threaten to consider (further) disrespectful language a virus; when it shows up, you don't extract the virus, you quarantine the host, which in this case would be the post it appeared in. The threat of an entire post disappearing because you indulged in a little name-calling and belittling somewhere in it, that seemed pretty persuasive, and mostly people agreed to play nice.

Playing school-marm is a crappy job though.

the secret handshakes of other veteran members — skyblack

Yeah, I think there's a bit of this. But that can also just be perception. Not everyone who feels excluded is actively being excluded, even if they're not being actively welcomed either.

having established them to be the spineless cowards that they are — skyblack

And this sort of thing is not okay with me, sorry. In a thread elsewhere on the forum, I might even flag it.

I'm going back to thinking about philosophy now.

In my brief stint as a mod, I waded into the Ukraine thread a couple times (IIRC) and deleted a few runs of nasty exchanges, I think. But I think I only ever edited a couple posts to save "content" and remove something else, and only when the something else was easy to remove. So I let stand some nasty stuff because it had content mixed in with the insults and belittling, and in those cases I warned participants that in future they would see their substantive points disappear along with the insults if they didn't edit themselves better. Some of you reading this may remember getting a little "Don't do that" from me and a warning that if you did it again, even in a post with actual substance, that whole post would be gone.

It's just far too much work to have the mods actually sorting the wheat from the chaff word by word, sentence by sentence, or even paragraph by paragraph. And I was never comfortable deciding whether a point was relevant or substantive -- I wanted to leave that to the community. I never deleted anything as irrelevant. Even the guideline to "stay on topic" struck me as ridiculous on this site, where every thread meanders into being about something else than the OP eventually, and I never enforced that.

I don't know how effective my little campaign for civility was. A bit. I worried a lot about the chilling effects of aggression and manipulation, that it would discourage participation, and I thought our mandate as mods was to encourage participation -- especially from new arrivals. That put me more toward the puritan end of the scale compared to the other mods and admins, who by and large were more tolerant of a little rough and tumble, even a little name-calling, and even insults so long as they were clever. Among people who've been contributing to this site or the old site for a decade, and know each other, no one's going to take that for more than it is. But I think a new arrival to this site might be horrified at how members talk to each other. And even longstanding groups of friends can have what amounts to institutionalized bullying as well as friendly sparring among perceived equals. I have no tolerance at all for bullying and I think some of what goes on here is not best described as "passionate" but as attempts at bullying. I think you should be able to read an entire day's posts on TPF and not once see "Reading comprehension not your strong suit, eh?"

TLDR: no, there shouldn't be a different standard for political discussions, never should have been; yes, we should raise the standards of the site in general, but not so much through increased enforcement (meaning specifically deleting and editing posts) but by encouraging members to change their own posting habits and changing the community-wide expectations of how you express yourself here.

But I think mine is the minority view. I think a lot of people would perceive such a site as less interesting and less fun, and some people wish the site were even more "gloves off". But if the thrill of landing a zinger is what you're after, Twitter is right down the hall.

So "is" means equal to. Unless it doesn't. — Real Gone Cat

There's yet another issue with taking "is" as something like "is the same as" in the most general sense.

"3 + 1" and "4" are obviously different expressions. So, to say that "3 + 1" is "4" must not mean they're the same expression, only that they have the same value. You'll agree with that, I assume. So our equals sign doesn't mean "is the same as" but only "has the same value as".

The reason that's interesting, to some philosophers, is because it means that "3 + 1 = 4" can be informative. "4 = 4" might also be informative, but what "4 = 4" tells you, that 4 is equal to itself, is different from what "3 + 1 = 4" tells you. But in mathematics we are authorized to substitute equals for equals anywhere and always: "3 + 1 = 4" is also a substitution rule, so anywhere you see "3 + 1" you can substitute "4" without changing the truth-value of your equations.

But even though you're not changing the truth value of the equation, you're changing something, else "3 + 1 = 4" would say the same thing as "4 = 4", and there's clearly a sense in which it doesn't. Frege's solution to this little puzzle was, roughly, that "3 + 1" and "4", seen as expressions rather than as values, have a sense as well as a reference: they both refer to the same value, 4, but in different ways. On such a scheme, "3 + 1 = 4" informs you that these two different expressions have the same value, and you have to be told that because expressions have a sense as well as a reference, and the sense of "3 + 1" is different from the sense of "4".

If you don't have some such scheme, you have to have some other explanation for what we're doing when we teach someone mathematics. How is that someone could know that "3233 = 3233" but not know that "53 * 61 = 3233"?

I honestly should have said "contingent" where I said "arbitrary" -- but I liked how forceful "arbitrary" sounds, and it captured the peculiar way in which each of us is just blocked from knowing certain things. If you weren't there, you weren't; you can have all the rational beliefs about it you like, but you'll never know. That's just contingency, but it feels arbitrary.

Here's something for you to talk about: what I postponed in looking at your model was not so much the "rites" stuff, but the propagation mechanism, having been deemed to have performed a rite, trust, staking a position, aiming to be deemed, all that business. That's nice, but applies to lots of things, it seems to me. More than just to the performance of rites. Did I miss something there?

As for "rites": rites sound like the sort of thing one would generally perform knowingly and deliberately. That's one way of putting the circularity problem. But, as above, another thing I want to say is that you know a great many things accidentally, so to speak, not intentionally and deliberately. I rely every day on things I happened to have learned that I didn't set out to learn. I didn't look up in order to see the balloon that I didn't know was there until I looked up; I just happened to look up and there it was, and now I have knowledge that you don't. From the perspective of a third party, Bill, I could be said to have taken an action that resulted in knowledge, and if Bill's definition of "rite" is loose enough, then Bill can say I performed a rite. Roughly, I did the same thing and achieved the same result as someone who performed that rite knowingly and intentionally. But the fact remains, I could not have performed the rite intentionally, since I lacked the knowledge required to do so. (And we've circled back to circularity.)

Seem like we also ought to say something about rites as general and specific. If I perform the rite of looking in a box to find out what's in it, there's the general, as it were, "rite schema" and then there's the specific rite, a token of that type, I will perform with this specific box. This "application" step might be a place where we point to additional knowledge required to perform the rite (knowing it, that it applies, how to apply it, etc.), but it's also clearly an area for experimentation. If you wonder what's in there, you might reason, "It looks somewhat like a box; let's see if we can open it (like a box)." That step of analogizing, or of extending the known range of applicability of a rule, is obviously terribly fruitful, and one way to generate unplanned-for, unexpected knowledge, without requiring at least certain sorts of knowledge up front. You don't have to know that the rite will work, or even know that it applies, to try it out. So there's experimentation again, and maybe not quite a solution to bootstrapping, but a clear path for expanding your knowledge base. And that path is deliberate, and intentional, without any knowledge of what the result will be.

In line with what you're saying, I'd just add that Gilbert Ryle called terms like "see" achievement verbs. To see a wolf entails that there is a wolf there. (Though, of course, one could think they had seen a wolf, but be mistaken.) — Andrew M

Yes, absolutely. I had Ryle in mind when I said "know" and "see" are both being used "factively". Point of interest that we might be disinclined to treat the identical construction, "I heard a wolf in the bushes" as factive. That is at least intended as a factive use, but we the audience are reserving some doubt that, say, wolves and foxes rustle bushes so distinctively. (But maybe to an experienced woodsman ...) For a more attractively factive use of "hear", consider how different is the sound of a bird searching for bugs among the dry leaves under a bush from the sound of a chipmunk just passing through. Or, for that matter, "I heard an owl up in the big oak tree last night."

We have at least a couple different threads here now.

I'm tempted to respond directly to your proposed model here (especially because some of it is close to some things I nearly wrote about earlier), pitch in on refining and extending it, all that, but I'm going to resist that temptation for now.

One thing that bothers me a little is that the model seems very broadly applicable, which may be a strength, but means we might be missing something specific to knowledge. I think I could read most of what you wrote as applying to, say, rational belief. (And possibly to a great number of other things, ethical questions and so on.) Would you say there's a point in here that is specific to knowledge?

One thing I've been trying to capture is that there's something a little arbitrary about knowledge. If I know because I was there, even by chance, and you don't because you weren't, that's just the way it is. If I happened to look up and see the balloon before it went behind the trees, I know there was a balloon and you can only take my word for it or not, even if you were walking along beside me.

I keep reaching for these examples that are clearly matters of perception -- which is suspicious -- but there are also the examples related to remembering, so I don't think I'm actually talking about perception rather than knowledge.

What about that balloon? Could I provide reasons for you to believe it was there? Maybe, maybe not. You didn't even notice me looking up, but if there was a balloon, we could try to find it again. Even if we find a balloon, that won't prove I saw it, might not even be the same one, but that might give you grounds for believing me. And that might be a mistake -- could be I made it up and the universe provided a spurious balloon to join in the fun of having you on. But I just know one way or the other, at least about whether I saw it, and you can only conceivably have reasons to believe. We are up to two completely different things.

Do you see your model as talking about this, or as comfortably absorbing this as a particular case?

I don't think the rites themselves can be true or false, only more or less accurate, more or less fit for task — fdrake

Well that's the thing. Some of what you say in your post has the feel of the "rites" (clever choice, that) underwriting knowledge production -- a bit like what Austin says about how only in specific circumstances does saying "I name this ship the Queen Mary III" make it so that the ship is now named "Queen Mary III."

But it's evident that we can judge whether a given candidate for a rite is knowledge producing. "You don't find out how many we have in the store by checking the receiving logs; you have to go and count them." What's going on there? I could claim that we are relying on a pre-existing understanding of knowledge to judge whether a rite works -- but it also looks like I'm proposing an alternative rite already known to work.

There's circularity here that leads to a bootstrapping problem. I have to know what knowledge is to know whether a rite candidate works; but all I have for an understanding of knowledge is pointing to rites known to produce it. How could I ever get from not having a rite that produces knowledge to having at least one I can use for reference? If I don't know what knowledge is, how can I possibly find out?

That bootstrapping problem infects every attempt at "explaining" knowledge -- for instance, if we take the talk of rites here as an explanation.

You can't 'just know', even if you really truly know. The working needs to be able to be shown. — fdrake

Now that's a biggie. For something to be a rite, we must be able to set out the steps in detail and teach those steps to the novitiate.

Is it true? It's at least true that if you follow the steps then you will acquire knowledge. But do you know because you followed the steps? Do the steps constitute knowledge acquisition? Is there maybe one step where we say, "Here, here's where the knowledge comes in"? Again, I think any such claims will be circular. How could you possibly come to know such a thing? So whatever the status of these rites, I don't think they can be an account or an explanation of knowledge.

One thing I think I'm resisting here is the suggestion (derived from Sellars) that "I know ..." is not really a factual claim at all, but an offer to defend or to justify my claim, to enter the space of reasons. In "I know X because Y," I'm not taking Y as being my justification or my warrant for claiming that X. I'm thinking of X and Y as being more intimately related than that. If I lack one justification, I might have another. You can swap out Y's. Reasons are things you can "come up with". The Y I'm interested in is not something like the basis for an inference, but more like an explication of what sense in which I'm using the word "know".

So the sense in which the steps of the rite must be capable of being made explicit, that could be that you must be able to say in what sense you meant the word "know". (Is there really more than one sense? Need to come back to that.) And since we do also make inferences based on evidence, can we tell the difference between distinguishing senses of "know" and offering justifications? "It was crowded and I didn't get a good look at him, but I heard him laugh and I'd know that laugh anywhere. He was there alright." Here's where I would start: one of the absolutely central elements of a knowledge claim like this is "I was there."

"I was there" is powerful. Imagine a vet listening to some guys at a bar, talking big about what we should have done in Vietnam or in Afghanistan. "You don't know what you're talking about," he says. "And you do? You some kind of expert?" "I was there." End of debate.

But again (and this is also, I understand, a key point for Williamson) knowing doesn't automatically mean you know that you know. (Knowing is not "luminous.") You can think you know, because you were there, but you weren't paying attention at the crucial moment, or you didn't recognize the significance of what you were seeing, and so on. We need there to be something definitive in the canonical situation, something automatic, but there are so many ways to fall short of that we have to be sensitive to.

One last bit on justification and "just knowing" without reasons. If we start from some position, with knowledge of some facts, say, and reason from there to something else we are prepared to count as knowledge, something we intend to rely upon, that's a bit like a "save point" in a video game. Calling it knowledge means precisely that you don't have to go back before that, and you can even jettison the reasons you relied on and just keep the conclusion. Knowledge of this sort is detachable from the reasons supporting it. When questioned, you have to check to see if you kept the original reasons; if you did, you have to reconstruct the inference, and if you didn't then you have to reconstruct the whole thing. Maybe it'll turn out your reasons weren't solid, or your inference was faulty. That happens. But in treating, let's just say it, such a belief as knowledge, you're in a way committed to not needing reasons for it anymore. It's a new save point you can treat as as-far-back-as-I-need-to-go.

And that could be one of those cases where we're reaching for a word, "knowledge", because the application here would have some structural similarity to its use elsewhere, even though the cases are actually different. In the situation where I know it was a wolf because I saw it, we are not making an inference and so there's no need to talk of reasons; in the case where we have made what we believe is a successful inference, we no longer seem to need the reasons (we have our save point) and so we call that "knowledge." But they're not really the same sort of thing at all. Knowledge has this strange dual nature, that it can be what you are most able or least able to defend, most willing or least willing to support with reasons.

Tarski's star student, Richard Montague, denied there was any difference between formalized languages and natural languages, and considered linguistics a branch of mathematics. For what it's worth.

My usual rambling reply. Apologies.

we'd still need to be able to preclude instances like the above, in which certain people would be excluded from counting as knowing things due to the facts about them precluding an appropriate access to reality (in some collection of scenarios). — fdrake

I think that's pretty clear, and why I included "in a normal state of mind" as part of the canonical situation. Normal for who? Normal for me, with my strange disorder? More like, normal for us, really.

There are a couple of things I'm after here: one is thinking of knowledge in a rather old-fashioned way, the way we use the concept ordinarily, and the way we still teach young people, namely, that it is distinct from opinion and from guessing. I don't want to lean too hard on the way English happens to distribute its verbs, but everyday usage lumps "belief" in with opinion and friends; if knowledge shouldn't be in there, then knowledge is not some sort of super-belief, isn't at the top of an axis marked "confidence," isn't on that axis at all. And that dovetails also with the cases mentioned above, that it may very well be clearer to someone else whether I know something or not than it is to me. (See Robert Burns.) We can know that we know something, and we can have beliefs about our knowing, and these don't attach automatically to instances of knowing, so we're not automatically in a privileged position compared to others with respect to whether we know or not.

Forgetting and remembering have all kinds of cases. I can know someone's birthday and not remember it until really pushed by someone else; but I can also have really, completely, irrevocably forgotten something that someone else wants to insist I know because they learned it from me. (I expect that will become a more and more frequent experience for me, alas.)

Coming back to your issue, fdrake, I tried to gesture at another of those ordinary ideas about knowledge with my first counterfactual: if any of you had seen what I saw, then you'd know what I know. We want cases of knowledge not to be cases of gnosis! It should be accessible to almost anyone, and the knowledge I acquired, by virtue of the position I was in, is just the knowledge almost anyone would acquire. (This is a vaguely science related notion, that it shouldn't matter who makes the observation, that you can freely substitute one observer for another, so long as they follow the same procedures, that sort of thing.) But we have to say "almost" because there are things you have to know, and maybe things you have to be able to do, to acquire certain sorts of knowledge even in ideal conditions. If you don't already know what a wolf is, you won't know when you've seen one. And here again, you might report that there's something up in the hills, looked like a dog but different somehow, and someone more knowledgeable could correct that to "You saw a wolf, your first."

So it turns out the canonical "situation" is not just the environment but involves quite about you, whether you have the capacity to acquire the knowledge available, whether you are receptive to it, and so on. Whether you were paying attention -- that one matters quite a bit. All of that goes into what we can't help but keep calling "being connected to reality the right way" to acquire knowledge. Or we could say that there are ways of interacting with your environment that are knowing ways and ways that aren't. Conducting surveillance is putting yourself in a position to know, and conducting experiments is creating situations where you can be in a position to know. Some of the difficulty of carrying off the acquisition of knowledge is not knowing enough to design those situations; you have only your current capacity to rely on in making the design, and if that's inadequate you might get an interesting result but not know it (the CMB story), or you might force the results to conform to your pre-existing knowledge, misinterpreting rather than simply missing the novelty.

Getting pretty far afield. I just want to capture the sense of saying something like, "Dad knows where the Easter eggs are, because he's the one who hid them," and that sense holds even if Dad forgets where he put a few of them. Similarly, "I know there's one in the flowers because I saw him put it there." These are cases of knowledge if anything is. They give the word "know" meaning. They are the sorts of cases you reach for to say what's missing when someone only has an opinion or an educated guess or a belief or a hunch about where the Easter eggs are. If Dad says, "I think I put one on the mantelpiece -- no, wait, I remember I was afraid it would roll off," that's less like switching from one belief to another and more like switching from one kind of state -- believing, opining, guessing -- to another kind altogether, knowing. You can still be wrong about whether you know, but the state you want to be in is not just a state of having different and better beliefs. That's the idea.

In the case of the wolf example, the boy can be asked, "How do you know there's a wolf?" Then we can form our own judgment on the evidence. — Andrew M

I won't belabor this -- in part because I have so little else to say about it now (!) though I've already been saying something related over here, which no one found interesting except MU, who thought it was stupid.

I do want to say though that I think there's something a little funny going on in imagining judging a sort of canonical case of knowing. (Of the "Well I seen it, didn't I!" variety.) What I mean is something like this: you might take the boy's knowledge claim as inferential, and question him in order to recreate that inference and judge its soundness. So how does that go?

Why do you claim to know there's a wolf in the hills?
-- I saw him.
And how do you know that what you saw was a wolf?
-- I mean, I know what a wolf is.

What else can the boy possibly say? What's odd is the feeling that he would infer the presence of a wolf from his seeing a wolf. That makes no sense, because "see" here is used factively, just as much as "know". "I know it was a wolf because I saw it" is only useful in distinction from "I know it was a wolf because I heard it" or something like that.

I'm not saying that the senses are irrelevant, or that their "testimony" can't be scrutinized. I guess I am a little bit saying something Wittgensteiny -- that there's a point at which your spade is turned and there's nothing more to say. That point regularly involves the use of factive verbs. Either you know or you don't. Either you saw it or you didn't.

And factive verbs find use precisely on the strength of their canonical cases. Seeing something you recognize in adequate lighting conditions and in a normal state of mind counts as knowing, counts as knowing if anything does, and all the more difficult and nuanced cases we deal with (I just caught a glimpse of it, it was new moon and very dark, I had been crying, etc. etc.) are dealt with holding just this sort of case as the standard.

And counterfactual descriptions of knowledge seem to circle around the same idea. "If any of you had been there and seen what I saw, you'd be saying 'wolf' too." (And further afield: if we would judge, of anyone in such a situation, in any accessible world, that they would know there was a wolf, then you, in this situation, in the actual world, are properly said to know there's a wolf.)

I'm going to keep mulling over this "situation" business. I've always wanted to say that a key element of knowing is being in a position to know, despite the evident circularity. I might find a way to make that do some work.

This type of speculation is all pointless — Metaphysician Undercover

Gosh, my bad.

I'll try to do better.

Dreyfus’ reading of Heidegger and Husserl has been dumped in favor of more radical approaches, Hacker’s Wittgenstein has been replaced for many by Cavell’s and Conant’s, etc. — Joshs

So there's no one Heidegger, but there's one Dreyfus's Heidegger, to be dumped. There's no one Wittgenstein, but there's one Hacker's Wittgenstein, to be replaced. Can Dreyfus and Hacker not be interpreted in daring and radical ways?

This proposed reduction ignores the fact that 'telling the truth" refers to making a statement about what one honestly believes, and there is no necessary connection between what one honestly believes, and any real "states of affairs". — Metaphysician Undercover

We like to imagine animal signals as, in essence, caused by the occurrence of particular features within the animal's environment. The vervet monkey "emits" a particular sound associated with a particular predator when that predator is present (and, I believe, only when there are other vervet monkeys around to hear it). There is no question of honesty here.

When we demand (or command, or request, etc.) that someone tell the truth, we are demanding that they behave in a certain way. It would be a senseless demand of an animal that has no choice in the matter. But at the same time, we are demanding that the speaker relinquish their freedom to say whatever they like and instead be bound by the truth.

If we look at displacement, it may become clearer. If the vervet monkey's calls are caused by their environment, you cannot ask one about a call they made yesterday. In the absence of the stimulus, they simply do not make that call, and the stimulus is in the past. Similarly, you cannot ask such an animal what call they would make if a particular predator were present. If it's not actually present, no call.

Linguistic animals like us can use displacement though, so we can ask someone to say what they said when they encountered something yesterday. Then we can reason from the words produced to the stimulus present, but only if we trust the link between what you said yesterday and the environment you were in yesterday. That is, only if we believe that, yesterday, on encountering what you did, you had no choice about whether to say what you did.

In a sense, this is all counterfactual business: you can ask someone to speak as if this situation now were the one they were in yesterday. And, further, if the link between your experience and what you say is not so snug as it is for non-linguistic creatures, we can ask you to behave as if it were. That is, we can ask you to say what you would, if you were in some particular situation, and if you had no choice about what to say.

On such an account, bizarre and cartoonish though it may be, honesty is a matter of the connection between a, possibly hypothetical or counterfactual, situation and what you would say in that situation. You can interpose beliefs here if you like, but the content of such beliefs goes back to situations. (For it to matter to your speech that you think, correctly or not, this is a snake-situation, you have to know how to speak in snake-situations.)

Even a stopped clock displays the correct time sometimes, but it isn't connected to the world in an appropriate way. — Andrew M

Yes, absolutely. Someone who always thinks it's 3 o'clock will be right twice a day, but we couldn't say that they know it.

On the other hand, here's a variation on an old story, called "The Boy Who Thought Wolf": suppose our young shepherd is a nervous sort, and every time he hears a rustling in the bushes he concludes "wolf"; we note that his procedure is unreliable, and conclude that even when he's right, he doesn't know there's a wolf. Like the clock. But suppose one night a wolf comes striding out from the bushes. Now he knows there's a wolf.

We can imagine the criterion here (seeing the thing) being made into a procedure, and say that if it were a procedure it would be reliable, and so we consider this case knowledge as a sort of courtesy.

But that's all backwards. The truth is that we talk of his actual wolf encounter as a potential procedure precisely because we recognize that in this case he knows there's a wolf. Making a procedure of this just relies on what we already know to be productive of knowledge, namely, this kind of situation. The issue of process is entirely derivative.

This is the main point I was trying to defend: judging whether someone has knowledge is a very different sort of thing from judging ability and understanding, that sort of thing. Surely not completely separate! But still noticeably a different kind of thing. Knowledge can attach to discrete, one-off events in a way that many things just don't. (I've sidestepped talk of the senses, among other things, because I'm not even trying to provide some explanation or account or analysis of knowledge, just see how it works when it does. Roughly.)

So in that case we could say that she didn't know that she knew it. But with reflection on her (perhaps repeated) success at remembering it, she could come to know that she knows it. — Andrew M

I think, as a general matter, we should preserve both sides of the coin here, not just our fallibility -- the cases where we think we know and we're wrong about that -- but also where we have misplaced doubt, and do know something despite thinking we don't. Even forgetting and remembering has a place here: you can claim, honestly, not to know where Mike is today, and then remember that he has work -- that is, remember that you do know where he is.

To relate this back to the OP, knowing everything would also require knowing that one knows in each case. — Andrew M

Maybe omniscience can just keep climbing that ladder, knowing that p, knowing that you know it, knowing that you know that you know it, ad nauseam. That's a lot of of infinities though. On a model like this, omniscience might just be incoherent. Whatever.

You can just ask yourself what it means for you to be a man to answer the gender identity question we've been asking here. — Hanover

I'll say this much: I think being a man is being a person who likely thinks about or has thought about what it means to be a man aspirationally, what it is to be "a good man" often. (Maybe a bit in that ancient Greek sense of virtue as fulfillment of potential.) In practice that has a whole lot to do with social expectations regarding masculinity, which you will accept and which reject, and how.

While the trans experience may be similar (if, say, I find I have the sort of aspirational view of my gender that a woman might, rather than what a man might) it's also quite different because the social expectations don't line up the same way, and in effect the trans person will have to navigate two sets of gender expectations.

It's just that, quite naturally, a man's view of masculinity is formed precisely in this push and pull of social expectations, not developed in vacuo and then "applied". I don't know how that works for trans people, who will to start with be given the wrong set of social expectations to cut their teeth on. As a girl you fight to create your own individual take on womanhood. I don't know how that works if society "thinks" you're a boy. How do you develop an individual aspirational sense of womanhood there?

But then, I haven't worked out my sense of manhood solely through my own experience. We all rely on role models, and borrow what we understand of their experience too. Perhaps it's as simple as saying that a trans woman can look to her mother, her sisters, to other women, and emulate them. Insofar as society has treated you as a boy for some of your life, maybe that's just a sort of annoying distraction (though of course it can be horribly taxing emotionally, as the suicide rate among trans youth shows), something that doesn't "land" with you, doesn't feel meaningful, has not, for instance, spurred you to think about what sort of man you want to be.

What I was thinking was roughly this: it's easy enough to see how you would define being honest as aiming at truth, so truth has priority.

But words are a bit like colors: they are defined, as it were, "in standard conditions," which is to say, spoken candidly. Without the baseline of candid use, words cannot have meaning. (Don't make more of the word "defined" than is meant.)

Lewis landed there too, and argued that a speech community requires a foundation of truthfulness and trust (taking speech overwhelmingly as candid).

In which case honesty is prior.

we might do well to look to what happens in a conversation — Banno

And it is a continuing mystery that you haven't read Grice.

For what it's worth, I think it would be a mistake to ignore @Metaphysician Undercover's point about the connection between honesty and truth. I don't think it's so easy to say which concept is parasitic on the other.

What I find odd here is the suggestion that relationships ought to be mediated by, in essence, science.

You count anything not theorized as "arbitrary" but is that more than a nasty way to say "individual" ?

What you say here though doesn't address the issue of identity from a subjective perspective (which was our gender question), which is what this thread is more interested in. — Hanover

That's fair. I didn't address it because I have no idea what a trans woman, say, means when she says, "I am a woman." Literally don't know what that means. It doesn't much matter to me, so I've not read stories or talked to anyone with first-hand knowledge to try to learn what that means, for at least some people.

One of my children has changed pronouns from feminine to masculine, so in time I may learn more, or not. I am not, after all, owed an explanation and might not understand one if offered. It matters to me only insofar as it matters to him, but doesn't really change our relationship at all.

This conflict between what people want to call me versus what I see myself as is the entirety of this gender identify quandary. — Hanover

Well yeah. I was pointing out that this issue is not unique to sex and gender. It applies to practically everything. Which isn't helpful, except to note that I don't think anyone has ever "solved" any of the many similar quandaries, so a solution here would be exceptional and unexpected.

I could change my identity from being Jewish — Hanover

There are even today people in the world who do not believe you can, whether you go to temple or not, whether you've ever even seen one. We do not want to be like them, the people who say "what you are is up to us."

The first alternatives people seem to reach for are: (1) what you are is up to you; (2) there is no "what you are." Neither of those seem entirely satisfactory to me, even though I'm committed to not being one of them.

I wasted a fair amount of time wondering what I am when I was younger. There is clearly a sense in which all of that wondering, and the object of that wondering, had biological underpinnings, just as much as if I had been wondering about my sexual identity. Sex is just an area where it's tempting to think we can point to an explanation not in biology at large, but in this specific little corner that's more tractable. (This chromosome, these organs.)

There's a curious little documentary about the so-called "warrior gene" hosted by Henry Rollins, who saw in this theory a potential explanation for his life, a revelation of who he really is. It turns out he doesn't carry that allele after all, and he concludes that this is a better result, because it means his personality is really his, he earned it through experience.

There are so many things you can say about how a person becomes who they are, and so many of them are true. There's no reason to indulge a desire for simplicity here.

To me, it's like someone wobbling on their bike. Do they know how to ride, or are they about to fall off? Compare also a student who can successfully cram for an exam but soon forgets the answers, or who can parrot the right words, to someone who understands the subject and can reliably use and communicate what they know. Having knowledge seems more like the latter to me. — Andrew M

This is descriptive of something -- Ryle (and of course Wittgenstein) says similar things -- about how we judge another's understanding and ability. And, as you say, it does seem to capture something about understanding what you know and being able to apply it, and so on.

But it's too strict, isn't it? I can ask someone to remember a telephone number for me, and they needn't understand which part is the (American) area code, which the exchange, and so on. They needn't even know it's a telephone number or what a telephone number might be. They either know the digits by heart or they don't. As long as there's no guessing, they know it. They need to be able to recite it back to me, or to reconstruct it if they chose some odd mnemonic, so there's a still an ability-style test, but it's nothing so broad as really "getting" telephones and their numbers.

We know perfectly well that the sort of person who tends to know stuff, and the sort of procedure that tends to produce knowledge, can fail. (Hence this thread.) And we know just as well that an unreliable person who has an unreliable approach to knowledge is sometimes dead right. We might reasonably prefer the former as an approach to rationality, but we'll miss the boat on what knowledge is.

I would say knowledge entails certainty. — Andrew M

And I again think of the shy schoolboy: I'm inclined to say that he knows the right answer, even if his lack of confidence in himself leads him to doubt that he knows what he does in fact know.

Even if you're right, certainty is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowledge. We generally believe that knowledge must be arrived at "in the right way" to count, to rule out lucky guesses. And we seem to have the very same problem with certainty. Many people are certain Trump won the 2020 election, but their certainty was arrived at in the wrong sort of way. If we still have to give an analysis of the right kind of certainty to get anywhere, will that analysis differ significantly from an account of the right way to arrive at knowledge? Maybe, but it's not clear to me.

It shows that both "aliens exist" and "I do not know if aliens exist" can both be true. — Michael

How does it do that?

It's a material conditional, which is true if the consequent is true. — Michael

Meaning the conditional is true whether the antecedent is true or not.

So how do you think the truth of this conditional shows that the antecedent and the consequent can both be true? It would still be true even if it is necessarily false that aliens exist. What are you even talking about?

Aliens exist
Aliens might not exist (≔ I do not know if aliens exist)
Therefore, aliens exist and aliens might not exist — Michael

It is clearly possible for aliens to exist and for me not to know it. That's not only uncontroversial, for all I know it's true.

But what you've been chasing in this thread is me knowing aliens exist even though they might not. To get there you have to allow premise 1 to be the epistemic claim and force premise 2 to be something else.

If you've nothing new, I'm hopping off this particular hamster wheel.