How do we identify truth?
What is knowledge?
Are there moral facts? — Tom Storm
First i think there are two questions that sometimes get conflated; the first is, what does "...is true" mean? The second, how do we tell if some sentence is true? — Banno
"P" is true if and only if P. so "The kettle is boiling" is true iff and only if the kettle is boiling. It seems to me that this account brings together the coherence, correspondence and redundancy of truth, ideas to which philosophers keep returning. — Banno
This is where the distinction between what is true and what is thought to be true comes into play. Whereas truth is monadic, being about some sentence, belief is dyadic, being about both some sentence and a believer. That is, the kettle is either boiling or not is about the kettle, while that one believes the kettle is boiling is about both the believer and the kettle. This is of importance because idealism and anti-realism work by denying this distinction between truth and belief. For them something is true only if it is believed (or perceived, or whatever) to be true. — Banno
I hope it is clear that I do not think there can be what I've called an "algorithmic" account of truth, and hence of either what we should believe or of what we can know. — Banno
"How do we identify truth?" becomes a normative, even an ethical question, being much the same as "What ought we believe?". It is about our place in a community, especially a language community. So despite my rejecting the antirealist move against there being true statements independent of the attitude we adopt towards them, I do think that what we say is true or false is to a large extent bound to the way we are embedded in a society. I agree more or less with their conclusion, but not with their argument. — Banno
OF course, I might be wrong. — Banno
Jeez, there's a lot bound up in all this. — Tom Storm
There are counterexamples. I am certain, for instance, that this post is in English, and my certainty is not a theory that I could revise if further evidence came along.
I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves. — Banno
I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves. — Banno
Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe (the certainty that this sentence is in English)? We seem to spend most of our lives in belief-land - some more than others. — Tom Storm
We find people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? A belief? To call it a false belief would imply that we already have decided that knowledge of god is not legitimate. Or it begs the question that we can tell if someone has knowledge of god. — Tom Storm
Karl Popper's suggestion was to throw away certainty from knowledge and work with knowledge in terms of probability. Basically, we are justified in believing something if it's the most probable belief given our current data. — Cidat
Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe — Tom Storm
We find people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? A belief? To call it a false belief would imply that we already have decided that knowledge of god is not legitimate. Or it begs the question that we can tell if someone has knowledge of god. — Tom Storm
I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves.
— Banno
That's perfectly true — Ludwig V
"God" (or even "gods") is not simply a fact, It is a way of looking at, or thinking about, or approaching the world. It's not in the realm of ordinary truths and falsities. — Ludwig V
I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. I don't even think it's a valuable goal. Most uses for knowledge don't require certainty—only a balance between level of certainty and cost of justification. — T Clark
I agree that pragmatically we tend to strike a balance between the level of certainty we can achieve for an appropriate cost of achieving it - mostly with a strong inclination to put in as little effort as possible. That's a good strategy in most situations.
I agree that we often call the result knowledge. Knowledge has much more prestige than belief and consequently a claim to knowledge has considerable persuasive power among those disinclined to skepticism.
I agree moreover that such "knowledge" is often good enough in practice. — Ludwig V
Could you explain to me exactly how "knowledge" of this kind differs from justified belief?
Do you have any idea why knowledge carries more prestige and persuasive power than belief? — Ludwig V
I use personal introspection as one of the sources of my knowledge. — T Clark
I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. — T Clark
Can you outline what you have in mind here? Do you mean using experience to make assessments and decisions? — Tom Storm
Surely certainty is important to logic, math and in your game - engineering? — Tom Storm
That's why Lao Tzu means so much to me. — T Clark
Interesting observations about the engineering process. — Tom Storm
I'm always envious of people who have models or texts they admire and are guided by. I've never really had that. I enjoy essay writers, but mainly because of their capacity to use language, not so much as a guide or inspiration. — Tom Storm
Although from my perspective it seems we often have no choice but to operate in much this way holding tentative accounts of 'the world' which are based on the best available evidence or reasoning, but are subject to revision over time. — Tom Storm
There's a distinction to be made between the stuff we don't question, but might, and stuff that we don't question because it forms the background against which we can question things. We have to hold some things certain in order to be able to cast doubt on other things; doubt only takes place against a background of certainty.Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe (the certainty that this sentence is in English)? We seem to spend most of our lives in belief-land - some more than others. — Tom Storm
One of the things I hope might be clear from this discussion is that knowledge is social, it is had by a community more than by an individual. Foremost, That Knowledge (to borrow a term of art) is by it's nature propositional, and hence embedded in the language of a community. Additionally, knowledge is justified, meaning that in some way it fits in with what you and those around you hold to be the case. And of course knowledge is useable, and so has a function within the community....knowledge of god though direct experience... — Tom Storm
Karl Popper's suggestion was to throw away certainty from knowledge and work with knowledge in terms of probability. Basically, we are justified in believing something if it's the most probable belief given our current data. — Cidat
In the view of many social scientists, the more probable a theory is, the better it is, and if we have to choose between two theories which differ only in that one is probable and the other is improbable, then we should choose the former. Popper rejects this. Science values theories with a high informative content, because they possess a high predictive power and are consequently highly testable. For that reason, the more improbable a theory is the better it is scientifically... — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProbKnowVeri
I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. — T Clark
I agree with all this, although I wouldn't put quotation marks around knowledge. — T Clark
So, yes - knowledge is justified belief with the condition that the justification is adequate. — T Clark
knowledge is social, it is had by a community more than by an individual. — Banno
I think that to know something is to experience it and therefore to perceive it in an undoubtable way. — Bret Bernhoft
people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? — Tom Storm
Certainty is the flip side of doubt; if something is undoubtable, then it is certain. — Banno
To summarize: you only know something when you have perceived it undoubtably through your senses. — Bret Bernhoft
But one has to acknowledge that experiences of God are overwhelmingly important to their subject and seem to be self-certifying. However, it also seems pretty clear that not all such experiences are actually from God, and that validation of them by others should depend on what comes from them in everyday life. — Ludwig V
And there are innumerable things that we take as undoubtable. I've already given the example of this post's being in English; to bring that into doubt is to bring into doubt the very basis on which one can doubt. There are simpler examples - One can't play nought and crosses if one doubts that three in a row is a win; One can't doubt that the brakes will work on one's car if one doubts that it has wheels. — Banno
So, in constructing a site conceptual model one does not doubt that there is a site... — Banno
I wanted to distinguish clearly between knowledge and fallible knowledge, which, as you may have noticed, I do not consider to be knowledge. — Ludwig V
Well, we're agreed on that, then. However, I'm not sure I would consider JTB a definition in the strict sense. — Ludwig V
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