You can't then propose a method of justification which relies on us knowing directly the way the world actually is — Isaac
Eliezer Yudkowski has said something similar, defining knowledge as "the ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality". If you can equally explain every outcome, you know nothing. This links knowledge with the concepts of information and entropy. — Echarmion
You couldn't know anything about morality — Echarmion
It would then presumably follow that only those beliefs can be considered knowledge that have no justified contrary beliefs, i.e. all contrary beliefs are rules out. But, if we insist on some objective notion of truth, a belief can be true before we are able to find significant arguments to rule out contrary beliefs. We'd then have to conclude we have knowledge of something even though we are similarly believing contrary things about it. That doesn't sound very useful. — Echarmion
I don't. The justification lies in someone's responsiveness to however the world is, not on knowing how in particular the world is. — Pfhorrest
I don’t see the apparent contradiction. Can you elaborate? — Pfhorrest
I’m basically applying the same standard of justification to belief as we usually do to action, at least in the modern free world: any action is by default justified, until it can be shown somehow wrong. We’re not obligated to do nothing at all except those things that we can prove from the ground up that we must do. We would normally consider than an absurd standard for justifying our actions, but it’s all too common to apply that standard to justifying our beliefs. — Pfhorrest
How do you measure responsiveness to how the world is without knowing in advance how the world is? How could you possibly know what anyone is responding to? — Isaac
Edit - who are these people unresponsive to the way the world is? — Isaac
Take a synaesthete. When they see the number 4, they hear a high pitched ringing. They test this a million times looking at a million number 4s. Is their belief that number 4s make ringing noises more justified than if they'd done only a thousand such tests? — Isaac
Hm. I think you've just put forward beliefs which haven't been disproven yet. Lets say I believe my friend Joe dated a woman yesterday. I ask him, "How did your date go last night?" supremely confident that he would date someone, just because I believe he would. No evidence, nothing. Joe replies, "It went great!"
Are we to say that I knew Joe dated a woman last night before I confirmed it? Popperian justification requires that we apply our beliefs, that they must be able to be falsified, and we must try to do so. Otherwise you're saying even induction is knowledge. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your intent at this point, so feel free to correct me if I am. — Philosophim
Everyone has direct access to a small part of the world -- that's what sensation is. (This hinges on the direct realism covered in the previous thread on the web of reality). Ignoring empirical evidence from your senses is being unresponsive to the state of the world. — Pfhorrest
I'm counting being uninterested in checking your beliefs against the senses as "ignoring empirical evidence".
Plenty of people ignore claims that there is empirical evidence to the contrary of their beliefs, rather than actually check if those claims pan out. That's being unresponsive to reality. — Pfhorrest
On my account, you were weakly justified to believe your friend went on a date at first, and then when observation that could have falsified that didn't, your justification increased. It's difficult to state that in the terminology of "knowledge", because it's odd to say something like you "knew a little" at first and then "knew a lot" later. — Pfhorrest
I had zero justification for believing my friend dated a woman the night before. It was just a random belief. And I think that's the problem with your proposal. If you are to state knowledge is something we simply haven't had refuted yet, you allow beliefs without justification to be declared as knowledge. — Philosophim
Can you really think of a scenario where you'd have zero justification though? — Isaac
I've formed beliefs that just sprang up out of nowhere. — Philosophim
the belief I mentioned did not tie to anything that would indicate Joe dated a woman last night. — Philosophim
what I'm saying is that such a situation is neurologically impossible. No matter how much you insist you did, there is no know (or even plausible) mechanism by which a belief can be formed without the sensory, or interoceptive inputs to form it. — Isaac
The abstract point I'm making is we can have beliefs that are examined, and beliefs that are unexamined. Is an unexamined belief knowledge? — Philosophim
If I have an unexamined belief (which has nothing to do with the technical neurological process of how that belief was formed) and it just so happens to be right, was my unexamined belief knowledge? — Philosophim
I guess technically on my account there is no such thing as an unexamined “belief“, because that would just be a “perception”: belief are what you get when you examine your perceptions and either affirm or deny their accuracy. — Pfhorrest
However, that still leaves the problem that both inductive and deductive beliefs are counted as knowledge. — Philosophim
So if you still hold to something even when it has been disproven, it then becomes something separate from knowledge, and becomes a belief. — Philosophim
At that point, we believe things that we know aren't true, and we know things that we can't believe are true. — Philosophim
I think allowing inductive beliefs to be counted as knowledge is where the sticking point it. What if you held deductive beliefs that have not been disproven yet as knowledge, and inductive beliefs as mere beliefs? — Philosophim
The thought experiment is to help you understand the abstract context of the above. If I have an unexamined belief (which has nothing to do with the technical neurological process of how that belief was formed) and it just so happens to be right, was my unexamined belief knowledge? — Philosophim
The abstract point I'm making is we can have beliefs that are examined, and beliefs that are unexamined. Is an unexamined belief knowledge? — Philosophim
the belief I mentioned did not tie to anything that would indicate Joe dated a woman last night. — Philosophim
The point I was making as counter to Pfhorrest's argument here is that it is impossible to generate a belief which is not based on some interpretation of the evidence (input from the outside world). — Isaac
That's not contrary to my views at all. (I've just been saying in the past few posts that a "belief" as I mean it is formed from a "perception", which in turn is exactly some interpretation of evidence). I think maybe you're reading in more than I intend to say. — Pfhorrest
I'm counting being uninterested in checking your beliefs against the senses as "ignoring empirical evidence".
Plenty of people ignore claims that there is empirical evidence to the contrary of their beliefs, rather than actually check if those claims pan out. That's being unresponsive to reality. — Pfhorrest
How can it be that people are "uninterested in checking your beliefs against the senses" and yet at the same time you acknowledge that all belief are the result of interpretation of input from the senses? — Isaac
The issue of whether a belief is 'examined' is another matter - the effort one puts in to gather even more external data relevant to the belief. Here the issue is scaler and the answer can be none, but in fifteen years of working on beliefs I've yet to see any evidence of a single belief which is 'unexamined' in this sense. — Isaac
Induction doesn't give you certainty like deduction does, but noticing patterns (which is all induction really amounts to) is still a way to form beliefs — Pfhorrest
It's not until you wonder to yourself "is that really right though?" — Pfhorrest
You may not necessarily have thoroughly vetted the idea yet, so that belief may not count as knowledge. If you have thoroughly vetted it, such that you would have already found that it was false if it were false, then you know it. — Pfhorrest
Also, one can form beliefs in a top-down way as well, hearing the beliefs of others expressed first, being told that something is so, and then perceiving nothing to the contrary (or else doubting the reliability of those perceptions) and so affirming the belief, without having yet observed anything that would have organically compelled one to believe. — Pfhorrest
it is impossible to generate a belief which is not based on some interpretation of the evidence (input from the outside world). It just neurologically can't be done). So everyone already has a justification for all of their beliefs, the justification is whatever external inputs caused it. — Isaac
I think most of us intuitively feel that a "gut reaction" is not necessarily knowledge, but can be a guide that we examine to gain knowledge. The point at which instinct crosses into knowledge is the question of epistemology. — Philosophim
It’s the “checking” part that makes the difference, between acting like the observations you happen to have made so are plenty (and possibly even being averse to makings further observations that might compel you to change your mind), and actively seeking out more observations to make sure that they continue the pattern. — Pfhorrest
You might instantly form a belief that the place is dangerous from that. But do you know it is dangerous? This is where a person has to actively and consciously examine their beliefs. — Philosophim
We cannot say that our belief in A is justified by the deductive argument 'If B then A, B therefore A' because our belief that B might be what is at fault, or our belief that 'if B then A'. — Isaac
it might be simplest to call what System 1 gets up to "caused" but a lot of those habitual responses are caused in a way that will pass muster and reflect repeated earlier effortful examination of things by System 2, so we might as well call those causes "reasons" in the non-causal sense too, the sense in which "justification" is not a synonym for "rationalization".
If challenged, a person might engage System 2 and begin a process of assembling the evidence they are comfortable claiming underlies a belief; we can call that "rationalization" in a wide sense, allowing that we might approve or disapprove of their claims for evidentiary import, etc. (Sellars seems more or less to claim that saying "I know" just signals we are now playing a language-game that requires everyone to put on their System 2 hats -- it puts a claim "in the space of reasons".) Or they might refuse to engage System 2 (wait -- is that even possible??) with a bare "I just know" and philosophers tend to frown upon that. — Srap Tasmaner
So there are two kinds of criticisms that can sometimes and sometimes not be made about the same beliefs:
formed with minimal "input" from the environment and considerable input from your other beliefs or "gut reactions";
"insulated" or "protected" from possible revision.
Philosophers don't like either of these but will let the first slide so long as you are open to revision; the second is more or less sinful. Are there good general-purpose ways of talking about these things? — Srap Tasmaner
What seems, again, in my experience, to be signified by a shift to the term 'knowledge' is that there will be agreement among others in one's social group. — Isaac
How much this relates to the ontological status of 'knowledge' as opposed to just what constitutes good habits (in the Ramseyan sense) — Isaac
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