Looks like you understand.

We can know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of by virtue of knowing what linguistic thought/belief consists of and taking it from there.
— creativesoul

I don't share your confidence about this. We can impute, from the standpoint inherent to our linguistically based reasoning, particular thoughts or beliefs to animals and pre-linguistic humans, but it will always remain a projection that cannot capture the reality of animal experience. In other words I think the nature of animal experience and even of our own experience prior to linguistic mediation is indeterminate; we can gesture at it, but that is about all. — Janus

This ought be gotten into...

Next time!

:smile:

Til then... Cheers!

1.Are we agreeing that the thinking/believing creature cannot state it's own thought/belief?

2.Are we agreeing that the thought/belief of a pre-linguistic creature cannot be in propositional form — creativesoul

1. Yes
2. Yes — Janus

In light of the above agreements, do you accept the following?

Pre-linguistic believing requires a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All thought/belief formed and/or had by a language-less creature consists of correlations drawn between directly perceptible content(different things). No pre-linguistic thought/belief has propositional content. All thought/belief has correlative/associative content. Not all correlation/association requires language. All propositions do. All correlation/association counts as thought/belief in it's most rudimentary form. Some rudimentary thought/belief is prior to language.

All thought/belief is all meaningful to the thinking/believing creature, and presupposes it's own truth somewhere along the line.

Do we agree?

:worry:

We can know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of by virtue of knowing what linguistic thought/belief consists of and taking it from there. Are you seeing this for yourself yet?

Reflecting a bit more on Gettier...

Knowing what it takes for a disjunction to be true is knowing the conventional rules.

Why ought we believe that Smith does?

All Smith believes is that Jones owns a Ford. His ground for that belief warranted his certainty. It warranted certainty by most. The ground doesn't get much stronger. Smith was so certain that Jones owned a Ford that he haphazardly asserted a disjunction solely as a means for emphasizing his own certainty.

Smith stated something that he did not believe.

He picked a place at random(Barcelona), because it did not matter which place he chose. Rather, all else said was for rhetorical effect/affect. Hence, he randomly chose "Brown is in Barcelona" because that was obviously unbelievable to him:He was certain that Brown was not in Barcelona. That certainty washed over from his belief that Jones owned a Ford.

Smith did not believe that Brown was in Barcelona.

What sense does it make to say otherwise?

We can know what pre-linguistic thought/belief consists of by virtue of knowing what linguistic thought/belief consists of and taking it from there. Are you seeing this for yourself yet? — creativesoul

No, I don't see that. As I said a few posts ago, I think the most we can do is "gesture at it" which means to speculate more or less blindly or wildly.

Do you take issue with talking about the content of our(as metacognitive creatures) thought/belief?

What else could differentiate pre-linguistic believing from post-linguistic believing if not the content?
— creativesoul

The fact that the latter has determinate content, insofar as it can be expressed verbally. — Janus

So, we can talk about the content of post linguistic thought/belief. You agree as shown above. It's actually tied into Gettier and the OP...

Convention has it that all belief is propositional in content, because all reports/accounts of it are(including the traditional epistemological notion of justification).

However, propositions are existentially dependent upon language use. Language-less creatures have no language. Thus, either there is no thought/belief prior to language, or not all thought/belief is propositional in content.

Agree?

That must be dealt with first. Of course, I'm asserting the latter. The question then becomes what does non and/or pre-linguistic thought/belief consist of? The answer does not have to be a result of blind/wild speculation. In fact, I would reject such a method.

I'll wait for a response prior to moving forward. I have a tendency to say too much too soon. Comes from assuming that everyone else has already been through all the same thought processes that I've been through. Bad habit.

:smile:

I think it is reasonable to say that animals who cannot use symbolic language behave as though they are doing something which we could refer to as 'thinking' but I don't really see much justification in going any further than that.

For me, thoughts and beliefs are propositional expressions of a more primordial activity that we could refer to as non-linguistic thinking or non-linguistically mediated thinking. I also think we who can use symbolic language also do this kind of 'thinking". Visual thinking, musical thinking, spatial thinking, motor thinking; all these we may have in common, more or less, with animals, but I would say the ways we do even those is mediated by our ability to think symbolically; that is it may be more or less "mixed up with" symbolic thinking.

I think it is reasonable to say that animals who cannot use symbolic language behave as though they are doing something which we could refer to as 'thinking' but I don't really see much justification in going any further than that. — Janus

Ok.

What is the justification for going that far?

:smile:

For me, thoughts and beliefs are propositional expressions... — Janus

What are these propositional expressions doing if not representing and/or misrepresenting the speaker's own thought/belief on the matter?

I guess comparing their behavior to ours and then observing what we are thinking when we behave whatever way it is that we are comparing.

I think they do represent or misrepresent our always already symbolically enbaled thinking. Of course any symbolic enabled thinking if it is apt is based on what we actually experience. On a deeper level what we actually experience is always already more or less symbolically mediated, in any case, as is nicely captured by Kant's famous:

"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts."

I guess comparing their behavior to ours and then observing what we are thinking when we behave whatever way it is that we are comparing. — Janus

This doesn't make any sense to me.

"I assume that we are all familiar. "

You assume wrongly.

I don't know what else to tell you; it makes perfect sense to me. Do you mean that you don't understand what I am saying?

Perhaps an example would help. I throw a ball for the dog onto the verandah, He obviously doesn't see whether it has gone over the edge because he runs all around the verandah searching for the ball. When he has looked all over and doesn't find it he immediately runs down the stares and into the garden and looks there for the ball.

Now if it were me I would look all over the verandah and when I saw the ball wasn't there would think "The ball must have gone over the edge of the verandah onto the garden, so I should look there for it". Now I know the dog cannot think that thought just as I have expressed it there, since he cannot exercise symbolic language.

But I can conjecture that he might have visualized the ball being on the verandah, and when he found it wasn't then visualized it in the garden beyond. Did he make some kind of inference? I don't know if it would be right to call it that.

We cannot get into that pre-symbolic animal mind in order to find out, but it does seem reasonable to say that he kind of did infer that the ball must be in the garden. Is this right or should we simply say that he visualized it on the verandah, and when that didn't work out, visualized it in the garden? Or was it all merely a series of neural processes that triggered his actions, and nothing more? Who knows?

Personally I don't favour thinking in terms of merely neural processes, because that would be to think of the dog as being equivalent to a robot; but I recognize that I don't really know, and that not tending to think that way is just my personal preference. Someone who doesn't like or relate to dogs might tend to think of them as robots. There doesn't seem to be any clear right or wrong in the matter.

For me, thoughts and beliefs are propositional expressions...
— Janus

What are these propositional expressions doing if not representing and/or misrepresenting the speaker's own thought/belief on the matter? — creativesoul

I think they do represent or misrepresent our always already symbolically enbaled thinking... — Janus

So, we agree that propositional expressions represent and/or misrepresent the speaker's own thought/belief, that the thinking/believing non and/or prelinguistic creature cannot state it's own thought/belief, and that the thought/belief of a pre-linguistic creature cannot be in propositional form.

Do we also agree that all creatures' thought/belief(thinking/believing) begin(s) simply within some reasonably determinable time frame - after biological conception - and grows in it's complexity?

:smile:

Do we also agree that all creatures' thought/belief(thinking/believing) begin(s) simply within some reasonably determinable time frame - after biological conception - and grows in it's complexity? — creativesoul

Yes, I agree to that. :grin:

Perhaps an example would help. I throw a ball for the dog onto the verandah, He obviously doesn't see whether it has gone over the edge because he runs all around the verandah searching for the ball. When he has looked all over and doesn't find it he immediately runs down the stares and into the garden and looks there for the ball.

Now if it were me I would look all over the verandah and when I saw the ball wasn't there would think "The ball must have gone over the edge of the verandah onto the garden, so I should look there for it". Now I know the dog cannot think that thought just as I have expressed it there, since he cannot exercise symbolic language.

But I can conjecture that he might have visualized the ball being on the verandah, and when he found it wasn't then visualized it in the garden beyond. Did he make some kind of inference? I don't know if it would be right to call it that. — Janus

I'm still left wondering what all those different kinds of thinking have in common such that they count as being cases of thinking. Clearly we agree that post linguistic thinking is only enabled by language and consists of propositional content. Clearly we agree that the dog's thinking is not propositional in content.

It's hard to place much value upon the above conjecture, especially after things have been said like we cannot get into the mind of a dog in order to know what it's thinking. That's an outright dismissal. A consistent/coherent position would stop there... and must. We both know that that's not right though. I reject that sort of approach... as if it was fait accompli, or a foregone conclusion. It's not. We both know that some thought/belief(thinking/believing) is prior to language. I suggest that you reject any and all conclusions and/or logic that leads to the contrary, for it's wrong on a basic foundational level.

Think about it this way...

We need not get into the mind of the dog any more that we need to get into our own minds. We cannot get into either. Such rhetoric adds nothing to our understanding of the evolutionary complexity of thought/belief. Rather, it stifles it and contradicts much better accounts of everyday events.

We can take good account of thought/belief from it's earliest stages through it's most complex by virtue of taking account of it's content. All we need know is what our thought/belief consists in/of combined with a reasonable conception of what non and/or prelinguistic thought/belief must not consist in/of in order to be rightfully called non and/or pre-linguistic, along with what it must consist of to be sensibly, rightfully called "thought", "belief", "thinking", and/or "believing". That harks back to the aforementioned criterion.

What counts as thinking/believing? What does each and every case have in common that makes them a case of thought/belief? This is what must be established/determined prior to any and all conjecture about the dog's thinking/believing. Well, if we are to avoid blind conjecture, that is.

We have to know what we're looking for, just like the dog.

Dogs look for balls, especially after having had enough experience playing the game. Clearly the dog believes that there is a ball to be found, and looks where it has been found in past, wherever it now thinks/believes it will be, or perhaps wherever it's physiological sensory perception leads it... this time around.

That is a common report of the dog's thought/belief and behaviour.

A more precise description of that thought/belief would be put in terms of the correlations drawn by the dog between different things; such as your behaviour(throwing the ball), it's own behaviour(fetching it), and other things like it's own mental/physiological ongoings and their immediate effects/affects(it's state of mind - loosely speaking).

That's more than adequate for bridging the evolutionary gaps between non-linguistic thought/belief and our own without anthropomorphism.

Remember, in the first case, Smith was - by Gettier's own admission - justified in believing that he would get the job. Smith thought to himself "I am going to get the job". Smith believed that he had secured the job. That is to think of and/or about oneself, not another.

That sort of thought/belief is self-reflective. It cannot be about anyone else. It turned out to be quite false. Yet Gettier's sleight of hand was invoking the rules of entailment as his own justification for changing an undeniably self-reflective thought/belief into belief about someone else. That move is unjustifiable here. — creativesoul

I don't follow your basic point.

In the job case, Smith is told that he will get the job. Because he knows he has 10 coins in his own pocket, he validly infers "a man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job". It turns out that Paul gets the job and that Paul has 10 coins in his pocket. Smith has a justified true belief but he doesn't have knowledge. Now you claim that Gettier changes the meaning and truth conditions of some belief of Smith's, but where? He doesn't change the meaning of "I am getting the job" to "a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job". He validly deduces the latter from the former using the extra premise "I have 10 coins in my pocket". What's wrong with a basic use of deduction such as this?

-PA

You're all over the place — creativesoul

Yes, I am trying to come at it from a number of angles because it is tricky to get people out of a bird's eye view - where they know which are the very well justified beliefs that are true and which are not - to an in situ one where we don't known which one's are merely very well justified and will be overturned.

There's one basic disagreement between us that is worth discussing here, because it's what piqued my interest regarding what you wrote. You claim that the truth criterion is redundant when regarding JTB. You further state and imply that there's nothing more about the "true" aspect of JTB than what we have regarding the justification aspect.

I'm saying - flat out - you are mistaken.

The ground for my saying that is that justification is inadequate for truth. If the aspect of being true were redundant regarding JTB, then there could be no such thing as justified false belief. — creativesoul

That actually supports my argument.

We are here at a particular point in time. We do not know which of the beliefs we have that seem both true and well justified will turn out to be false, precisely as in the examples you gave from within science.

We have Scientist 1 who reaches belief X through a series of experiments. Other scientists test also and the belief X is extremely well justified.

1) it may be overturned
2) those scientists do nothing more beyond examing the justification to say it is true.

Now one could say that knowledge covers well justified beliefs that have not been shown to be false. But that is not the same as true.

And note, you justified the use of justified true beliefs as a label for knowledge by saying that there are false justified beliefs. 1) I obviously accept the existence of the latter and 2) the existence of those does not demonstrate that the label 'true' is useful.

For us. Here at this moment in time, knowing that our ideas may be overturned in the future.

It is not that a jtb not different from jb

It is that we don't have access to anything more than justification. And justifcation is weak the moment we find something that says a belief is false, and says it well.

YOu are looking down from the sky and say
Belief X is justifed and true

which is different from beleif Y which justified but not true.

That's a God's eye view.

I am looking at, for example, the history of science and saying we mere humans do not have some extra process we can use to text if it is true.

So, yes, there is a difference, but we in situ don't have anything other than our justifications. Our sense it is obviously true may be wrong.

In science not just any justified belief is considered knowledge. It must have a great deal of evidence including wide range testing and a lack of strong counterevidence.

In science we have something like extremely well justifed beliefs are knowledge.

They do not then do some other experiment to show that it is true. Any other evidence or experiment would merely add to the justifcation.

When the scientific community is done amassing evidence and concludes that idea is so well justified they consider it knowledge, what step do they take to check if it is true?

I don't think this is right; there may be justified false beliefs, as in the example of the cardboard cutout sheep in a paddock I referred to a couple of posts ago. From where it is viewed it is indistinguishable from a real sheep, so I have no reason to believe it is not a real sheep, at least on immediate viewing. Say I am going by at high speed and only catch a glimpse of the cutout for a couple of moments, then I will not have time to notice that it is not moving; something which, if noticed, would be good reason to doubt it is a real sheep.

Another example: the ancient's belief that the Earth is flat could be counted as a justified false belief. There would be countless examples of justified false belief. — Janus

Yes, but these support my assertion.

We do not now know what justified beliefs we have now will turn out to later be considered false.

I am not arguing that all justified or even extremely well justified beliefs are true.

I am saying that we do not know which of our currently held well justified beliefs will turn out not to be true.

I agree that there is a difference between a jtb and a jb even a very well justified jb. But here's the thing....we don't know which beliefs are very well justified and this will last and which are very well justified and will be ovoerturned.

You both keep mentioning that there are false justified beliefs

and I want to say..........................precisely!

Earlier in the history of science there were beliefs held by the consensus of the scientific community that we now know to be false. I think it made sense for them to consider those ideas knowledge. However it turned out they were not true and they

did not have the skills to test for truth after they used their justification.

Again: I am not saying that all even extremely well justified truths are true.

I am saying that all we have is our justifications and these may well turn out to have been for false beliefs.

We do not text hypothesis X, use all the evidence as justification, then check the truth. We just work out good justification.

Now we can check to see if anything contradicts, shows it to be false.

I could see an argument for justified and now shown to be false belief. Which is bascially what science does.

It calls certain beliefs knowledge when they are extremely well justified and there is nothing that says they are false.

But to say something is justified and true
§1) implies a two step process with two criteria when we in situ only do the justificaiton and have not other trick to determine if it is true. 2) it may be overturned.

We can try to falsify what is currently called knowledge.

OK, but the point for me is not that we can know, with any absolute certainty, that our beliefs are true in any absolute sense; but rather to unpack the logic that is inherent in the ways we think and speak about truth. So, past false beliefs may have seemed at the time to be justified true beliefs, but if they were indeed false, then they were false then, just as they are false now. — Janus

Sure. But my point is the usefulness of jtb. Is it a smart way to decide what is knowledge, given that we can only determine something like extremely good justification. Why not just leave it at that? What is the act of adding on the adjective true, knowing that we may, as a species, realize later it isn't. We can still call the conclusions knowledge. And, in fact, I think this is how scientific epistemology works.

So, we can know, within suitably circumscribed contexts, whether a belief is true or false. For example it certainly seems vanishingly unlikely that the justified belief that the Earth is roughly spherical will ever turn out to be false — Janus

Fine, so we all that knowledge, because it is an extremely well justified belief.

We act, certainly, as if it is true, and that's workign out great. I have no problem with that.

But notice how true is functioning in your schema.

It is functioning as an intensifier. It is saying something like extremely good before justification.

It is not some other kind of criterion. It is simply saying 'and this justification is so good we doubt it could change.'

It is not referring to some process of evaluation outside of the justification processes: the evidence and so on

I think it's also worth considering that the pragmatist (Peircean) conception of truth which is something like "What the community of inquirers will come to believe when there is no longer any reasonable doubt" is also perfectly compatible with the JTB model. — Janus

I am looking at jtb as a definition of knowledge. I have no problem accepting all sorts of things as knowledge or scientific knowledge that are extremely well justified.

My point is the 'true' is misleading. One because it implies there is some other criterion, when in fact it is just saying the justification is great while being a word with absolute connotations. Two because it is not necessary. Three because it does not in any way reflect the actual process, say in science, for deciding something is knowledge. There is no 'meeting the justification criteria process' then the 'meeting the truth criterion process'. There is only the gathering of enough evidence (read justification) to convince the scientific community that this is knowledge. I could see using j nstbf b, as in

justified not shown to be false belief.

But jtb to me implies that there are two criteria when there is only one. There are degrees of justification and science is on the rigorous end. A different in degree of justification. Not two criteria.

I'll give up here. Hopefully I managed to reach one of you. I am not sure I can formulate it any better. Please check out my responses to creativesoul since I expressed it a bit differenly there. But I don't think I can do any better.so I will leave it at that.

I don't follow your basic point.

In the job case, Smith is told that he will get the job. Because he knows he has 10 coins in his own pocket, he validly infers "a man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job". It turns out that Paul gets the job and that Paul has 10 coins in his pocket. Smith has a justified true belief but he doesn't have knowledge. — PossibleAaran

When Smith thinks to himself, "the man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", the referent of "the man" is himself not Paul and that is not properly accounted for. He does not have justified true belief that Paul will get the job, rather he has justified false belief that he will. He does not believe that anyone else is going to get the job. "The man" as used within Smith's belief does not - cannot - refer to anyone other than Smith himself.

It is not that a jtb not different from jb

It is that we don't have access to anything more than justification. — Coben

That's not true. We look and check for ourselves to see if the cup is on the table, and we do not look at the justification.

There is no god's eye view needed.

t w

That's not true. We look and check for ourselves to see if the cup is on the table, and we do not look at the justification. — creativesoul

You are responding as if I am saying you cannot be confident that there is a cup on the table when you see what you decide is a cup on the table.

That example has nothing to do with the idea of JTB.

JTB is a proposed way of evaluating whether a belief should be considered knowledge.

EVALUATING. KNOWLEDGE.

We don't look at the justification, you say.

But that's what the process of deciding whether something is knowledge is.

You are treating JTB as if it is a failed theory of perception.

It's a suggestion for how we determine if something should be considered knowledge, and that must include looking at the justification.

Now I understand why we are having problems. I don't think you understand what JTB and the category it is in are about.

Of course even your ability to trust your perception is based on implict justification. But sure, you don't need to think about justification and yes, you'll reach out and find that cup in the vast majority of situations.

JTB is not a heuristic for dealing with the things in your flat.

It's a description of what some people think are the criteria one should use

when deciding if a belief is knowledge.

So when you say you don't have to look at the justification, you are confused about what jtb is.

IMagine scientists writing papers where they say that bacteria X causes stomach ulcers and that this belief they have should be considered knowledge.

When asked why anyone else should agree - that is what criteria did they use to determine it was knowledge not some less rigorously arrived at belief - the scientists said it's knowledge because it's true. Now that saves a lot of paper since journal articles would be simply the conclusion, but it seems like a weak theory of knowledge.

And it is not a way to analyze beliefs. Cause pretty much everyone believes their beliefs are true.

I'm done.

That's not true. We look and check for ourselves to see if the cup is on the table, and we do not look at the justification.

There is no god's eye view needed. — creativesoul

And I just realized how rude this post of yours was. You did not interact in the slightest with the arguments I presented. You simply say one part is wrong and repeated something you said earlier. Even if you did understand the category jtb is in and what it is proposed to deal with and do, you are a terrible dicussion partner. I mean, seriously. Good riddance.

My point is the 'true' is misleading. — Coben

The one point we disagree about is this. We have many justified beliefs, no doubt some more justified than others. Justification is contextual as I have said. That Paris is the Capital of France is a justified true belief that only the most way out simulated reality scenarios could falsify; so for all intents and purposes it is a belief that will never be shown to be false.

It is not really about claiming or being able to decide just which of our justified beliefs are also true beliefs, it is about making the general logical distinction between justified beliefs which are true and those which are not. We cannot do without the distinction between true and false beliefs, which is not the same as to say that we know, or even could know, which beliefs are true and which false in any absolute sense, in other words.

We need not get into the mind of the dog any more that we need to get into our own minds. We cannot get into either. Such rhetoric adds nothing to our understanding of the evolutionary complexity of thought/belief. Rather, it stifles it and contradicts much better accounts of everyday events. — creativesoul

I don't know what you are trying to say or imply here, To say what the dog is thinking just is an attempt to get into the mind of the dog. We are already "in" our own minds in a way that we are not "in" the mind of other humans, let alone dogs. This is not rhetoric. I know what I am thinking, but I don't know what you are thinking unless you tell me, and even then I cannot be absolutely sure that you are not deceiving me. It comes down to trust. I don't see how you could reasonably deny that. You gesture towards "much better accounts" but I have no idea what you are referring to.

Make your position/argument in such a way that it pertains to and/or references the two Gettier cases. That may help. Not trying to be rude dude. You're all over the place though. Can we simplify what your saying?

You claim that the true aspect of justified true belief is redundant. You further claim that the justification aspect basically covers the true aspect. You go further and claim that we have no access to check for truth.

I'm denying all three of those claims, and I've provided arguments and/or prima facie examples which support that denial. I don't know what else to say here...

Some of the stuff you've said I agree with. I do not agree with what you do with that stuff.

We need not get into the mind of the dog any more that we need to get into our own minds. We cannot get into either. Such rhetoric adds nothing to our understanding of the evolutionary complexity of thought/belief. Rather, it stifles it and contradicts much better accounts of everyday events.
— creativesoul

I don't know what you are trying to say or imply here, To say what the dog is thinking just is an attempt to get into the mind of the dog. We are already "in" our own minds in a way that we are not "in" the mind of other humans, let alone dogs. This is not rhetoric. I know what I am thinking, but I don't know what you are thinking unless you tell me, and even then I cannot be absolutely sure that you are not deceiving me. It comes down to trust. I don't see how you could reasonably deny that. You gesture towards "much better accounts" but I have no idea what you are referring to. — Janus

I'm saying that such talk of "getting into the mind" of anything is misleading at best. There are better ways to talk about our thought/belief.