What I don't understand about your position is that after you say that the broken clock can't lend epistemic justification, why the need to say more? I mean, doesn't that fully explain the justification failure? — fiveredapples
I'm still struggling to understand how you ground the claim that the person does not believe that a broken clock is working. — creativesoul
I don't think it does when the failure was a result of false belief that goes unaccounted for. — creativesoul
Of course, we should be clear about the difference between (A) "He doesn't have a belief about the clock's working or not" and (B) "He believes the clock is not working." Sometimes (B) is stated as "He doesn't believe the clock is working," which sounds like (A) -- but it's not. — fiveredapples
...what philosophical work is the belief you're attributing to him doing to explain the epistemic failure? — fiveredapples
Neither of which properly accounts for his belief that a broken clock is working. — creativesoul
Neither of which properly accounts for his belief that a broken clock is working.
— creativesoul
First of all, he doesn't believe that a broken clock is working. He believes falsely that the clock is working. Those two statements are different. But nevermind the difference. Why think he has a belief? — fiveredapples
The clock is broken. He believes it's working. He believes that a broken clock is working. — creativesoul
This is a strange way to phrase it. It seems like you are misunderstanding the Russell scenario. The man has successfully satisfied JTB. He has a belief. The belief is true. And the belief is justified. If you think knowledge is JTB, then you must conclude that the man has knowledge. You seem not to appreciate this fact. You're wanting to object that he doesn't have knowledge because he was looking at a broken clock. But you can't make that objection if you subscribe to JTB. — fiveredapples
Trusting clocks is not always automatic, to be as clear as possible. — creativesoul
I think you are missing the fact that if the clock has stopped working then the belief, although true, is not justified. — Janus
You might want to say that he is justified in believing that his belief is justified,
but that belief is not true, since the clock is not, contrary to his perfectly natural expectation, working.
Also, earlier you mentioned "Warranted True Belief" as an alternative to JTB. I'm not seeing any significant differences, on the face of it, between the two terms.
Trusting clocks is not always automatic, to be as clear as possible.
— creativesoul
I agree. It's an intermediate phenomenon. But trusting language (as you did when you wrote the sentence above) is usually at least as automatic as trusting a clock usually is.
Being-in-a-world and being-with-others is (in an important sense) prior to the subject that examines her mind and questions her beliefs. We live in a world with others of spoons, stairs, books, and clocks. They don't exist primarily as objects for ratiocination but as 'transparent' tools-in-use through which we see our thousand worldly purposes. Language, I'm claiming, has this tool-in-use kind or mode of being.
Along these lines, our 'blind' know-how concerning words like 'know' is prior to our retrospective attempt to define 'knowledge' so that the definition fits our intuition. — softwhere
You're repeating my own position to me. I said he's not justified under my conception of knowledge. I said he is justified under JTB. If you think he isn't justified under JTB, then you don't understand JTB. — fiveredapples
This tells me you don't understand either JTB or our intuitions of knowledge. Whether he's justified or not has nothing to do with whether his belief is true or not. — fiveredapples
Yes. And that's a way to show Heiddy's relevance... — creativesoul
How do you decide whether a belief is justified? — Janus
For JTB, yes, but it wouldn't count as knowledge.Can a belief be justified and yet untrue?
Does 'justified' mean, to you, merely something like understandable (given the circumstances or context)?
Well, I didn't agree that "justified" means something like "understandable," so this doesn't apply to me.If so, then knowledge would be understandable true belief.
Well yeah, because in using knowledge terms you are referring to your knowledge. What else could you be doing with those terms? — Harry Hindu
But you're not taking this to it's ultimate conclusion and that is how do we know that the aliens know the truth? How do you know that you have acquired the truth when you only have justifications to go on? Again, as you are defining it, you'd need to know that your knowledge is true, not only justified, in order to use the term "knowledge" correctly. — Harry Hindu
If you're not referring to your knowledge when using knowledge terms, then what do you mean when you use the terms? — Harry Hindu
When I say "use" I mean making a particular sound or scribble to refer to the information one possesses about a particular state-of-affairs, like the steps one takes to tie their shoes, and the reasons why one should tie their shoes. What do you mean by the word "use"? — Harry Hindu
This seems to arrive at a problem regarding the origen and/or content of belief. It presupposes that all belief is premiss based. I've an issue with that as a result of the fact that premisses themselves are belief.
Seems to me that it would have to be the case that some rudimentary belief are not premiss based. If they need to be in order to qualify as being well grounded then such belief cannot count... by definition alone... for if the definition is good... they do not have what it takes. — creativesoul
Can we ever confidently label something knowledge, by this definition? We can certainly evaluate justifications, but how do we evaluate 'true' if not via justification?I would prefer to do away with what seems
to be your sensr of 'justified' because it is too subjective, and say that knowledge is belief in what is true for true reasons. — Janus
I also think that much contemporary thinking about knowledge confuses two distinct questions. "When do we have knowledge?" and "what 'is' knowledge?" Even if we can agree about when we have knowledge, that doesn't necessarily tell us what knowledge itself is. — Bartricks
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. — Wittgenstein
<emphasis mine>There is...something that average everyday intelligibility obscures... that it is merely average everyday intelligibility...This is what Heidegger called 'the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation....What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate 'ground' of intelligibility is simply shared practices...This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation. — Dreyfus
Right. So how do you know that you or someone else is using the term, "knowledge" correctly, so say things like, "I/You are using the term, "knowledge" correctly."?The justified claim only needs to be true in order to use the term "knowledge" correctly or successfully. It is the same in this respect to the use of the word "raining" above. — Andrew M
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