we can deduce, from the fact that we have JTB of X, that X is true. — J

That's circular. You can only satisfy the JTB if you know that X is true.

My concerns with JTB are all about how the truth of P is supposed to be established — J

That is indeed a problem. But we can't solve all the problems at the same time. For the purpose of defining knowledge, we can assume that we have a concept of truth and worry about what it is on another occasion.

If you tell me, "I know X, because I have JTB of X," and I believe you, then I know, or at least believe, that X is true, without knowing anything about its truth conditions. — J

Well, that seems a bit radical. Most people, I think, believe that knowing at least the outline of the truth-conditions as part of understanding the meaning of what one is signing up to.

Is personal verification of the truth conditions the only truth-guaranteeing justification? Or, if "guaranteeing" is too strong, the only good-enough justification? — J

So you accept knowledge based on authority. I'm a bit surprised - it is quite unusual for philosophers to accept that. They usually, if only by implication, seem to believe that only first-person verification is satisfactory. That's a very strict criterion and cuts out most of what we (think we) know.

An alien civilization inimical to ours might choose tonight to destroy our solar system. That is not impossible, or incoherent, or against the laws of physics, etc. — J

That's fantasy, not a real possibility. On the other hand, the possibility that one of our superpowers will make that decision and actually try to do it. That's a real possibility.

Doesn't that have to answer the possibility question. If P is true, it cannot possibly be false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm a bit puzzled about you are getting at here. It's my move in a chess game. I have various possibilities with the rules. Many of them have little or no strategic or tactical value. I decide on one and make it. All the other possibilities are ruled out. They were possibilities, but are no longer. Similarly, when I set out to decide whether P, there are (barring complications) two possibilities - that it is true, or that it is false. If I decide (correctly) that it is true, then the other possibility is ruled out.

What sort of concept though? Rorty's move to redefine truth as "what our peers let us get away with is a conception of truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think we have to develop our understanding of knowledge to be compatible with every theory of knowledge. If we are not committed to a theory, we take for granted our existing concept, whatever that may be. It we are committed to a theory and it makes a difference to the epistemology, then, of course, we need to take it into account.

Rather, it is, do we think P is possibly false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For me, the question whether P is true and the question whether I think that P is true are the same question - or rather, the answer to whether P is true determines whether I think that P is true. Something similar would apply to a question whether we think that P is true.

Affirming P is a sort of endorsement. "It is good to believe P," where "good" is also "hurrah for..." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quite so. Asserting P is a speech act, and it has various effects, which are usually called forces. The standard taxonomy has three, as I'm sure you know. The difficulty is to utter P without some sort of illoctuionary or perlocutionary force. The ground for thinking that the content is distinct from the ancillary forces is that we can utter the same proposition with different illocutionary forces. We can assert, deny, suppose, know, believe and think that p.

No matter how hard they reasoned about the groundlessness of their own knowledge, they would still run from rabid dogs like Pyrrho or climb a tree to get away from raging bull elephants like Sanjaya. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Though that formulation of the point leaves open the possibility of claiming special status for the theoretical context that is philosophy. It is probably better to point out that such sceptical beliefs have no significance.
On the other hand, one might give up on digging oneself into ever deeper holes in pursuit of grounds and admit that knowledge, in the end, is a self-supporting structure. If it's good enough for the planet, it is surely good enough for knowledge.

Hence, in most ordinary circumstances, one will affirm knowledge of what one will do later on in the day (or else of when one’s airplane will arrive), this serving as one example among many. — javra

Knowledge of what one will do later in the day is not quite the same as having intentions or plans for what one will do later.

If one instead prefers to remain on the safe side, one can instead simply declare it as a belief one has. — javra

There is no safe side. One may prioritize avoiding believing something false, but that raises the risk of failing to believe something true. Both are wrong.

I think there is a problem with this account, and I think the problem is precisely what Gettier points up. Gettier shows that someone can have belief, truth, and inconclusive evidence, and still fail to have knowledge. (But I am going to come back to your earlier posts in this vein. I am still catching up.) — Leontiskos

OK. You know where I stand on Gettier. Though I would like to add that the analysis I gave earlier of his case 1 is not a model for other examples. The point of attack is the same, but the analysis has to be worked out in each new context.

Hume would say that even if you've pocketed the 9-ball in this identical situation 1,000 times in the past, it doesn't follow that you will pocket it this time. — Leontiskos

No, of course. Though as Hume points out, you are going to believe that you will succeed next time because you have succeeded before. Who's to say that's wrong, given that deductive logic doesn't apply.

if the identity of mind and object is true, then you do not have global uncertainty. — Leontiskos

If that's what Aristotle or Aristotelians say, I can see a certain sense in it. But there is the tricky problem how I avoid being burnt to a crisp by the sun.

What is at stake here is an argument against truth dressed up as an argument against JTB. — Leontiskos

You may well be right.

"I know that I know ..." is pure pleonasm
— Ludwig V
Upon reflection, I think you might be right (at least in the JTB context that isn't committed to fallibalism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I do accept that there may be some qualifications and caveats and that it seems very hard for fallibilism to escape from the problem that we can't be said to know p if p is false.

However, if we pair JTB with a sort of fallibalism that denies any certitude to beliefs, ... I do think it follows that we can never know that we truly know anything. .... Another way to say this is that, if we believe our own belief might be wrong, we don't seem to believe that we know it, since knowledge is necessarily true, and we can hardly believe that something that is true might also be false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be honest, those kinds of fallibilism seem incoherent to me. Something that might be false may in fact be true. To put it another way, the possibility of p being false seems to me to be irrelevant to the question of knowledge. What is relevant is whether p is or is not false, on the assumption that if it is not false, it is true.

One solution here, that I'm sure no one will like, is to simply do what analytic philosophers have done for "evaluative" knowledge claims. We could suppose that statements of knowledge and statements of fact should simply be reinterpreted the way evaluative statements are, such that: "P" is "hurrah for asserting P!" or "I believe P," or "from my perspective, P." — Count Timothy von Icarus

In one way, you are pushing at an open door. "Know" is one of a large group of terms that express an attitude to, or an evaluation of P. But such an approach would need to include assertion as part of their meaning, as well as an attittude towards what is asserted. But it's very complicated. "Know that p" includes an evaluation of p as true, so it indirectly asserts p. "S thinks that p", on the other hand, includes an evaluation of p as false and therefore denies p. Supposing that p is more complicated; it doesn't assert or deny p, but asks to treat p as true (usually for the sake of an argument. And so on.

... it's on us to show why we think there needs to be something of the sort where "P is *really* true," and that we must be able to assert that this is so.. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, my approach would be to explain that certainty and doubt, possibility and impossibility, etc. are meaningless without a concept of truth.

After all, others' first-person experiences and beliefs are generally accepted to be ineluctably private, so prima facie there can be no empirical support for them, whereas there can be no empirical support for anything outside of such experiences for us. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are treating those philosophical ideas as if they are true or make sense. If they don't make sense, we need not bother with them when defining knowledge.

If it's right that we can't know X is true via JTB (since it's an element of JTB, not a result, and would require a previous demonstration of knowledge), then we might never know whether we know a given X, since we wouldn't know if X was true. — J

But we don't know that X is true via JTB, but via whatever the truth conditions are for X.

So we have two distinct notions of truth in play: Intersubjective mathematical truth, for which the truth maker is independent of Johns judgements whether or not his judgements are correlated with intersubjective mathematical truth, versus what we might call "John's subjective truth" in which the truth maker is identified with the neuropsychological causes of John's utterances. — sime

This is a false dilemma. John's subjective truth will be conditioned by his understanding of what mathematical truth is, which he has learnt through interaction with others who teach him. Unless that has happened John may have a subjective opinion, but it doesn't count as a mathematical opinion.

John has to live with the possibility of being wrong. — frank

Sure. He also has to live with the possibility of being right. But he can live with neither possibility unless he knows what it is to be wrong - or right.

I see doing mathematics as a physical activity, involving pencil and paper, computer, or neural activity. — Janus

OK. Is there any activity that you see as a non-physical activity? Unless there is, you've deprived "physical activity" of its meaning.

If say I am certain that something is the case, then I mean that there cannot be any doubt about it. Then I would say I know it to be the case. If I think something is the case but there is any possible doubt it, then I would say that I believe it to be the case, but do not know it to be. — Janus

There is a difference between the possibility something might not be the case and it actually not being the case. You are treating mere possibilities as if they were actual.

Say I believed that something is the case, and for very good reason, despite thinking that there was some small possibility which could cast a doubt about it—then I would say I believed it, but did not know it, to be the case. Then say I found out that the small possibility of doubt had been unfounded—I would then say I now know it to be the case. — Janus

That seems reasonable. I'm still doubtful about your "small possibility".

But if I had justifiably believed it to be the case previously, despite thinking there was a small possibility of doubt and the small possibility of doubt turned out to be a mistake, then according to JTB I would have already known it to be the case despite the fact that I didn't think I knew it to be the case. That would be knowing despite not knowing that you know. And that just seems weird to me. — Janus

Why? Where does it say that it is not possible to know something but not to know that you know it? It isn't like a pain or a taste, where what I say determines the truth. I suspect that you are thinking of the first person "I know that I know..." But it is perfectly possible for me to say "Janus knows that p, though he thinks that he believes it."

an objection to any theory which says that truth is supposed to be established prior to justification and investigation, — Leontiskos

No, you are quite right. Justification and investigation are how we determine the truth.

In seeing an unsound justification and a sound justification as equivalently sufficient conditions for knowledge. — Leontiskos

The issue here turns on justifications that provide evidence, but not conclusive evidence. In the context of JTB, such justifications can work, because the T clause denies claims to knowledge based on partial justification when their conclusions are false.

Can the justifications for thinking it true be themselves true even if the theory is false? — Janus

Yes, if the justification is not conclusive - i.e. not sufficient.

This is the most-succinct, elucidating summary I’ve come across (of course needing to know what he is getting at with “expression”, and what the description would be presumed to be of, but still, well put). — Antony Nickles

I'm glad you think so. I'm acutely aware that further explanation is needed. One issue is to sort out the difference between his use of "expression" in the context of propositions and sentences to mean something like a way of putting something or articulating something. (There might be a translation issue there.) The other is to say a little more about the relationship between "Ouch" and "I am in pain". I feel that Wittgenstein stops short at saying that "I am in pain" replaces "Ouch" and does not describe it, or the cause of it. However, "I am in pain" is actually part of language and one needs to see how "I am in pain" relates to "S/he is in pain", given that the latter follows from the former.

I would offer that the method of “Ordinary Language Philosophy” does not give privilege to our common sayings, nor is the point that they are true (“common sense”). — Antony Nickles

Well, it shouldn't, but is often discussed as if that is the idea. Wittgenstein doesn't involve himself in those issues, but seems rather to just take ordinary language for granted; I'm not at all sure what he would have said about the Oxford School. Ryle has a good account of this in "Dilemmas", in which he maintains that the importance of our untechnical discourse is that it is where important concepts that underpin all technical discourses are found. I think his argument with conventional philosophy would be that those theories distort and bowdlerize them, depriving them of the proper sense. But he (and Austin) do rather give the impression of thinking they can be some sort of conceptual police.

The initial relevance of bringing up examples seems to just be to point out how our practices (feelings, etc.) work differently than in a metaphysical framework. — Antony Nickles

Yes. I often feel that his primary concern is to open our eyes to differences, and this does make his writing very different from many other philosophers, who seem primarily concerned to sweep differences away, or at least under the carpet. He seems quite happy to make his points and leave us to draw our own conclusions. One thinks of that remark in his preface that he would not like his work to save others the trouble of thinking for themselves. But it does make him rather more elusive that most commentators seem able to cope with. Everything gets formulated into arguments and conclusions. But without that, perhaps we feel we can't "find our way about", as he puts it.

Not quite. I'm saying that this would be the unwelcome conclusion if this way of construing JTB is adhered to. To avoid this conclusion, I'm suggesting we alter or abandon JTB, not our confidence that we can know we have knowledge. — J

H'mm. Maybe. But I think you may be getting into an unnecessary tangle because you (seem to be) focused on the special case of "I know that I know.." Anyone who asks themselves the question whether they know that p is to ask themselves the question whether p. When the latter question is answered, the answer to the former question is also answered. (Of course, this can't be generalized; it does not follow that S knows that p follows from p. That's the first person case is a limiting case.)
I recognize that in certain circumstances "I know that I know that p" might have a point. But it doesn't add any cognitive value to p asserted by me. (So long as p is true.)

I read Wittgenstein as saying, for instance, that if knowledge is justified true belief, then we don't know we are in pain - becasue the justification just is the pain - but he also insisted we "look, don't think", and so that nevertheless he would note we do use "knowledge" in this way. — Banno

Yes. Things are often not quite straightforward with Wittgenstein. I don't know what he would say. But I stick to the view that "I know I am in pain" is a non-standard use of "know", based on the similarity that it would be very strange to assert of anyone that they are in pain and do not know it. Such cases as there are emerge from the fact that other people can tell whether I am in pain or not, so they can't be used to support pain as a logically private experience - which, after all, is his main target.

There was a time, when cars became commonplace, were the corpses of slow-witted dogs littered the streets, their mangled remains a common sight that might well be used to explain how one felt after surgery. — Banno

H'm. Survival of the fittest. But I suggest that that use would be an expression of pain, rather than a description. In which case, not knowing would not be the issue.

The conclusion, perhaps unpalatable to Sam, is that we do use talk of knowing in ways that are not only about justified true beliefs. — Banno

Well, yes. Knowing how and knowing by acquaintance might be examples. But that's a restriction of the scope of JTB, not a refutation. JTB may be a mess in many ways, but the lack of any articulate competition suggests to me that it does capture something important.

Now it's tempting to think that therefore the JTB account amounts to only justified belief. But this fails to recognise that there is also a difference between somethings being believed and its being true. That difference is what allows error. — Banno

Yes. That's why we would need to invent the concept of belief if we did not already have it.

The "T" is JTB is not about deciding if the proposition in question is true - that's the prerogative of the "B" - it is about insisting that we cannot know what is not true. — Banno

Am I right to take you as saying the B clause reports the view of the knower/believer, but the T clause reports the view of the speaker and commits them to changing their mind if it turns out later that they are wrong.

If everything we cognize is counted as "physical", then would not metaphysics, thought of being what is beyond the scope of physics, or any other science, be thus taken to be dealing with the non-cognitive? — Janus

Yes. But I reject the antecedent. We cognize many things that are not physical. Mathematics for a start.

I don't know...perhaps you are misunderstanding me—I'm not talking at all about being cautious in trying to avoid false beliefs. but about avoiding thinking and saying that I know something if I cannot be certain about it. — Janus

I take the point. But a lot depends on how you define certain. If you define it as something that's not possibly wrong, I would have to take issue with you. Something that is possible can possibly be actual and can possibly not be actual. So the strongest definition of certain is too strong.

I'm not certain what you are saying here, but the question that comes to mind is whether it is possible to know something without knowing that know it. The very idea just seems wrong to me. JTB does seem to make this possible, and for me that is to its detriment. — Janus

Maybe I'm confused. In general, I think that "S knows that S knows that p" is not ungrammatical, but is empty. The only kind of case that would give it some content is a situation in which S knows that p, but is confident that they know that p. (Someone who answers questions correctly and can justify their answer, but is hesitant, for example.) But their hesitation is not about whether they know, much less whether they know that they know; it is about whether p.

If Descartes considered this he would still be faced with the question of being able to doubt the purported real world just as much as he can doubt the virtual world of the Matrix. — Janus

I suppose you are right. If he did find some convincing evidence that he is being fooled by an evil demon, he would have to doubt whether he is being fooled by an evil demon. Before he could accept this alternative view about reality, he would have to subject it to his methodological doubt.

It's VR all the way down...? — Banno

Yep, I guess it could be. — Janus

I have sometimes wondered whether we should not start by accepting that we are all already brains in a vat.
Alternatively, we could accept that some things are self-supporting structures and do not require foundations.

we shouldn't forget that the two notions of truth (causally determined versus community determined) aren't the same notion of truth. — sime

But causal processes aren't true or false - except when we have determined a suitable interpretation of them, or set them up in such a way that an interpretation of them can be derived from them.

Because to already know that the piece of information is true, that knowledge would have to have been verified via JTB. — J

If knowledge were a matter of accumulated atomic pieces, then you are right. But it isn't. We learn how to do colour and at least some of the colours at the same time, and elaborate from there. We learn about solid objects as we encounter them before we can even conceive of them. Then we can deal with individual solid objects as they crop up, whether we have encountered that specific kind before or not.

(This all assumes you think JTB is a good yardstick for knowledge, of course.) — J

Have you got a better candidate? I don't recall encountering one.

If he cannot know that he knows what a knife is, then he can, at best, merely know that he believes he is experiencing a knife. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Knowing what a knife is is only partly a question of knowing that it has a sharp edge and a handle. It also involves having the know-how to identify knives and distinguish them from spoons and swords. That requires input from other people, who have been teaching me what objects are and how to classify them since before I could speak.

It seems to me that he cannot know that he knows on his own. "I know that I know ..." is pure pleonasm. But it is an important feature of my attributing knowledge to someone that, by passing on the information that he knows, I endorse the knowledge. So "know" not only has space for endorsement by other people, it is built in to the concept as an unavoidable commitment. If I want to avoid commitment, I say that they believe that p. (If I actually disagree, I can say that they think that p.)

in fact in the case of metaphysics I would say there can be no certainty at all, that it all comes down to plausibility, because we are dealing with the non-cognitive. — Janus

If metaphysics is about the non-cognitive (which needs a bit more fleshing out), are we sure that certainty and plausibility even apply?

The Matrix Hypothesis I think is absurd, because it posits that there is a real world in which the virtual world we inhabit is sustained, and this means the need for explanation is just pushed one step further back. — Janus

Yes, that's right. In the case of the Matrix, it turns out that the real world is the same kind of world that the simulation places us in, so the fundamentals haven't changed. In fact, as we know, there is a case for saying that we already know that the real world is radically different from the world as we know it. No solid objects, everything consists of wavicles. What a nightmare!

Why do we need to talk in terms of 'knowledge that' when nothing is lost by talking instead of 'justifiably believing that'? — Janus

Well, if there were something to be gained, it might be a change worth making. But so long as we distinguish between true beliefs and false ones, the issues remain. But what are the issues? As I sit here, it is possible that a meteorite or similar is hurtling towards me and will land on my head. I could move and so avoid that disaster. But the possibility applies to anywhere else I might move to. So not only is the probability uncomputable and vanishingly small, but there is nothing I can do to avoid it - apart from living a mile underground, which would have its own limitations and dangers. So I take my cue from my society and ignore the possibility. I haven't been wrong yet.

I think these discussions usually leave out half the issue. If it is wrong to believe something that might not be the case, then, presumably, it is equally wrong not to believe something that is the case. The more cautious you are in avoiding false beliefs, the more you risk not accepting true beliefs. There's no safe territory. But surely to worry endlessly about possibilities that make no difference does not look like a particularly beneficial or even entertaining occupation.

I would say that it we determine that something is possibly false then we don't at all need to "abandon it" but merely to abandon the pretense that we know it to be so, for the more modest claim that we believe it to be so. — Janus

We can only pretend something that is possible. So if something is possibly false and we can pretend to know it, then it must be possible to actually know it.

This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania Pascal[/quote]
Thanks for the link. I shall read that soon - possibly today!
It sent me down the rabbit hole, wondering what it is to know what anything feels like and whether it is appropriate to read philosophical significance into what he said. He may have meant the remark simply as a kind of "buck up" reminder. That's something that is, perhaps, rather out of favour nowadays, but at the time, it was common place. I was brought up on "Worse things happen at sea". Once I grew up enough to wonder what the relevance was, it stopped working.
If it does have philosophical significance, we're in the territory of private experiences, aren't we? Wittgenstein doesn't think I know about them - at least not in the same sense that I know about the pain of others. Not because the truth is elusive, but because it is not clear that truth really applies to my responses to my own pains. So the idea that I can know what someone else knows when they are in pain seems - inappropriate. A topic for another discussion sometime.

The facts that help you decide on your attitude are irrelevant to whether p is true or not. — Banno

I take your point. Whether I believe that p and on what grounds is a matter that is entirely distinct from the question whether p is true. That distinction is important when I am considering the beliefs of other people. But when I ask myself whether I believe that p, surely I need to consider whether p? When I have decided whether p, I know whether I believe it or not. From my point of view, there are not two questions here, but only one.

By pre-JTB I mean that we would enter the "JTB situation" already believing that X is true. Our belief in X is not a result of what is about to happen if we successfully apply JTB, hence not knowledge. The difference between believing and knowing is important here. If, in trying to determine whether I possess a piece of knowledge, I ask myself, "Is X true?" (a JTB requirement for knowledge), I can only reply, "I believe so." I can't say, "I know it is," because this initiates the vicious circle. — J

I'm a bit confused by all this. Someone passes on to me a piece of information. Normally, I would just accept what I'm told because this informant is very reliable. But for some reason I decide to examine this claim more closely. So I set aside my assumptions including my belief that what I have been told is true. Then I ask myself the questions... Short story, anyone with any sense entering a "JTB situation" would and should set aside any assumptions that have already been made.
But there is a problem about the T clause. It is clear that it is not about what my informant knows or beliefs and ot about what I know or believe. Yet any verdict I give on the truth or not of the information is inescapably only what I know or believe. The effect - the significance - of the T clause, so far as I can see, is to require me (and not just my informant) to take responsibility for the truth of the information - to endorse it, in other words. As a result, my claim to knowledge continues to be vulnerable after I have made my decision; if it should turn out to be wrong, I will have to withdraw my claim. On the bright side, if my informant's justification was a bit dodgy, my claim will stand so long as no refutation appears.

The problem that I have with the idea of knowledge being defeasible is that if it isn't true it isn't knowledge, so if what I think I know is possibly false, then I don't really know it—so I say instead that I believe it and that it is belief, not knowledge, which is defeasible. — Janus

I think one defeats a claim to knowledge if it is false. Possibly false is far too strong and leads to us abandoning swathes of what we know quite unnecessarily. "possible" does not imply "actual".

It can just as well be an activity or an event. We can still ask what it is, taking "is" in one of its many familiar usages. The question was whether there's a "correct way" to describe the activity of hallucinating using the word "see." I'm saying, no, it's terminological; "see" can work either way. — J

Hallucinating isn't usually something that I do; it's something that happens to me. I think of it as an event or process. The point of the concept of hallucination is to allow us to recognize Macbeth's behaviour ("Is this a dagger I see before me?" etc. etc.) as what it is, the behaviour of someone who is seeing a dagger, but cancelling the actual dagger. Compare pretending or acting.
I think it is true that we can equally say that Macbeth is seeing something that isn't there or Macbeth thinks he sees something that isn't there. I would say that the first alternative suggests that there is some thing that he sees that isn't there and so I prefer the second option. `

We've talked about this in the context of Williams' book on Descartes. I think you're being too harsh. — J

Oh dear! My memories of that are, I'm afraid, a bit vague. Perhaps I am being too harsh. I would accept that there is a balance to be struck. But I am quite sure that not all possibilities are equally possible. The awkward bit is that the dividing line between them is not at all clear. There's possibilities like the ones that Eliza dreams about when she sings "wouldn't it be loverly" in My Fair Lady or we can be fascinated by like "Battle Star Galactica". I classify these as fantasies and I think they have only have significance for psychology or the philosophy of psychology. There's other possibilities like whether there is still honey for tea or the cream is still fresh. They do have significance for epistemology. Possibilities can change their status. Something that is a fantasy at one time can become a dream and ultimately a reality.

But if this relationship is a causal relationship between the object of the belief and the mental state of the believer, then how is a false belief possible? — sime

It isn't. Which is why the relationship between the object of the belief and the mental state of the believer is not a causal relationship.

the intentionality of a mental state has nothing to do with the opinions and linguistic biases of a community, — sime

That's a very good point. But the object will be framed in a language, and that language will be the framework will have been learned from the community.

And hence as with the example of a thermometer, either humans have intentional belief states, in which case their beliefs cannot be false due to the object of their beliefs being whatever caused their beliefs, else their beliefs are permitted to be false, in which case the truth-maker of their belief is decided externally by their community. — sime

Well, the first option is not an option, so it must be the second. But it's not quite right to say that the truth-maker of specific beliefs is decided by the community. The community teaches us about truth and falsity and how to determine it in general. Individuals then apply that framework to specific cases; disagreements will be discussed within the community and, often but not always, an agreement will be reached. (Sometimes the belief will be one that is not determined by the shared rules.)

On the other hand, if the community gets to decide the truth-maker of your use of S irrespective of whatever caused you to utter S (the principle of minimal charity), then you cannot know that S is true until after you have used S and received feedback. In which case, the truth of S isn't a quality of your mental state when you used S. — sime

Not quite right. Given that I have learned how to determine truth and falsity, I can make a decision. I don't need feedback on each case. Nonetheless, the feedback that I receive is important in maintaining the framework that we have all learned. (It is not impossible for the community to be wrong.)

the question seems to be whether I have to know that X is true. — J

Yes and no. I think it is more accurate to say that the requirement of truth is a kind of absolute liability. I make my judgements, but they may turn out to be wrong later on. In that case, I have to withdraw my claim.

We can loosen that requirement, and say that "X is true" is pre-JTB and therefore not a knowable instance of truth. This seems to resemble more closely our actual practice. — J

It's true that we rarely consciously and specifically apply the JTB. It's a formalization of what (normally) we actually do in a messy, informal way. I don't understand what it would be for something to be "pre-JTB".

For what is a hallucination, and how do we talk about it? Is there an obvious consensus? Some would describe hallucinating as "seeing something that isn't there"; others would describe it as "thinking you see something that isn't there". Is there a meaningful difference, apart from choice of terms? — J

Asking the question "what is a hallucination?" in the sense that you seem to mean it presupposes that a hallucination is an object. It leads us to posit various other pseudo-objects as if they could magically explain away what puzzles us. But they can't. The whole point is that there is no object. But if you ask what leads us to say that someone is hallucinating, we look at what someone says and does - attributing a hallucination to them presents what's going on in a way we can understand. It is still puzzling and we look for explanations - there's no way round that.

He detested skepticism and believed he had refuted it. (And we have a perfectly good modern version of the Evil Demon: the "Matrix hypothesis.") — J

Very true. It is odd that there seem to be no philosophers who actually accept scepticism. They all try to explain it away or neutralize it. Mostly, other philosophers accept the destructive moment, but reject the constructive response.

He points out that it would be possible to doubt them. — J

The problem is that he does not consider what actual limitations there are on doubts, and reduces it to the possibility of saying "I doubt that..." in front of almost any proposition. But if we ask what the content, the reality, the significance, of the doubt is, we find nothing.

Let's say I'm in a "JTB situation"; that is, I want to find out whether I possess a piece of knowledge. Will the justifications that I cite -- the J in JTB -- for why I believe X refer to the same sorts of facts that, out in the world, would show whether statement X is true or false? — J

I think that the justifications are mostly the same sorts of facts that would show whether X is true or false. But there can be justifications to the effect that I am in a position, have the skills, to know - which are of a different kind or level.

I'm not convinced that Wittgenstein accepted JTB, in the way Sam26 seems to think. I read him in On Certainty more as pointing out that if we do accept JTB then these are the consequences - there are for instance things that we might casually say we know that are rules out as knowledge by the JTB account. — Banno

I don't think that JTB is the kind of thing that the later Wittgenstein would want to accept or reject - pointing out the consequences of acceptance and rejection and leaving us to make up our own minds is much more his style.

We can't know how a dog that has been run over feels. — Banno

I get the point. Applying JTB to a dog seems inappropriate, because the dog doesn't speak. As always with animals, applying our descriptions of what we know and feel to them needs to be done quite carefully. But I think we can attribute beliefs to dogs - and other animals, and we can ask how why they believe what they believe and assess whether their beliefs are true or not. The same applies to experiences - there's no doubt, IMO, that they feel pain, sometimes less and sometimes more. So I don't understand why you say this - unless you are thinking of our inability to know what it's like to be a bat.

Logic. But I'm thinking of Davidson here, too - interpretation and the principle of charity fit in with your comments regarding empathy... — Banno

Yes. That's not an accident. But what I'm especially interested in is, put it this way, the glitches in natural language that require us to develop or learn conceptual dodges that enable us to cope. My reply to @J earlier (bottom of last page) is a nice example. It's in a grey area between logic and psychology, but it is where, IMO, the later Wittgenstein is operating. The Blue Book is an excellent example, just because he is developing his methodology.

Belief only makes sense against a background of truth; it is, after all, what is thought true as opposed what is actually true. — Banno

That's true. But it requires, not just introspection, but an awareness of other people as different in certain ways. Arguably, that awareness is even essential to self-awareness and introspection beyond what Wittgenstein calls expressions in his discussion of pain, as in " the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it" (PI 244) and "How can I even attempt to interpose language between the expression of pain and the pain?" (PI 245.

Introspection is not immune from mistakes, because it is most always inferential. That one experiences what one presently experiences is, on the other hand, a brute given. — javra

H'm. I can see that one might use the words in those ways. But I would have called what you call the brute given, what I know by introspection, and called what you call introspection ordinary knowledge. But there is a fuzzy line between the experience of pain and the interpretations of pain (as caused by falling down or whatever). My doubts about what you are saying are around the fact that what you call he "brute given" is only by extension something that I know about. That requires me to distance myself from the experience itself and think about it in a way quite different from the simple reaction ("Ouch!"), which does not mean "I am in pain", which requires conceptualization.

As one very common example, visual experiences that occur during REM periods of sleep are all seen with the mind’s eye. So then people can’t say, “I saw X in a dream last night”? Yet this is common practice. — javra

I think the practice is all right. When I say "I saw X in a dream", I defuse the standard meaning of "see" by adding "in a dream". That signals that I'm aware that I didn't "really" see X. (Contrast the small child who wakes up in the middle of the night terrified by the wolves all round the house.)

I'd suggest that here truth is foundational, and knowledge derivative. — Banno

I'm not sure whether you are talking logic or child development here. But it seems to me that, from a child development perspective, this must be right. The development of empathy in small children has been much studied - admittedly the primary focus is on emotional empathy, but awareness of the different perspectives of other people (emotional and cognitive) is included. The philosophical relevance is that this is where the concept of knowledge becomes necessary for understanding what people do - or don't do. (Belief, it seems to me, must come later.)

But in any case, this is about choice of terminology. We could say to the drunk, "No, you didn't," and mean either "You saw nothing" or "What you saw wasn't a pink elephant." Neither one is obviously correct, apart from pedantry. — J

This is spot on. But I don't think it is just pedantry.

I'd say the mistake is in the use of "see". — J

I don't think there is any mistake at all. You are presenting a tediously familiar philosophical "problem" but in a way that makes us to look at the problem in a different way. The conceptual resources in your presentation do not allow a satisfying description of the situation. As you say, two contradictory answers seem both to be true. If you say the drunk saw nothing, you are not taking into account what they say and what they do - they do in fact behave as if they saw a pink elephant. If you say, what the drunk saw was not a pink elephant, you invite the question what they did see, and there is no answer, apart from nothing.

But we're all three dividing up the conceptual territory the same way. — J

I take it that the three of us are 1) someone who says the drunk saw nothing, and 2) someone who says what the drunk saw was not an elephant and 3) the drunk who says that they saw a pink elephant? ln which case, you are quite right. But your description is excluding the "straightforward" answer that the drunk is hallucinating a pink elephant.
So we can see that the concept of a hallucination resolves the problem - it squares the circle of three answers, none of which is satisfactory. I'm irresistibly tempted to say that it was (in some sense) designed to do just that.
In a sense, of course, it just kicks the can down the road, because the puzzle about what a hallucination actually is remains. Many philosophers have "resolved" it by distorting our concept of experiences, appearances, images or inventing a yet more puzzling concept like "sense-data" to explain the phenomena. But that is not a solution. It just kicks a much bigger can down the road. Common sense doesn't do that, but moves towards an explanation why all this is happening. So we needn't go down the philosophical road, but simply say that Macbeth's weird behaviour is the result of his guilty conscience or possibly a vision sent by God.

Okay. Presumably someone has to bring me food and drink and take away my waste. Do they come in to the room or push it in through a hatch. Do we talk - can I talk? Has this gone on since I was born, or how old was I when I was imprisoned here? Do I have access to books and videos and music? Do I know why I am imprisoned here? Is it for ever, or indefinitely or for a fixed term. All that makes a difference, doesn't it?

Yes, and, again, that was the entire point of the example given. — javra

I'm afraid I didn't realize that. Fair enough.

The person’s knowing that they are seeing a pink elephant is knowledge by acquaintance; it is non-inferential and so not contingent on justifications; — javra

Does that mean that you are thinking of seeing the pink elephant as introspection and so immune from mistake? I can't help feeling that applying the description "pink elephant" to whatever I am seeing is not immune from mistake.

In which case the intentionality associated with the believer's mental state is irrelevant with respect to the belief that the community ascribes to the believer — sime

I don't quite understand this. Our community ascribes false beliefs to people all the time and that's why they are called "intentional"

Beliefs refer to the actual physical causes of the believer's mental-state - in which case the believer's intentionality is relevant - so much so, that it is epistemically impossible for the believer to have false beliefs. — sime

I don't understand this either - apart from the first part. If beliefs did refer to the actual physical causes of the believer's mental state, we could never ascribe them to each other, since we mostly have no idea what they are.

On what grounds can you justify the likeliness of something changing outside the room if you've never been outside the room? — Michael

I.ve been around long enough to know the difference and to know what a fly is.

I don't think we have any criteria for determining what's real and what isn't in the philosophical sense. It's interesting to consider that this might be a dream or some kind of collective construct. — frank

Each to their own.

I didn't say that it is, just that it could be. We don't know. — frank

OK. But if you say we don't know, you are suggesting that if certain things happened, you would know. What might those be?

Still, it could be a collective dream. It really could be. We don't know. :grin: — frank

What's the evidence that it is?

All I can do is assume. But perhaps it looks and behaves very different when outside the room. It’s impossible for me to know. — Michael

No, you can work it out. If it is, say, a fly in the room, it is unlikely to change much outside the room. If it is a chrysalis or a caterpillar, it will likely be very different outside the room.

Still, I wonder: if we treat “reality-in-itself” as simply “what resists explanation until new concepts arrive,” doesn’t that risk reducing it to nothing more than the horizon of human cognition? In that case, the notion stops doing the metaphysical work Kant meant for it, and becomes more of a pragmatic placeholder. Do you think that’s an adequate way to interpret the tradition, or is something lost when we set aside the stronger claim that something exists independently of our ways of knowing? — Truth Seeker

I'm not sure that I'm interpreting the tradition, because that suggests that it makes sense. That's what I question. If I'm right, there is no metaphysical work for the concept to do.
I don't reject the claim that some things exist independently of our ways of knowing. I don't think that conceptualizing those things as unknowable is coherent - it gives with one hand and takes back with the other. I'm not always sure how we draw the line between what is independent of our ways of knowing and things that only exist because we think they do. Mathematical objects, for example, are hard to classify. There are much more interesting - and answerable - questions inherent in that approach.

On your last point, I agree that philosophers often overgeneralize. But if
“reality-in-itself” and “being-in-itself” are different, as you suggest, how would you articulate the difference without collapsing one into epistemology and the other into ontology? What criteria let us say: “this is about reality” vs. “this is about being”? Or is the best we can do to recognize that the distinction is heuristic rather than hard and fast? — Truth Seeker

The difference is hard to articulate. But I'm clear that most things that are not real do nonetheless exist, for the most part. But things that do not exist are not even usually even unreal. It is easy enough to draw the distinction when you consider specific cases, but very hard to generalize over all real things or all things that exist. I doubt whether such generalizations are even coherent.

As an analogy, let’s assume that I’m trapped in a windowless room. Something enters the room. I can see that it exists and what it looks like and how it behaves now that it’s in the room, but I don’t know that it existed or what it looked liked or how it behaved before it entered the room (or after it leaves); perhaps it’s very different (or doesn’t exist) when not in the room. — Michael

I don't think this analogy is helpful. What things can enter a windowless (and doorless) room? Sounds, maybe? Not much else. How did I get into the room? It seems that you do know what kind of thing the something is while it is in the room. That will give you a basis for working out what existence it has outside the room. I can see that you are trying to articulate the kind of vision that Berkeley has, but if it does anything, it makes Berkeley even more implausible.

So this may be a collective dream. We don't know. — frank

I don't think it is a question of whether it is or is not a collective dream, but of how one chooses to think about it or how one decides to approach and cope with the reality we experience.

If there were only one proposition, then how could there be an entailment? Gettier's argument depends on the entailment, and entailments involve at least two propositions. "The man who will get the job" does not refer to either Smith or Jones. It is a descriptor. What this means is that, contrary to your view, Smith is not uttering a tautology when he says, "Jones is the man who will get the job." Such an utterance is not the same as, "Jones is Jones," even for Smith. — Leontiskos

I think we are still talking past each other. I take your point that there is an entailment involved and that this must involve two propositions. I also take your point that "Jones is the man who will get the job" and "Jones is Jones" are not equivalent, even though A=A.

Let me try again:-

.. suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the fol1owing conjunctive proposition:
(d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. .....
Proposition (d) entails: (e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true. — Analysis. vol. 23 (1966)

I think we agree that (d) and (e) are two distinct propositions, and (d) implies (e).

But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. — Analysis. vol. 23 (1966)

That's right, because (e) also follows from (s) "Smith is the man who will get the job, and Smith has ten coins in his pocket." Now we know that if Jones gets the job, (e) will be true, and if Smith gets the job, (e) will be true. So it also follows that (e) is true, because whoever gets the job will have ten coins in his pocket.
But Smith only knows that if Jones gets the job, the man who gets the job will have ten coins in his pocket. So Smith is justified in believing (e) if "the man who gets the job" refers to Jones. He is not justified in believing (e) if (e) refers to Smith. So he is not justified in believing (e) if it refers to "whoever gets the job".

Your theory amounts to the idea that when Smith says, "The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket," he is saying something false. But when someone else says the exact same sentence, such as the hiring agent who knows that Smith has ten coins in his pocket, he is saying something true. — Leontiskos

No, I would not say exactly that. I do say that, given what S believes, when he asserts that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, he is asserting something that he does not know to be true. But when the hiring agent says the same sentence, that needs to be interpreted in the light of their knowledge and beliefs, and the hiring agent does know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Are we to say that Smith's belief is false? It depends whose point of view you regard as the appropriate context.

The "exact same" sentence may have different meanings if it is used (asserted) in different contexts. Suppose that A is 20 years old, and B is 40 years old. If A says "I am twenty years old", A is saying something true. If B says "I am twenty years old", B is saying something false.
I say that "I am twenty years old" said by A is a distinct statement from "I am twenty years old" said by B. A statement is a sentence as it is used in a specific context. Whether it is the same proposition or not, I do not opine, because, IMO, the concept of a proposition is not sufficiently clearly defined.
But if you are thinking of a proposition as something like the meaning of a sentence, I think you will still have trouble saying that "I am twenty years old" expresses the same proposition in both contexts, because it is true in one context and false in another. But you might say that "I am twenty years old" said by A means "A is twenty years old" and similarly for B. In that case, you still get two distinct meanings for the sentence and therefore two distinct propositions.

"The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket" has different references in different contexts. In the context of Smith's beliefs, it refers to Jones. In the context of our knowledge, it refers to Smith. There is a third context, and so a third meaning for this sentence, and that is the context before anyone knows who will get the job. As it happens, in that context, we know (but Smith does not) that whoever gets the job will have ten coins in his pocket.

So I think a material conclusion can differ from a formal conclusion, for example when both say the same thing and yet the "therefore" of the first is merely valid whereas the "therefore" of the second is sound. — Leontiskos

Could you please explain to me the difference between a material conclusion and a formal conclusions? I'm not familiar with it. I may have forgotten what it is.

I would go farther and say that you can see that their argument is correct. It's not so much a matter of trusting them. — Leontiskos

I would accept that. But I do have a reservation about the data. Unless I can make my own observations (or experiments), I have to trust the report of them. In order to pass on knowledge, we have to be able to assume a common context to at least some extent.

As one banal example, why must something which by all accounts appears to all everywhere to be a vase on a table in fact necessarily be a vase on a table—such that it being a vase is true—rather than, say, being an extraterrestrial alien which is camouflaged as a vase, or else an advanced hologram — javra

It depends what you mean by "necessarily". I suspect that you have in mind logical necessity, and that is not possible, because "there is a vase on the table" is contingent. In one way, I'll accept that we can imagine that the vase on my table is an alien or a hologram. But there is not a shred of evidence for either possibility, so there is no rational basis for an actual doubt. It is and empty possibility. In fact, when I try to imagine it, I cannot imagine how that possibility might have come about, except by a further fantasy which has little or no connection with reality. Contrast the possibility that the vase on the table is actually a listening device with a camera, planted by an evil agency to entrap me. But then, I can rule that out, so it is in a different class.

But I also think that is too strong and that we do know some things with certainty, because I don't think skepticism based on the bare logic possibility of error should be taken seriously. — Janus

Quite right too. (I sometimes wonder what distinguishes Descartes' evil demon from a paranoid fantasy.)

The reason I don't think it works is because if Smith were using "the man who will get the job" to refer to Jones, then there would not be an entailment involved. — Leontiskos

But Smith is using "the man who will get the job" to refer to Jones. Since Jones will not get the job, Smith's deduction is based on a false premiss and the conclusion is not justified (but not refuted either).

In that case rather than there being an entailment, Smith's two propositions would just be saying the same thing with different words. — Leontiskos

I don't follow this at all. Smith is not considering two propositions, but only one, and that proposition is false and so does not entail that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, so Smith's belief is justified only in a weak sense. It might be sufficient for the J clause in the JTB, but it is certainly not sufficient for the T clause.

Let me try again:-

But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, — Analysis. vol. 23 (1966)

It all depends on how you interpret the sentence "The man who will be appointed has ten coins in his pocket". As it stands here, the reference of "the man who will be appointed" is not fixed, or rather is fixed differently in the context of Smith's beliefs (where it refers to Jones) and in the context of the God's eye view of the narrator (and the audience) of Gettier's story (where it refers to Smith). In the context of Smith's beliefs (e) is justified but false, and in the context of the narrator and the audience, it is true. I don't know what criteria you have for "same proposition", but it seems to me that if a given sentence is true in one context and false in another, that sentence is expressing different propositions in each context. Certainly the same proposition cannot be true and false at the same time.

I don't think this is right. Someone can "justify" a claim to you and thereby show you that it is true. Thus one can learn from another on JTB precisely through the other's justification. — Leontiskos

Yes, perhaps I was a bit hasty there. Though if someone tells me that the earth goes round the sun, I can demand their proof and they can, no doubt, provide it - the data exist and the interpretation can be explained to me. But I would have to trust the data, or, perhaps collect a fresh set of data.

Again, in fallibilism, no justification (which is always epistemological in its nature) can guarantee the ontological occurrence of some given truth in question. — javra

That's a bit sweeping, isn't it? Certainly, an absolute guarantee of an empirical truth seems to be built in to their definition as contingent. But, if the conditions are met, surely we can guarantee the truth. Then there are the embedded or hinge propositions, which seem beyond the possibility of any coherent or rational doubt. Perhaps our choice is not between fallibilism or infallibilism across the board. After all, not all propositions (candidate truths) are of the same kind.

This is yet another thing from the prolific David Lewis, contextualism, the short version of which used to be that we do know things in everyday life that we don't know in the philosophy seminar room. — Srap Tasmaner

That's not an unreasonable idea. Nonetheless, if it turns out that we are wrong, we are expected to withdraw the claim to knowledge. I may be said to know that my car will be safe in the car park, and that may be well justified. But it is is stolen, I have to admit that I was wrong.

the truth of things which are true by definition and logical self-evidence is simply obvious, and just needs to be pointed out to be established in conscious understanding. — Janus

It is obvious to us. But we have learnt how to do reasoning as part of learning language and interacting with people.

It's not enough, for the sentence to be known, that we believe it to be true. It must also be true. — Banno

What bothers me is the interface between belief and reality. "It must be true" is the something more that is required. But once I have assessed the evidence, what more could there be? so I have difficulty in seeing what this amounts to. The best I can come up with is that claims to knowledge, like any other claim, have to be withdrawn if they turn out to be false. There may be cases in which the truth or otherwise of the proposition in question is finally and conclusively determined, but most of the everyday stuff doesn't come up to that standard. So the caution remains in place.

Well, I think Gettier creates a strange division between justification and truth, but the Gettier cases I am familiar with involve a proposition that is true, not false. — Leontiskos

It's not all that strange. A standard use of "justify" does indeed assume that if P is false, then there is no justification for believing that p. But this has the consequence that I can only be said to know P if I have a conclusive justification for P. That means that I do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun. So that definition can be said to be too strong. So many people believe we should relax the criterion and allow that I do know that the earth goes round the sun, even though I only believe it on authority. It is tempting to say that it follows that I can be justified in believing something even though it is false and Gettier explicitly says that is his assumption.

First, in that sense of "justified" in which S's being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S's knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false. — Analysis. vol. 23 (1966)

There's a wrinkle here that Gettier does not mention. It is clearly wrong to believe something that is known to be false and conclusive proof over-rides any non-conclusive justification. But where there is no conclusive evidence, one has to go with the evidence one has, and that does mean that one can be justified in believing something that turns out later to be false. That's a weakness in most of the cases. However, most people seem to go along with his (unstated) assumption that we must continue to call him justified when we know, but he does not, that his belief that Jones will get the job is false.

The proposition in question, in his first case, is

(e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. — Analysis. vol. 23 (1966)

Smith wrongly, but not without justification, believes that Jones is the man who will get the job, but the truth is that Smith will get the job. So Smith is using "the man who will get the job" to refer to Jones, but we (and Gettier) are using it to refer to Smith. That makes two different statements expressed in the same words. There is no problem. (This solution does not apply to all Gettier cases).

This has the awkward consequence that I can never learn anything from anyone else.
— Ludwig V
Why think that? — Leontiskos

JTB requires me to accept a claim to knowledge only if I know it is justified and true (and believed). But that means that I have to know p as well as the person claiming knowledge.

Kant framed it as noumenon, that which exists independently of our forms of cognition. — Truth Seeker

Actually, my understanding (admittedly based on encyclopedias) that there is a distinction iin Kant between the noumenon and Being-in-itself. But I'm not at all clear what that amounts to. Then there are all the various ways that philosophers have articulated Being-in-itselr. But I think we have to accept that there is a very respectable philosophical tradition that is sure that there is something beyond appearances.

Still, I wonder: do those successes give us reason to think we are asymptotically approaching reality-in-itself, or only that we are continually refining the human image of the world? — Truth Seeker

Refining and/or extending, I would say. I can't see beyond the frontier - that's how it is defined. So there's no way of telling which it is. On the other hand, we can't know if we are approaching, asymptotically or not, any kind of terminus.

Or do you lean toward collapsing them into a single problem about how language points beyond itself? — Truth Seeker

In a word, yes. There's an argument I encountered in learning about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that one cannot explain how a picture pictures - or at least, not by drawing a picture. (If you can understand my picture of picturing, you can already understand a picture. If you can't understand a picture, drawing a picture is just more of what you don't understand. That's one way of understanding Wittgenstein's showing, not saying. So I think that that how language points beyond itself is something one can show, but not say. Very frustrating for philosophers. Yet every human baby gets it. Most animals are very bad at it, though I'm told that pigs can do it.

But, as you point out, every example we can give (light spectra, bird magnetoreception, etc.) still relies on human conceptual frameworks to describe it. — Truth Seeker

How could that not be so? Anything we could come up with would immediately become a human conceptual framework. The only way out of the puzzle is to turn it round and look at it the other way. Human conceptual frameworks enable understanding the world, including letting us understand what we cannot grasp.

So maybe “reality-in-itself” always risks being a placeholder for “what we don’t yet know how to grasp — Truth Seeker

My inclination is to say that the whole thing is a mistake, resulting from the regrettable tendency of philosophers to test everything to destruction. Yet it is a well-established way of thinking and the moving frontier is the best I can do by way of extracting some sense from what people say about it.
But I would insist that Reality-in-itself is not a thing, nor is there a special class of things that we can separate off as being real, leaving whatever is unreal on one side. We know something about everything and there is much that we don't know about everything. Mostly, it's a question of aspects, not of distinct objects - though there are also unknown objects, I've no doubt. The story of the discovery of pulsars is a nice example. A mysterious phenomenon resists every attempt at explanation. Finally, after studying it more carefully, we develop a concept which "saves" the phenomena and a new kind of object enters our collective ontology.

Do you think it’s coherent to maintain that these distinctions are useful heuristics even if, in practice, we can never step outside cognition to test them? — Truth Seeker

We can always push at the boundaries and find places and methods where there are new forms of cognition to be had.

Or do you lean toward collapsing them into a single problem about how language points beyond itself? — Truth Seeker

Language is always important, but I'm not sure that it is ever the whole story. I do think philosophers should be much more careful about generalizations and pay more attention to differences. So it's quite tempting to sweep reality-in-itself and being-in-itself together and I'm sure they are related. But I'm also sure that they are different, and both need to be recognized.

I don't see how belief would be destroyed, but there is at least one sense in which justification and truth rise or fall together. But that gets us back to Sam26's questions about Gettier's objection. — Leontiskos

You are right that there is at least one sense in which justification and truth rise or fall together. But Gettier's argument assumes that they do not, that is, that it is possible to be justified in believing that p and for p to be false. In that case, the link between JTB and knowledge rests entirely on the T clause. But if I'm evaluating whether someone knows that p, I must make my own evaluation of the truth or falsity of p, which re-introduces the entire process.

That the sentence is true is one of the criteria for the sentence being known. This says nothing about how we determined if the sentence is true. — Banno

I agree with you. But does that mean that the definition must take the truth or falsity of the sentence as given, in some way?

You seem to have an image of an investigator looking at a sentence and saying "ok, Criteria one: I believe this sentence; criteria two: this sentence is justified by such-and-such; but criteria three: how can I decide if the sentence is true?" But that's not how the idea would be used - there's an obvious circularity in such a method, surely. If you believe the sentence (criteria one), then you already think it to be true and criteria three is irrelevant. — Banno

Considering the process of applying the definition is interesting. I don't often see it raised. It seems just obvious to me that it must be my evaluation of the knower's justification (NOT my justification), my evaluation of the truth, and the knower's belief. That means, IMO, that I have to take a position on whether the sentence is true or not. This has the awkward consequence that I can never learn anything from anyone else. That seems to make the concept of knowledge a bit limited and rules out the possibility of standing on anyone's shoulders, giant or not.

First, when you suggest that “partly” knowing reality-in-itself implies that we do in fact know something of it, what safeguards do we have against simply projecting structures of our cognition outward and mistaking them for reality? — Truth Seeker

I'm afraid I'm somewhat handicapped here, in that I don't really understand what reality-in-itself is. I mostly understand Reality as everything and anything that is real. I difficulty understanding that because most things are real when we describe them in one way, but not real when we describe them in other ways. There's not one group of real objects and a distinct group of unreal objects.
But then I don't understand what "reality-in-itself" is. Your concern about simply projecting the structures of cognition outward is not unreasonable. But there's no single answer. We have to consider case by case. If we do that, we find ways of distinguishing between projections and reality. We see a particular spectrum of light, and we have discovered that the spectrum is much wider than just the colours. But we have discovered that by means of our vision as it is and we have developed ways of grasping the invisible parts of the spectrum. We know that some birds (migratory ones) can perceive the magnetic field of the earth and use that to navigate from A to B even though we don't (directly) perceive it ourselves. So there may be distortions in our perception of the world, but we can deal with them when we discover them.

Second, you asked how “reality-in-itself” differs from “Being-in-itself.” For me, “reality-in-itself” gestures toward what exists independently of any observer, while “Being-in-itself” (to use Sartre’s term) connotes the sheer presence of things apart from consciousness. They might overlap, but one emphasizes ontology, the other epistemology. I’m curious: do you see them as distinct, or just two ways of naming the same riddle? — Truth Seeker

But don't both those definitions create a puzzle about what does exist independently of any observer, or what the presence of things apart from consciousness is. What are the criteria that tell us these differences? Or are you asking what we know independently of all the ways we have of knowing anything? It's like asking how we can walk without legs. Of pay for things without money.
At the moment, I'm trying to work out whether they are distinct issues or different varieties of the same issue. I suspect they are quite closely related, but not identical. It's possible that they may be the same issue formulated as epistemology and then as ontology, but the fact that Reality does not equal Existence tells against that.

I also like your suggestion that empiricism, rationalism, phenomenology and pragmatism are not mutually exclusive. Maybe the question isn’t ‘which is right?’ but ‘how can they work together?’ to give us the most complete account of reality. — Truth Seeker

That's a very interesting idea, but, as you say, it isn't quite clear how all of them might be fitted together. One might start by observing that empiricism and rationalism do seem to fit together in the sense that they deal with different things - experience vs concepts. But fitting in the other two is more difficult.

For me, the open problem is: if all our approaches (empirical, rational, phenomenological, pragmatic) remain within the limits of human cognition, how do we ever know we are not simply locked inside those limits rather than perceiving reality as it is? — Truth Seeker

A lot depends on how you think about it. In some sense or other, we can describe limits to our cognition. But how do we know about them? It can't be because we can get beyond them, so it must be that our knowledge within its limits points to, or, possibly, even creates, the idea of something more to be known. The other observation I would make is that one can consider what we can know and bemoan our fate in being confined within them, ignoring the fields of knowledge that those limits create. There are two sides to a limit; on one side there's all that is open to us, on the other side, there is all that is closed to us.
If we can have so much as the idea that there is something beyond out limits, we open up the possibility of transgressing the limits and exploring beyond the frontier. If we then look at our history, it seems pretty clear that we then work out how to extend out knowledge beyond them. The limit is a moving frontier, not so much a limit as a border between what we have learnt and what we will discover.

Do we need to accept that reality-in-itself will always remain partly unknowable? — Truth Seeker

"Partly" is interesting. You seem to be accepting that we do in fact know some things about reality-in-self. Which suggest that we can know more. No doubt, there will always be more to be learnt - every answer is the foundation for the next question. Perhaps this is just an infinite process and the idea that our knowledge will ever be complete is no more than the impossibility of completing such a process.
But I'm not sure what you mean by "reality-in-itself". How does it differ from "Being-in-itself"?

If the latter, (sc. "what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use?") then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture. — Joshs

I'm not sure whether you are talking about the picture as a shadow-object (the illusion that W is trying to show is superfluous), or about the relevant sentence (which he compares to a picture). I think that, in your example of the two photographs, the photographs are doing the job of the sentence, and that this is consonant with what he is trying to say.

I mean that part of the point of the concept of an object is that it persists through a variety of contexts. — Ludwig V

If that's right, then, what is happening with the two photographs is a question of how we interpret the photographs, rather than of the photographs themselves.
A side-note - a important curiosity here is that some differences between the two images may be crucial in our deciding that it is the same car in both pictures. The car will have aged and maybe undergone events that leave traces in the photographs - a dent, a patch of rust, a sticker. When we say it is the same car, we take that in to account and actually rely on those changes as evidence that it is the same car.


I haven't much to say about these pages. They are splendid examples of his method and I think they are very clear and work well. Hi remarks about method are also very helpful. But I do have some comments.

Ironically, our confidence in our personal experience leaves us without a shared world, only “a lot of separate personal experiences of different individuals”, — Antony Nickles

It is ironic that the search for certainty ends up by removing, or making problematic, so much of what we want to be certain of. The supreme irony here is that W's account of "I have a pain" as an "expression" as opposed to a description, trades on the absolute certainty of our experiences, but turns it into a problem, rather than a secure foundation. The price of certainty is the inability to say anything.
(There's a similarity here with the parallel issue about analytic statements, which cannot tell us anything just because they are so "secure")

Our investigation tried to remove this bias, which forces us to think that the facts must conform to certain pictures embedded in our language. — p.43

This expresses an ambivalence about our (ordinary) language which is perhaps rather glossed over, not only in some of W's own remarks, but also in "ordinary language philosophy. Ordinary language is sometimes "all right as it is", but sometimes it is not. The trick is to tell the difference.

But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them. — p.48

It is very hard to persuade people to accept W's stance, for example, that neither realism not ant-realism are correct or incorrect and that what is necessary is to understand both in order, one might say, to transcend them.

I added this example as an after-though:-

the expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence;--and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus. Now we are tempted to imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the sentence as written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated, in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there--all in a lump. The mental act seems to perform in a miraculous way what could not be performed by any act of manipulating symbols. Now when the temptation to think that in some sense the whole calculus must be present at the same time vanishes, there is no more point in postulating the existence of a peculiar kind of mental act alongside of our expression. — p. 42

W makes clear, admittedly without saying so, that, in a sense, the calculus is present whenever we speak or write. But in a lump, and not in the sense required by the idea of a mental act of thinking - not that that idea could contain the whole of language "in a lump" without magical properties.

His method allows us perspective on thinking as the assumption that we just speak our “thoughts” (not in the sense of voicing our inner dialogue), by asking “what do we say if we have no thought?” and then pointing out the sense of speaking thoughtlessly as simply not considering beforehand the consequences of saying something in a particular context. — Antony Nickles

Now here's a difficulty. The trick here is to juxtapose a sense in which one can speak thoughtlessly with the philosophical doctrine, in such a way that the emptiness of the doctrine stands out. But much depends here on the reaction of the audience, who, I find, are a bit liable to object that they did not mean that, so that the two sides are speaking past each other.

Do you mean that I am using “same” as a rule which outlaws beforehand certain ways among others that we may use general and generality, — Joshs

That is what I was suggesting.

or that general and generality are exclusively associated with specific ways of use (“the” ways we actually use them, versus a potential infinity of possible uses)? — Joshs

Not quite that. It would be incautious of me to deny the possibiity of non-standard uses of "general" and "generality". All I was saying was the standard logical definition of "same" (A=A) makes standard uses of "general" and "generality" pointless or reduces standard uses to sloppy versions of the strict or pure use that logicians prefer. For me, it is A=A that is non-standard - not wrong, exactly, but a limiting case.

What I was trying to do was not outlaw any particular use of “same” , but to point to a use of same which relies on the consultation of a picture. — Joshs

That is very helpful.

If we say that two photos of an object depict the same object, or we stare repeatedly at an object and report that our perception continues to be of the same object, should we say that the sense of ‘object’ here is unique to the specific context and instant of use, or that what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use? If the latter, then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture. — Joshs

Two pictures of my car - one in London and one in Edinburgh, say - are two pictures of the same object. Clearly that object transcends the instant and context of each picture - in some sense of "transcend". (Actually, the idea of an object that exists only at an instant or in a specific context is - let's say - a bit odd, or perhaps specialized. I mean that part of the point of the concept of an object is that it persists through a variety of contexts.)

Would you agree that if there is no essence of meaning of any word , then there is no essence of meaning of ‘particular’, and likewise no essence of meaning of ‘general’, paradigm, game, category, etc? — Joshs

Yes. But you seem to me to be laying down an essence of "same" and using that as a rule which outlaws the ways in which we actually use "general" and "generality".

The answer to: “Why are you tense, steadying yourself, holding your breath?” is not: “I have an expectation.” — Antony Nickles

The answer to idealism, in a nutshell.

As well, I see “groping for a word” not as putting a word to something “already expressed” internally (p. 41), but as an activity (though perhaps just passive waiting). In this sense, the expression is only in having found the word, in the saying of it (to you or myself). — Antony Nickles

I think of it, not as a repetition of something stored, but as a recreation, in which each element is added because it "fits" with the previous one. Or, the metaphor of the pearls being drawn out of a box, but are not stored in the box, but (re-)created at the moment that it is needed.

(The power of this “must” I take as very important to why all the forced analogies and “fixed standards” (p.43), but so far he only goes so far as to blame our forms of speech—not yet seeing the need driving it). — Antony Nickles

That's a nice example of how a new position can generate the next question.

I think it is worth noting that he wants to add back in a sense of “private” thinking and experiences, — Antony Nickles

Perhaps this passage should be quoted more often in debates about the PLA.

I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there 'must be' what is called a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc. — p. 41

It is striking, at least to me, that what he means by a mental process is a conscious process, which we can become aware of if we pay attention what we are conscious of from moment to moment. It's an effective tactic, even if it smacks more of phenomenology than logic. But I am puzzled about the mental processes posited by congitive science. I have the impression that these writing do not pay attention to the difference between conscious and unconscious processes. That allows the argument that the must be certain processes going on that we are not aware of - i.e. unconscious processes. (No doubt this is not intended in a dualistic sense, but is based on the assumption that a physical substrate will be identified in due course.

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time. — Joshs

Yes, you get that result if you think of same in the light of the logical axiom that A=A is the paradigm of sameness. Actually, for me, it is the limiting case of sameness and is the point at which it is deprived of all real meaniing. Obviously, any generalization must be applicable to a range of particular cases, which may will likely not be identical in all respects, as required by our paradigm. But the concept of a paradigm allows for differences. In short, your argument suggests that generality is, strictly speaking, impossible. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum but it is certainly a reduction to pointlessness.

Part of what Newman is doing here is arguing that, in the more primary epistemic sense, law has to do with will and not with nature. He is turning Hume on his head, and will continue to do so. — Leontiskos

Thank you for that quotation.
I guess Hume will survive being turned on his head. It is no more than what he tried to do to the "Schoolmen". But Newman's argument is reminiscent of Berkeley's, and, presumably, gets to a very similar conclusion. I'm not greatly bothered by his argument about natural the uniformity of nature, since I don't consider it to be a truth, but a methodological presupposition. governing the search for order in the world.

The distinction follows from the metaphysics in the same way that someone who accepts the Doctrine of Transcendentals will acknowledge a distinctive logical function for One, Good, and True and their derivatives (Something, Thing, Beautiful, etc.), in that they are transcategorical and that they are conceptual/logical (as opposed to real) distinctions that add nothing to Being but which are coextensive with it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’ve never understood metaphysics and I don’t know enough about the doctrine to dissect this. But it looks as if metaphysics and logic reflect each other here and that someone who accepts the doctrine of transcendentals agrees that there is a distinction that is at least very similar to the modern fact/value distinction.

It would be like arguing for moral realism on the grounds that the Doctrine of Transcendentals makes a different logical distinction re "Good." — Count Timothy von Icarus

So I guess you don’t buy the argument. In that case, it is irrelevant.

As noted earlier, I don't think "good" always indicates or approves of an action. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m open to examples.

On something like an Aristotleian account, the goodness of actions is always parasitic. Goodness is primarily descriptive there and grounded in final causes, and particularly in beings (organisms). — Count Timothy von Icarus

A lot depends on the details. What is the goodness of actions parasitic on? If goodness is primarily descriptive, like theoretical statements, how come it can move us to action, as in his paradigm example, “Dry food is good”. But the key questions are 1) whether “good” is univocal, like “red” or changes its meaning according to context, like “real” or “exists” or “large” and 2) whether Aristotle (and Aristotelians) are right to posit a Single Supreme Good and 3) the role of those things (activities) that are “good in themselves” or “good for their own sakes”, like theoretical reason, music and friendship.
Now I’ve mentioned “real”, I need to say that I don’t feel a great need to answer the philosophical issue, in relation to values or anything else. There are certainly values of several sorts, moral values included; the questions are about their nature, their role in our lives. I don’t see that recognizing a distinction between facts (which also exist) and values brings that into question in any way.

Even in common language today though, "good" often seems to be used in strictly descriptive ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An explanation of what you mean by “in strictly descriptive ways”, possible including examples would help enormously.

Nor do I think that what makes a claim "evaluative" is generally clear. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with you. We’ve been using both “descriptive” and “evaluative”, not to mention “fact” and “value” and “is” and “ought” on the assumption that we have a common understanding. Which may well not be true. But the context of our discussion is morality and ethics, so that kind of evaluation is obviously the focus. That should help a bit.

"That's hot" can be a claim recommending action. It can also be merely descriptive. "That's too big," is often a claim recommending action, but it can also be descriptive. Context determines if it is taken to recommend action or not. But more to the point, no one thinks that because "that's too big," or "that will break it" might recommend action, that they are not also, and often simultaneously fact claims and descriptions. Their being evaluative in one context doesn't remove their descriptive nature. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is difficult. One could well say that the difference between description and evaluation is the use made by sentences in a context. Then we would need to say that descriptive statements are statements whose use in standard contexts is descriptive and similarly for evaluative statements.
But we need to think, for example, about what kind of arguments or evidence supports or undermines a descriptive vs an evaluative statement (use of a sentence), and what kinds of role they play in our language and life.

Anyhow, perhaps I interpreted this wrong, but you seemed to be supporting the general fact/value distinction in light of the logical distinction. If so, I would say this argument is circular. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I thought I was trying to articulate a logical distinction. What is the general fact/value distinction as distinct from the logical fact/value distinction?

Note that the move to subjectivize value here could just as well he made for all descriptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe so, but that’s a different issue, isn’t it?

Some people make a differentiation between first person declarative and third person informational statements. I find this distinction more useful, but it cuts across claims of value and "facts" and does not presuppose the two are exclusive. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are certainly important differences between the two. But if they cut across the fact/value distinction, how are they helpful?

In any case, there obviously often is assertoric force. If there is, then "x is y" is equivalent with "it is true that x is y." Now, we might not believe that "x is y," but surely if it is really true we ought to affirm it, right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, if x is y, then you do well to answer the question “Is x y?” in the affirmative. But asserting that x is y just because you believe it is, well, a bit odd. Am I supposed to assert everything I believe. How often? What happens if I don’t?
Asserting what one believes is one activity that expresses one’s beliefs. But then, any action for which x being y is a good reason expresses one’s beliefs just as well. When x being y is not relevant, it doesn’t come up.

Although, I suppose it's true that for the values anti-realist "y is true" never implies "affirm y," and the move to affirm y must always come from irrational, inchoate sentiment. …. Whereas the counter to the effect that we have a "sentimental" desire for truth qua truth ("all men desire to know") is just reintroducing the rational appetites with the adjective "sentimental" tacked on. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, I see, this is about the rational appetites. Well, I’ll acknowledge a desire for truth. But I don’t think there is anything special about that desire. Like others, it can be excessive or deficient. Like others, it has to take its place among our other desires and values. A being that was devoted to truth and nothing else would not last long in this world; I don’t think I could recognize it as a human being.
But there’s another point about this. Like many others, I think that our emotions and feelings (sentiments) can be rational – that’s why they can be assessed as irrational. But their connection with actions mean that they are reasonable, as opposed to logical. It is reasonable to fear the lorry that is hurtling towards us and reasonable to get out of its way. In that context, the emotivist’s account of morality looks rather different, doesn’t it?

This is very similar to his claim that we never sense causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps so, but how is it relevant?

The idea that "good" involves something like "thou shalt" or that "ought" primarily denotes duty or obligation (or even action), is a product of that context. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps so. But I think we should evaluate the idea for its own sake, in our context, rather than anyone else’s. Rejecting an idea just because of it’s original context seems a bit like prejudice to me. Actually, what I was trying to say was something vaguer, more like statements of value can be major premisses in a practical syllogism – or statements of value (and so of desire) explain the motivations for action in a way that statements of fact do not.

I'll respond to the rest later but I wanted to point out a potential miscommunication: — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this discussion is getting too complicated. I would like to set aside the historical debate. However, I can’t resist two observations – I don’t expect you to agree with me, but I think we can make more progress by focusing on the core issues. This post is about sorting out the focus, setting aside debates, not because they are not worth while, but because one cannot deal with everything at once.

1.Likewise, one need not suppose that Hume rejects final and formal causality on theological grounds to accept that he is writing in a context where final and formal causality have already been excised from "scientific/philosophical discourse" primarily on theological grounds. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s true that Hume was not involved in the ejection of final and formal causality from physics but that he was writing in the context of that decision. Whether that decision was made primarily on theological grounds is another question. I don’t have the expertise whether that was so or not, so I won’t argue the point.

2. I am referring to the section in Book III where he says that we never sense (touch, smell, see, etc.) vice or badness.
"Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. … The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object." — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a regular technique for the empiricists, isn’t it? There’s always a catch. Here, it is “as long as you consider the object” – our attention is directed away from the context. Certainly Berkeley is very fond of this move, though he doesn't let it get in the way of a good argument. I don’t set much store by it. But consider the end of that section.

Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of these be pleasure and uneasiness ; and if favourable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behaviour. — Hume Treatise III. 1. i.

That doesn’t sound like moral anti-realism to me. On the contrary, what he seems to think he has found is a foundation for virtue and vice that is consonant with his methodology. There are problems with it, of course. First, there is the let-out clause “If favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice”. I’m sure many people would point out that our sentiments are often not particularly favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice. In addition, there is the Euthyphro question, whether the gods love piety because it is good or whether piety is good because the gods love it. On top of that, there is Moore’s fallacy.
Hume is more complicated, even slippery, than he is usually thought to be. I think standard representations of him are misrepresentations. But I don’t think it’s a black-and-white issue.

The distinction follows from the metaphysics in the same way that someone who accepts the Doctrine of Transcendentals will acknowledge a distinctive logical function for One, Good, and True and their derivatives (Something, Thing, Beautiful, etc.), in that they are trans-categorical and that they are conceptual/logical (as opposed to real) distinctions that add nothing to Being but which are coextensive with it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’ve never understood metaphysics and I don’t know enough about the doctrine to dissect this. But it looks as if metaphysics and logic reflect each other here and that someone who accepts the doctrine of transcendentals agrees that there is a distinction that is at least very similar to the modern fact/value distinction.

It would be like arguing for moral realism on the grounds that the Doctrine of Transcendentals makes a different logical distinction re "Good." — Count Timothy von Icarus

So I guess you don’t buy the argument. So I won't let it distract me.

He does not take up the influential arguments for the appetites associated with reason, but simply declares they cannot exist. But I consider the phenomenological and psychological arguments made for such appetites to be quite strong, and Hume's declarations to be quite destructive, so I have no idea why we should take them seriously. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK. Would you mind explaining what the arguments are that you consider to be quite strong? I’m intrigued by the idea of appetites associated with reason.

The fact/value distinction in Hume (see Book II) is justified in a circular fashion from this premise. — "Count

Hume’s wraps up his premiss in some rather confusing flourishes, but he realizes that no set of facts can provide a deductive proof of any statement of value and sets out to provide an alternative explanation. Are you saying that he is wrong about that?

We experience obscenity, depravity, cruelty, etc. — "Count

Hume doesn’t disagree with you. On the contrary, he argues that morality is based on our responses to those experiences – on how we feel about them. He realizes that those responses can’t be validated by deductive reasoning, but believes that, nonetheless, they are the basis of morality. I think that’s an over-simplification, but not unreasonable as part of a more comprehensive theory.
The biggest weakness in his argument, in my view, is that he seems to think of experience and our reactions to it as something given. He doesn’t distinguish between what our experience is and how we have learnt to interpret it. That knocks a big hole in the idea that experience is the foundation of knowledge – and, indeed, or morality. That doesn’t rule it out as a contribution to or a factor in our knowledge and morality.

Hume's argument, that "virtue and vice" don't show up in our "sense data" is extended into the seeming reductio claims of later empiricists and phenomenologists, that we also don't experience cats, trees, the sun, etc., — "Count

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Yes. Actually, it was Berkeley that first articulated that argument and critics made the same criticism. It didn’t impress Berkeley and it doesn’t seem to impress modern idealists either. I don’t know why Hume is not also subjected to it.

what we are given to understand is a contextual sense of an object that cannot be swallowed up within a more general categorical definition on it. — Joshs

Broadly, that's ok with me.

The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense. — Joshs

I'm a bit puzzled about what "swallowed up" means here. We only ever encounter particular houses and particular people. Even though they are particular, they can be described in terms of generalities.

we are only aware of the need to explain or clarify before or after the expression. Sometimes there is no “understanding”; we don’t speak of it when I ask you to pass the salt, as you say, “trading on shared assumptions and attitudes.” — Antony Nickles

Yes. There's an interplay between what we are aware of, what W calls a mechanism of the mind - I think of it as the unconscious. Understanding seems to occur in both ways. But perhaps we need a third category - our ability to explain ourselves, to answer questions. A disposition is odd. It manifests in certain circumstances and not in others. In between manifestations, there's nothing - except counter-factuals about what I would do or what might manifest itself in a different context.

I'm not denying a difference between commands and recommendations and descriptions, just the idea that so descriptions involving values are actually commands or expressions of emotion. Such theories do violence to language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wasn’t suggesting that descriptions involving values are actually commands. I was pointing out that descriptions involving values are also commands, or, more accurately, have the force of commands, etc.

The idea that "good" always refers to something like "thou shalt" is a product of Reformation volanturist theology, the tradition that shapes Hume. To say that all value claims are about "thou shalt" isn't to observer an ironclad law of philosophy or language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn’t limit that list to commands, or recommendations, but was gesturing towards a connection between certain descriptions and action (or inaction).

It's just the (originally explicitly theological) premise that shaped Hume's context, i.e., "there is no intrinsic value (teloi) because intrinsic value would be a constraint on the divine will. Thus, value must be about divine command." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The theological premiss may have been the first version of the idea. But, given that he does not mention it, I think we can be reasonably sure that it was not Hume’s premiss.

"This is a great car," does not mean "thou shalt drive my car," or even "I should drive my car," just as "this is good (healthy) food" does not directly convert to "thou shalt eat this food," or even "you ought to eat this food." This is even more obvious when we move to the beings that most properly possess goodness. "Peter is a good man," need not mean "thou shalt choose Peter," or "I recommend Peter." It can, but it needn't; it can be merely descriptive. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m sorry, I seem to have misled you. I was not saying that any description was synonymous with any command, in the sense that one “directly converts” to the other. I was saying that many descriptions have the force of commands, or recommendations, or (Hume’s favourite) approbations or even expressions of emotion. (I’m assuming that you are reasonably familiar with the concept of speech acts.)

Centuries of war waged against intrinsic value in the language haven't been able to paper over these issues. While "that's a good tiger," might seem a bit odd in English, descriptive value statements made in a slightly different ways are still common and natural. Hence, "that tiger is a perfect specimen," or "that is a perfect tiger," is generally about the tiger as tiger, not recommending the tiger or commanding us to do anything vis-á-vis the tiger. So too, "that is a pathetic, miserable bush," isn't telling us to do anything vis-á-vis the bush, but is normally telling us something about the bush as a bush. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are cases where it doesn’t make sense to describe them as “good”, such as, “This is a good disease”. I surmise that’s because their badness is built in to the concept. In other cases, like “tiger”, it may be because they have been known to kill us, and are dangerous. They are very good at hunting; the catch is that they are perfectly capable of applying those skills to hunting human beings. In yet other cases, the oddity may be because there are no criteria for evaluating them. I suspect “planet” may be such a concept; “oxygen” may be another.
Let’s think about dog shows. The rules for these competitions include descriptions of the various breeds. The rules for a Shih Tzu and for an Old English Sheep Dog are different, but they specify what makes one competitor better than another in each class. To evaluate a Shih Tzu by the criteria for an Old English sheep dog is a solecism or a misunderstanding or nonsense.
The project here is to specify criteria for the evaluation of each competitor. Identifying a dog as a Shih Tzu tells us that specimen conforms to the criteria, to a greater or lesser extent, and so justifies the classification; but the rules also justify evaluating specimen as better or worse than another. It is essential to the project that description and evaluation are distinct activities, linked by the rules. This is a formalization of a conceptual structure that is very common in our language, and which presupposes that description and evaluation are distinct. Another field with a similar, but different, structure is the legal definition of a crime – murder, say, or theft.

So let me ask a pointed question: does the descriptive statement "x is y" essentially mean "you ought to affirm that x is y is true?" If not, then why, if y is "good" would it automatically change to "you ought to do y." — Count Timothy von Icarus

1) No. 2) Because “good” is an evaluation and “x is y” is a description.

To be sure, we ought to choose the good and avoid the bad. But we also want to affirm truth and reject falsity. And yet we don't say that "x is true" becomes equivalent with "affirm x," and so "x is good" shouldn't be subject to this sort of transformation either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The whole point of the distinction is that a (pure) description is not equivalent to an evaluation. But some concepts have both descriptive and evaluative components; sometimes, in specific context, a description may be treated as an evaluation.
I don’t think that “x is y”, of itself, suggests that we should affirm it or should not affirm it, except in specific contexts. Sometimes we should and sometimes we should not. (Cf. Kant on truth-telling)

More later…

The separation of practical and theoretical reason was centuries old. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, indeed - even millennia old. So why do you think that the fact/value distinction is a distinctive error of empiricism - or even an error at all?
(As I remember it, Aristotle even asserts that "Reason, by itself, moves nothing". That's what motivates his construction of the practical syllogism.)

It's precisely the assumption that there are no final causes (and perhaps, no facts about goodness) that allows for a novel move here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you are over-simplifying here. That decision was a re-configuration of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, not, or at least not necessarily, an abandonment of the ideas of purposes and values. Oversimplifying again, final causes are not the province of science, that's all.

Prior thinkers hadn't missed the difference between "ought" and "is;" yet they thought there could be descriptive statements about the good and beautiful (just as we can speak about what "ought to happen" given purely descriptive predictive models"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is true that the interface between fact and value, or between theoretical and practical reason, is more complicated than is usually recognized. We do not always draw a clear distinction between the two, so one can always turn an evaluative statement into a factual statement - and there are many concepts that combine the two. Yet we can also to disentangle them. "Murder" combines fact and value, but I think everyone understands how to distinguish between the two aspects. "Abortion is illegal" is, in one way, a statement of fact and not of value (unless one is arguing that one ought to obey the law). But we can also ask whether abortion ought to be illegal. We can also, I think, see the difference between "ought" of expectation and prediction ("we ought to get home in three hours") and "ought" of moral or ethical principles ("you ought to be on time for this appointment"). The factor that can create confusion is that we usually expect people to meet their moral and ethical obligations.

You can see this in the fact that if you replace "good" in the second statement with "common" you get a straightforwardly descriptive statement: "It is common for people to be kind to their mothers." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Surely you can see that those two statements have very different force? One implies an instruction or command, or recommendation. The other doesn't. "`It is common for people to take a summer vacation" is an observation which does not have the force of a recommendation or instruction, while "It is good for people to take a summer vacation" does not imply that it is common and is compatible with it being rare to do so, but it does imply that one should. When the surgeon holds out his hand and calls "scalpel", it's an instruction and the surgeon expects the nurse to put one in his hand; when the nurse holds up a scalpel and asks what it is, the same word is a description - there is no expectation that the nurse will put it in his hand.

It seems to me to be akin to demanding that every logical argument include the additional premise that: "we ought affirm the true over the false" tacked on to it. Granted, I see no problem in adding either since they seem obviously true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, a logical argument does not require that premiss. If the argument is sound, it is sound whether or not people affirm the conclusion. It is true that when we are trying to explain the force of these arguments, we try to explain that, and why, we ought to affirm the conclusion. It's a knotty problem.

Sometimes I feel like his examples here are just terrible. I mean is it just me or waaaaay too unnecessarily esoteric for the point he is trying to make, except that he seems to feel he needs to chase the rabbit all the way down the hole to cover as many senses/analogies in which philosophy might frame our thinking as objects, etc. — Antony Nickles

I'm glad you mention that. I agree with you, and there should not be a problem about recognizing that Homer sometimes nods. I still have no way of shifting my feeling that something has gone wrong in the discussion of imagination and the question whether we can imagine the abolition of redness.

Most importantly, understanding is not “present” during communication. Understanding happens after expression, in coming back to it, .... — Antony Nickles

Yes. I think that W is right to point to the importance of explanations after the event. But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication. Surely understanding is expressed in communication and in even in non-communicative action. In any normal action, there is a huge amount of complexity and we may be unable to resolve various ambiguities simply of the basis of a single action. Then we need to clarify after the event. But a great deal of that complexity can be expressed in the processes of planning and preparation, before the action.

philosophy interprets the sheer possibility of disconnection, and the difficulty of reconnecting, as if the “problem” is in the activity of (always) connecting which is then just a puzzle to “know”, like a “a queer mechanism” (cue some neuroscience). — Antony Nickles

Philosophy wants to construct a logical structure of the action and then turn it into an actual structure "in the mind". It's like insisting that all arguments be expressed in formal logical format, even when we actually utter a short version, trading on shared assumptions and attitudes.

But I think this leads to an unfortunate and common conflation where the second sort of "empiricism" is appealed to in order to justify the first sort, such that all scientific progress is called on as evidence for the superiority of the first sort of empiricism, and a rejection of empiricism is said to be a rejection of science. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. It is odd that those theories are often classified as idealist.

Yet to my point in the OP, if our epistemology leads us to this—to dismiss claims as seemingly obvious as "it is bad to have my arm broken," or "it is bad for children to be poisoned at school" as lacking any epistemic grounding (i.e., not possibly being facts)—then I'd say this is an indication that we simply have a bad epistemology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I can see your point. But it's only an over-view. It needs a slightly more detailed argument.

I think this is especially actue in metaethics, where empiricsts epistemic presuppositions essentially amount to metaphysical presuppositions. "Examine the sense data; there are no values (or universals, or facts about meaning, etc.) to be found." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, I think that Hume's argument is a bit better than that. There is some value to recognizing that statements of value (evaluations) are not in the same logical category as statements of fact.

The same sort of thing that happens with "empiricism" happens with "naturalism." Both have been equated with accepting or rejecting science to such a degree that virtually no one says that they aren't an naturalist. Yet this just leads to a huge amount of equivocation, where "naturalism" can be either extremely expensive, or "only reductive, mechanistic materialism." I think it is, in general, an increasingly useless term. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is that if one gives up using all those terms, and tries to concentrate on the issues rather than the labels, other people will pin them on us according to their needs.

I do think that solution is better, but the point isn't to highlight that specific solution, but rather the genealogy of the "problem" and how it arises as a means of elucidating ways it might be resolved or else simply understanding it better." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure whether you mean the Aristotelian solution or the Neoplatonist one. Either way, I don't think we can assume that we can lift one part of a coherent system of thought and make it work in our context. More than that, there are, in my book, two versions of empiricism. One of them has been popular in philosophy and leads to the empiricism of appearances, ideas or sense-data. The other is mostly unspoken but is the foundation of science; this version understands experience in a common-sense way and doesn't posit theoretical objects that boast of being irrefutable and turn out to prevent us from understanding the stars or anything else.

Thus, we should not be surprised that borrowing their epistemology leads to skeptical conclusions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A fair point. It looks as if we need to be a bit careful what we take from those times if we want to avoid the same sceptical conclusions.