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.

a) if aliens exist then I do not know if aliens exist

This claim is true. — Michael

Is it? It does not look true. What is the connection you're positing between the existence of aliens and my ignorance of that fact? An equivalent English sentence is "Aliens exist only if I don't know whether aliens exist." Does that sound remotely plausible?

What you mean is that you're taking "I don't know whether aliens exist" (P) as a premise, in which case, you can claim any conditional with P as the consequent is true, but all of them are uninformative, so this "argument" is abusive.

And mixes modalities. I don't want to go through all this again.

And yet you resist the world's favorite choice for such a situation: "I do not know whether aliens exist," because you have an agenda. The word "might" in "Aliens might exist" describes our epistemic condition, not the state of the world.

This de dicto / de re sort of problem applies to facts as well as beliefs, which is similar to what you and @Andrew M were discussing. Drawing balls from an urn, it's fine to say "The next one might be red," but it doesn't really make sense to say of either a red or a blue ball that it might be red, even if it's the next ball. It just is or isn't.

Obviously.

The usual sort of probabilistic analysis is well-known, and you can say, with enough hand waving, that there's a definition of "reasonable" in here somewhere, but that might not be true. And it's not what we were looking for.

In a sense I was suggesting that you might try to layer this probabilistic approach on top of a set of beliefs that are not themselves probabilistic (which beliefs about a lottery inherently are). I don't find that very satisfying because you are then forced into taking an attitude toward your own beliefs that inadvertently changes them. There are things I hold probabilistic beliefs about, but I don't think I must treat each of my beliefs as probabilistic because some largely unrelated beliefs are false. That's very weird. ("There's a chance that's not milk because my keys might not be in my jacket." What?)

So I'm still unhappy with the move from "Some of my beliefs are false" to "Each of my beliefs might be false." For a whole bunch of reasons, some of which have been on display in this thread.

fallibilism — Michael

Suppose reason and experience suggest to me that it is almost certain that some of what I believe is in fact false, but that I am not in a position to know which of my beliefs will turn out to have been wrong.

The conjunction of all of my beliefs is thus false, but only because at least one of them is false; the claim that I believe something false is an existential claim, and ranges over my beliefs disjunctively.

Put another way, I must believe that my beliefs taken together, in sensu composito, are false, while at the same time believing of each, in sensu diviso, that it is true, since these are after all my beliefs. If someone were to enumerate my beliefs, and question me about them one by one, at the end they would announce that I do not after all believe that one of my beliefs is false, because "my beliefs" is just the conjunction of a great many things I believe are true. This is a quandary.

A tempting approach is to say that since I believe a certain number of my beliefs are false, without knowing which ones, my attitude toward each of my beliefs should be that it might be one of the false ones. But this is problematic because a conjunction of all of these "might be false"'s leads to the conclusion that all of my beliefs might be false, which is not what I think at all. Quandary unresolved.

And the problem isn't restricted to these universal conjunctions. If I believe there is a needle in a haystack, I need not believe, of any subset of the haystack, that it contains the needle; the overwhelming majority of moderately sized "substacks" will not contain the needle. But I must at the same time believe that there is a substack that does contain the needle.

And all of this applies to facts, though I've been presenting it in terms of beliefs. Most subsets of my beliefs have conjunctions that are true, and most substacks of the haystack do not contain the needle.

We can also, in a sense, reverse our analysis: I could hold that my beliefs are generally true (de dicto) while refusing to endorse unreservedly any one of them taken individually (de re). As a matter of simplistic probability, if I figure 99% of my beliefs are true, I could say of each that the chances of it being true are 99 out of 100 and leave it at that.

Is there a way out of this?

I'm not sure. One thing that looks a bit suspicious to me is the temptation to treat our beliefs as a countable (either finite or countably infinite) set, something like a haystack that we really could examine member by member. It could be argued that in reasoning, we only deal with such finite or countably infinite sets, but I'm not sure that's true either, because reasoning always takes place within a context of quite vaguely defined background knowledge. I find the idea that beliefs could be enumerated as implausible as enumerating the real numbers. If that view is correct, the model relied on here is faulty. But I'm not certain. Despite my reservations about background knowledge, deliberate reasoning does consist in part of trying to restrict which of our beliefs are in play and which are not, so perhaps that objection misses the point, while quite rightly drawing attention to the fact that whether we reason successfully is sometimes down to whether we have properly drawn the boundary between what we include and what we exclude. (That is, have we kept out everything we should, and let in everything we should?)

There is some fuzziness in the analogies here too. If I know there is a needle in a haystack, then I know there is some subset of the haystack that contains the needle, but would I really claim to know, of any given substack, that it does or does not contain the needle? I have probability on my side, so there's justification about, but if I claim to know of each substack that it does not contain the needle, I am (1) effectively claiming there is no needle, and (2) I am wrong on at least one occasion. And here it begins to look like not so much a case of the occasion when we're wrong being unfortunate, as we usually think, as all the cases in which we were right being lucky. (Which suggests we were doing some part of the analysis backwards, that we have the wrong designated term.)

I haven't solved it yet. My real suspicion is that there is mistake in moving from "Somewhere among my beliefs there is a falsehood" to "I should think, of each of my beliefs, that it might be false." There's something wrong there, which is what motivated this ramble, but I don't have an alternative model to offer yet.

So in terms of my original argument, I'll still commit to 5 but reject 6:

5. My belief is true and might be wrong
6. My true belief might be wrong — Michael

Seriously?

It's something like ~(P & ~P). It's really that simple.

3. There are possible worlds in which we are brains in vats, and we do not (or, perhaps, "cannot") know that this world is not one of those.
— Srap Tasmaner

This is acceptable except your use of the word “know”. — Michael

And I think you should have raised an eyebrow at "cannot". That would pretty much force us to start sorting worlds by our epistemic condition and then determining (1) whether worlds in which we know we're brains in vats are possible, and (2) whether worlds in which we are brains in vats but don't know it are possible, and so on and on. There is, I understand, quite a bit of literature along exactly these lines, none of which I've spent any time with.

I don’t understand what you’ve been arguing against. — Michael

I think that's true.

Some of what I've been saying has become clearer to me, but not to you, as we went along. Some of it is just subtle enough that I think I've expressed myself poorly at least a couple times, but I have been trying to be more precise with each post.

I think I have been mistaken, even in that last post, in how I imagined we would keep the issues of how the world is and our knowledge of it separate. I still think we should keep them separate, but it's becoming clearer to me that they are both ways of sorting and partitioning sets of worlds -- different ways, yes, but the only way forward is to treat them similarly if separately. Otherwise there are too many things I can't say without serious cheating.

As far as I can tell, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, your position and your understanding of the issues involved has changed not at all since the OP, despite everything I and others have posted. You still appear to be baffled that anyone would disagree with anything you've posted and just post it again, as here.

If you have something new to say, I'll listen, but for now I've put as much work into this as I intend to, and I'm not going down the rabbit hole of modal conditions on knowledge without very good reason.

The skeptic claims that we might be brains in a vat. There are two different ways to interpret this claim:

1. There is a possible world where "we are brains in a vat" is true
2. It is possible that "we are brains in a vat" is true in the actual world

I think it obvious in context that they are making a claim such as 2). So with that in mind, I will rephrase the above: — Michael

3. There are possible worlds in which we are brains in vats, and we do not (or, perhaps, "cannot") know that this world is not one of those.

See how that separates the concerns you have mashed together in (2)? You must first argue that brains-in-vats worlds are possible (that it is coherent, and maybe a bunch of other stuff), and then further argue that we have and possibly can have no knowledge that our world is not one of those.

"Possibly true in W" is not nearly clear enough, not for this kind of discussion, and I'm tired of disentangling the various strands of meaning.

Not gonna address your worlds that "might be" this or that. Clarify your terminology or I'm done.

No. If Jane's belief is actually true, it can only be counterfactually false, not actually false. It's what "counterfactual" means.
— Srap Tasmaner

You accepted here that "Jane's belief might be false" and "Jane's belief is true" can both be true, so I don't understand your objection. Do these two phrasings mean something fundamentally different to you? Obviously the second phrasing combines the premise and conclusion of the first phrasing into a material conditional, but the meaning of "Jane's belief might be false" is identical in every occurrence. — Michael

I doubt either of us has been perfectly consistent about this, but I can explain what I'm thinking.

When we say "P is true," for instance, I am taking that as "P is true in the actual world." I think that's generally what's intended with an unadorned "true" or "false." When it matters, I'm saying "actually true" or "true in W," something like that.

When we say "P is possibly true," with no other restriction, I am taking that as "true in some possible world," and the set of possible worlds in which P is true may or may not include the actual world.

So, in our earlier exchange, I took "Jane's belief is true" to mean true in the actual world, and "Jane's belief might be false" to mean false in some (other) possible world. They can both clearly be true, on this reading, even though JB being actually true means the actual world is not one of the worlds in which JB is false.

Phrasing 1:
Jane's belief might be false
Jane's belief is true
Therefore, Jane's belief might be false

Phrasing 2:
Jane's belief might be false
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then Jane's belief might be false — Michael

Phrasing 2 is a degenerate argument in which JB's truth plays no role.

Phrasing 1 is fine because I'm reading "might be" as counterfactual. If you change that to "Jane's belief might actually be false," I'll say no.

Maybe I need to be even simpler. — Michael

I'd rather you be more explicit. It is absurd that in this sort of conversation we are not in every case saying "true in W" instead of unadorned "true." It would make many points much clearer.

Do you accept that both of these are possible worlds?

World 1
Jane's belief might be false
Jane's belief is true

World 2
Jane's belief might be false
Jane's belief is false — Michael

Worlds? Not sets of worlds?

For the first, if JB is true in W1, no it cannot be false in W1. How could it be?

For the second, I'll address the bit I skipped over with W1. What exactly do you mean by "might be"? I cheated a little in W1, because the second premise allowed me to construe it as "not violating the law of noncontradiction." But really what is "might be" supposed to mean within a given world?

If you want these claims to be true within a single world, I think we have to take "might be" as indicating our epistemic position, because it makes no sense at all to count a world as its own counterfactual. Worlds are collections of facts, not possibilities. Sets of worlds represent possibilities, depending on how the facts are distributed among them.

I can continue to read W2 as I read W1, that it does not violate the law of noncontradiction for JB to be false. But these "worlds" are specified using unnecessarily ambiguous language. I wish this language were just nonsensical, but it happens that there are things we want to say that can be made to fit (the logical and epistemic issues), and that are sometimes what people mean when they talk this way. Since we know there are several different types issues in play, there's no reason for us not to be much clearer.

Is anyone besides Michael checking my math?

I am barely qualified to be explaining this stuff and feel like I'm on the verge of making a hash of it.

Would really appreciate it if someone more knowledgeable chimed in.

You are right that Jane's belief, which is true in the actual world, isn't false in the actual world, but what do you mean by saying that it can't be false in the actual world? — Michael

Only the law of of noncontradiction. It's a matter of, let's say, "logical" necessity. What is true cannot be false, even if it might have been false. No such law prevents a sentence from being both true and English, say. But by the same token an English sentence cannot be a Russian sentence.

Option 1
It is possible that Jane's belief is actually false
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then it is possible that Jane's belief is actually false — Michael

No. If Jane's belief is actually true, it can only be counterfactually false, not actually false. It's what "counterfactual" means.

Option 2
It is possible that Jane's belief is actually false
Therefore, Jane's belief is actually false — Michael

No. We do not know that Jane's belief is necessarily false, so we do not know that it is not possible that Jane's belief is actually true.

This is tricky though, and can be put a little more clearly the other way around. There are worlds in which Jane's belief is false; the actual world might be one of those worlds. "Might be" here is epistemic; it's about our knowledge of what sort of world this one is, not about what sort of world it is. There are two steps: determining what sorts of possible worlds there are, and then determining which of those we happen to live in. We simply do not have enough here to conclude that this world is the sort of world in which Jane's belief is false. The other kind of world may be possible, and this might be one of those.

(For what it's worth, the epistemic issue is forcing me to talk about possibilities that might or might not be, which is terribly uncomfortable, but I'm not sure how to get around it. I wondered aloud once before whether we could just capture the epistemic options in more sets of possible worlds, but that's more work than I feel like doing unless I have to, and I don't even know that it works. Again, very likely reinventing the wheel here, as this sort of stuff is a very hot topic today in epistemology.)

Option 3
It is not possible that Jane's belief is actually false — Michael

So this is not freestanding but the fallback if I reject 1 and 2.

Option 1 I have a problem with because even if JB is only contingently actually true, it cannot be actually but only counterfactually false. I am not committed to JB being necessarily true.

Option 2 tries to take the logical necessity of Option 1 and turn it into metaphysical necessity. That is, there are conditions under which I have said JB cannot be actually false (namely JB being actually true), therefore if JB can be actually false, those conditions must not be met (JB is not actually true). But JB need only be contingently actually true to block JB being actually (rather than counterfactually) false, so I am still not committed to JB being necessarily true.

If JB were necessarily true, it would not be possible for it to be actually false. Since I am not committed to JB being necessarily true, am I committed to anything else that would make it impossible for JB to be actually false? Nothing I can think of, so it's "no" to option 3 as well.

Which option is correct? It must be one of them. — Michael

Also no.

I understand your quandary here, I think, but it's mainly down to use of modal sounding terms in different senses. The fact that whenever P is true in W, it cannot be false in W, comes right out of the definition of W, which includes P carrying a value of "true". That's just not the same thing as saying that P is true in all possible worlds; it's only saying that the worlds in which it is true are defined by its being true there, and if you need it to be false then you're in another set of worlds.

If Jane's belief might be wrong and if Jane's belief is true then Jane's belief is true and might be wrong. Why do you disagree so much with this contraction? — Michael

Because you have been very clear that you mean Jane's belief, which is true in the actual world, might be false in the actual world, and that's not an option. If it's true in ℋ, it cannot be false in ℋ; if it's possibly false, in addition to being true in ℋ, it's false counterfactually in some ℳ where ℳ ≠ ℋ.

Do you at least understand the difference between "the actual world might be other than I believe it to be" and "there is a possible world that is other than how I believe the actual world to be"? — Michael

I think I do.

For instance, there could be a possible world that is other than how I believe the actual world to be because I am wrong about how the world is, and this world is that "other" world.

The actual world is a possible world. There are possible worlds I know I don't live in, and possible worlds I can contemplate that, for all I know, are this one.

No, it doesn't "mean the same thing," but it might or might not be different from how I think it is implies that I do not know whether it is how I think it is.

Unless of course you're being abusive. I listen to a quiz show sometimes in which the host says things amounting to "Well the answer might be C ..." in order to get the guest to give the correct answer of C. (It's a friendly show. If it weren't, he might say something like that to trick the guest into giving the wrong answer.)

If we have actuality in hand, if we know the facts, what would motivate us to talk instead in terms of possibility? There are good and bad reasons for doing so ...

If we do not know the facts, it is obvious what our motivation for considering possibilities is.

Your reasoning here seems to be that "Jane's belief might be wrong" and "Jane's belief is true" cannot both be true — Michael

They can both be true, yes, but you have to be careful. If Jane's belief is true in ℋ, which it is by stipulation, it cannot be false in ℋ. If it can be false, also stipulated, it must be false in some ℳ, where ℳ ≠ ℋ. That is to say, counterfactually.

But there's a way to say this that is misleading or even abusive. The magician tells you the coin is in his left hand or in his right, even when he knows which is the case, because he intends not to inform you. I could say, "Michael, honey, I might have overdrawn our checking account," when I know perfectly well that I have, but don't quite want to admit it. *

I don't think we have much use for arguments that rely on degenerate cases like "If Caesar was a goat then today is Thursday," today being Thursday.

We are suggesting that the actual world might be other than how we believe it to be. — Michael

I have offered, I think half a dozen times, a distinction between the world being different from how we think it is and counterfactually different from how it is.

What's different about your version here is that the world might be different from how we think. And that's to say we don't know how the world is, else we would be in a position to judge whether we had been mistaken, and in a position to contemplate counterfactual worlds.

And this gets us no closer to your goal of fallibilist knowledge, so far as I can tell.


* Should have added: I know that I might have, because I've done it. Actuality entails possibility.

Argument 1
Jane's belief might be wrong
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then Jane's belief might be wrong

The argument is valid but the conclusion is counterintuitive despite its consequent simply being a restatement of the premise — Michael

Right. This is
1. P
2. (anything at all, true or false) → P

But, it is now "misleading" because if Jane's belief is true, its being false is no longer a real possibility in this world, only elsewhere. What's more, we only say things like "Jane's belief might be false" when we don't know whether Jane's belief is true or false, so it is very odd to take it as a consequent of Jane's belief being true.

There's also this general counterintuitiveness about unnecessary disjunctions: "Today is Thursday" entails "Today is Thursday or Caesar was a goat." Uh huh. And we have that here: "P is true, so it might be true or it might be false." (Twirls mustache.)

Argument 2
There is a possible world where Jane's belief is false
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then there is a possible world where Jane's belief is false

The conclusion is acceptable, but I think that the premise is an inaccurate interpretation of the original. — Michael

And it doesn't say much and it's not what you're actually interested in.

Argument 3
It is possible that Jane's belief is actually false
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then it is possible that Jane's belief is actually false

I understand that this is adding a second layer of possible world semantics, but I don't know how else to phrase it. — Michael

Yeah, I don't think you can or want to do that, and if you can't then you still can't say a proposition that is true in W can be false in W. It's just the way true and false work, and the whole point of introducing W as, in essence, a set of assignments of truth-values to propositions.

I get what you're going for, I do. But if Jane's belief is true, Jane's belief can only be false counterfactually. We already know how to say that, and it's "Jane's belief might have been false," or "could have been false."

Argument 4
Jane's belief is not certain
Therefore, if Jane's belief is true then Jane's belief is not certain

This, at least, appears to have an acceptable premise and conclusion, although I'm not sure if it's an accurate translation of Argument 3. — Michael

Maybe I'm missing the boat, but as I indicated before I don't think we're wedded to falling back on degrees of confidence or certainty or any of that. Despite the popularity of that approach these days, my gut is that this is a different issue. What about the shy schoolboy who does in fact know what the capital of Arkansas is, but doubts himself?

The paradox, though, is that whereas we may be willing to accept Arguments 2 and 4, we appear unwilling to accept Argument 1 (as shown by the resistance I am getting). Why is that? — Michael

Yes, 2 says nothing and is not what you want anyway. 4 is another issue, I think, though lots would disagree. 1 and 3 are what matter.

1 is fucked up in various ways that amount to abuse. 3 ends up not being what you want because the epistemic issue you were after has been swallowed up by counterfactuals. Your options are to give in and treat "might be false" as "don't know", for whatever that gets you, or try to develop 3 into something coherent about knowledge and counterfactuals. Don't reinvent the wheel though. Look at sensitivity and safety, for instance here, if you really want to throw your life away on this.

A favorite joke of mine from M*A*S*H:

Colonel Flagg joins the poker game in the swamp and sits down next to Klinger.
Flagg: Hey, up close you're a guy.
Klinger: Far away too.

In a context like this, "might be" is deliberately misleading. — Srap Tasmaner

To clarify, the context I was referring to was saying that something I know to be false "might be true," as in the example about my legal name.

That first argument was a reference to your claim here. When I asked you if that meant that "I might be wrong" entails "I am wrong" you responded with "I think that's the converse of what I was at least trying to say." — Michael

The converse would be that "I am wrong" entails "It is possible that I am wrong", which of course is true. Actuality entails possibility. Possibility doesn't entail actuality.

As for the rest, I believe the posts you're talking about may not have been the clearest I've written, because I was still (am still!) trying to figure out what's going on here. There seems regularly to be a problem with the sense in which truth excludes falsehood -- the truth of P in W makes it "impossible" that P is false in W, but that "impossibility" is not modal, only logical. There are no available possibilities within W.

If my keys are in my pocket, they cannot not be in my pocket, can't be on the dresser or on the table, even though they only happen to be in my pocket and might not have been. See how that works?

Is any of this even related to what you want? "I might be wrong," "I could be wrong," and similar formulations are about me, about the limits of my knowledge, and my knowledge in turn is knowledge of the actual world, but if I'm wrong it's because the world is different from what I thought, not because of some counterfactual something or other.

Maybe that's putting it too strong. It's how the world is or isn't we're interested in. If you ask me to guess the next card you're going to deal and I say "ace" but it's a 2, I can truly say, "If it had been an ace, I would have been right." And there has been work on knowledge that relies on that sort of thing. I'm just not sure any of this is in the neighborhood of your interest in fallibilism.

It is. It’s like saying “I’m a bachelor, therefore I’m not married”. — Michael

And no, it isn't, and it isn't.

My legal name might be "Srap Tasmaner" but it isn't.

That's logically the same form as the conclusion to your argument 2, and it's fine, so long as we know what we're about. In a context like this, "might be" is deliberately misleading. I don't think that's what you want. You want something that expresses epistemic modesty.

I might wire you £1,000 today but I won't.