@Ourora Aureis, our disagreement isn’t the real issue. The real issue is that the stance you’ve put forward is dogmatic, internally unstable, arbitrary, and laced with needless contempt—your own words prove each point.

You start, without a shred of argument, by announcing: “I simply state a truth—denying free speech is psychological torture.” That’s textbook begging the question: you christen your claim as “truth” before you defend it. Moments later you declare I’m “not actually interested” in understanding your view—an ad hominem circumstantial that attacks my motives instead of my reasoning.

Elsewhere you proclaim, “All laws are upheld with the threat of physical violence by the state,” but you condemn that “violence” only when it applies to my proposals. For your own bans—“Harassment, slander and misinformation should be banned”—the charge of violence mysteriously disappears. That’s an equivocation on the word “violence” and a self-contradiction: if every law is violent, you’re endorsing the very violence you denounce.

You draw the line just as arbitrarily when you say: “If someone writes intolerant sentences in a private diary, that’s fine; if they post the same words in a public forum, it should be criminal.” Identical words shift from harmless to heinous depending solely on audience size—a classic case of special pleading.

The causal standard shifts, too. On one hand, “Ideas cannot cause anything at all,” yet my ideas supposedly amount to “psychological torture.” This false dichotomy turns ideas into either harmless air or torture devices, whichever suits your momentary needs.

To heighten the drama you roll out a slippery-slope flourish: restricting speech means tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets—as though fines or forum rules were already police brutality. And you finish with poisoning the well: my view is “narcissistic,” “disgusting,” tantamount to “torture.” Insults replace analysis.

These passages show that what you offer isn’t philosophical rigor but moral show-boating: you lay down dogmas, swap definitions when convenient, redraw boundaries on a whim, and season it all with contempt. Sad.

Let’s end our discussion here, then.

They claim that certain expressions of intolerance should be banned, which I consider equivalent to applying violence against their expression, as this is the only way a government can enforce law. I think maybe people are not understanding the definition of violence? To elaborate, I could expand it to "physical force likely to cause harm when non-compliant", examples of such force would be tasers, K-9's, tear gas, rubber bullets etc. which are used against those who resist arrest/imprisonment. It should be considered the same type of violence that enforces taxes and all other laws. — Ourora Aureis

Come on — it’s almost comical how you blow my point up to whatever scale you fancy, as though violence were a single end-stage toggle instead of a spectrum with crucial distinctions like coercion in the middle.

Your line of reasoning conflates very different kinds of “violence” and then extrapolates a single case to the worst-case scenario. It slips into equivocation by treating the conceptual act of banning intolerant speech as the same kind of violence as a state officer’s taser or tear gas. Yes, any law can be backed by physical force in the last resort, but the rule itself is not ipso facto an act of bodily harm.

When we test your claim against real philosophers, the picture is clearer. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle allows speech to be curbed only when it directly and foreseeably harms others. Vicious but purely verbal misogyny hovers at the edge; once it tips into incitement or dehumanisation (“women are a disappointment … hopefully no females in 10 000 years”), Mill would treat that as actionable because it primes real-world harm. Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” goes one step earlier: a tolerant society must refuse protection to movements whose goal is to destroy that very tolerance. So both thinkers champion robust debate, yet both agree that speech whose purpose is to strip a group of its humanity or safety falls outside the safe harbour of free expression.

The slogan “a speech ban is violence, because every law is enforced with tasers or cages” flattens at least three layers that Mill, Popper (and, later, Johan Galtung) keep separate:
1. Physical violence – deliberate bodily harm.
2. State coercion – legally authorised pressure such as fines or jail, ideally proportionate and rights-based.
3. Structural violence – institutional arrangements that systematically deny opportunities.

To treat every act of state coercion as morally identical to a street beating erases these gradations — and, paradoxically, hands the moral high ground to those who really do preach or practise brute violence.

With that line of reasoning, you’re not really having a debate so much as running a semantic rack-stretching experiment.

I still see no evidence supporting your accusation of explicit and immediate violence.

I still see no evidence supporting your accusation of explicit and immediate violence.

- - -

Your entire line of questioning rests on a series of false equivalences and a profound misunderstanding of the relationship between speech, law, and social harm. You’re operating in a realm of abstract principles, divorced from the practical realities of how societies function and protect themselves. Let’s dismantle this.

First, your continued misrepresentation of my position as advocating for "state violence" is either willfully obtuse or demonstrates a fundamental failure to grasp the concept of a legal framework. Laws against incitement, harassment, and defamation are not random acts of "physical violence"; they are codified, publicly agreed-upon limits designed to balance freedoms and prevent societal harm. When the state enforces a law against someone inciting hatred, it is upholding a legal order designed to protect the rights and safety of all its citizens. To equate this with arbitrary "physical violence" is a rhetorical trick designed to paint any form of regulation as oppressive tyranny. It’s a caricature, not an argument. My position is that the principles of the paradox of tolerance should inform these legal frameworks—a position of civic prudence, not a call for violence.

Now, to your questions, which I will answer directly.

* "Would you consider the criminalisation of the expression of ones beliefs to be a form of psychological torture?"
No. This framing is hyperbolic and frankly, insulting to actual victims of psychological torture. To equate the legal prohibition of publicly expressing, for example, a desire to see a racial group eradicated with the systematic cruelty of torture is a grotesque false equivalence.
Society does not and should not criminalize beliefs (internal states of mind). It regulates actions, and public speech is an action with public consequences. The "discomfort" a person might feel from being legally barred from publicly dehumanizing others is not comparable to the harm, fear, and exclusion experienced by the targeted group. The law, in a just society, must weigh these harms. The "psychological pain" of a racist being unable to broadcast their racism pales in comparison to the psychological and physical threat that racism poses to its victims. Your argument equates the "suffering" of the aggressor with the suffering of the victim. This is a moral and logical failure.

* "Do you believe that rational, coherent, and non-violent, yet intolerant beliefs are possible? If they were possible, would you still wish for their censorship despite their non-violence?"
This is a classic "philosophy 101" hypothetical that is largely irrelevant in practice. Most intolerant ideologies—misogyny, racism, religious supremacism—are fundamentally irrational. They rely on essentialism, prejudice, and a rejection of evidence, which is why Popper would classify them as pseudoscientific and dogmatic.
However, for the sake of argument, let's entertain your hypothetical "rational, non-violent intolerance." The core issue remains the same: Does this speech serve to dehumanize and exclude a group from equal participation in society? If a "belief," no matter how coherently argued, posits that a certain group of people is inherently less worthy of rights, dignity, or social standing, it is an act of social corrosion. Its purpose is not to seek truth, but to establish hierarchy and exclusion.
Censorship is not the goal. The goal is to preserve the foundations of a pluralistic society. If such "rational intolerance" actively undermines the ability of a group to participate in public life without fear or degradation, then a community or a society is justified in drawing a line. The question is not "Is it rational?" but "Does it destroy the conditions for a tolerant society?" The answer is yes.

* "What makes a belief intolerant? Can there be any intolerant yet true beliefs?"
A belief is intolerant when it denies the equal moral worth, dignity, and rights of other human beings based on their identity (race, sex, religion, sexuality, etc.). It is the refusal to extend the principle of tolerance and equality to others. Intolerance is not mere disagreement; it is the active rejection of another's claim to equal standing.
Can an intolerant belief be "true"? No, because intolerance is a normative position, not an empirical one. You cannot empirically "prove" that women are "cum dumpsters" or that Jewish people are "treacherous." These are not statements of fact; they are ideological claims designed to justify hatred and inequality. You are confusing "facts" (objective reality) with "values" (moral or ideological stances). While one might point to empirical data (e.g., statistical differences between groups), the leap from that data to an intolerant conclusion (e.g., "...and therefore this group deserves fewer rights") is a logical fallacy—the is-ought problem. Intolerance is a moral and political choice, not a factual discovery.

* "You said these views are allowed until they make open discourse impossible. Are you for the criminalisation for all disingenuous behaviour? If not, could you explain why?"
This is another false equivalence—a classic slippery slope argument. You are equating bad-faith argumentation in a debate with systemic speech that dehumanizes and incites hatred against entire populations. The two are different in kind and in scale of harm.
Being disingenuous in a debate is a breach of conversational ethics. It makes a specific conversation unproductive. Advocating for the extermination of a race, the subjugation of women, or violence against homosexuals is a threat to the entire social fabric. One is a nuisance; the other is—metaphorically speaking—a poison.
The law must be proportionate. It does not—and should not—concern itself with policing every instance of intellectual dishonesty. It does concern itself with speech that directly threatens public order, incites violence, and undermines the fundamental security and equality of its citizens. My argument is about protecting the foundational pillars of democratic society, not enforcing politeness in online forums— even if it might be a learning for some people. To conflate the two is to trivialize the very real danger of hate speech.

That is naive, self-righteous, and once again a misinterpretation of what I wrote. But first, something else…

Would you respond to the following quotes?

• “Society has become a place of female worship, and it’s so fucking wrong. They’re not gods; they’re just fucking cum dumpsters.”
• “Women deserve to be raped if they reject men like us.”
• “All women are nothing but breeding machines for high-status men.”
• “They [homosexuals] must be executed to ‘protect Muslims.’”, “Kill them wherever you find them… the Jews are a people of slander… a treacherous people.”
• “We live in a ‘Jew republic’… Turkish-German men are ‘semen cannons.’”
• “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (accompanied by Nazi salutes)
• “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate’s stomach. Wild!” (This was spoken at a “War Council” celebrating the Sharon Tate murders—commitment to violence as political strategy.)
• “Revolutionary violence is the only way to bring real change. We’re not here to talk. We’re here to fight.”
• “It is legitimate to take up armed struggle against the imperialist system.”
• “Burn the system down. No dialogue with fascists or cops – punch, burn, destroy.”


Now to some aspects of your reaction:

intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. — Ourora Aureis

Misogyny is not a philosophy in any meaningful or systematic sense. It is better understood as a form of ideological prejudice rooted in power structures, rather than a coherent body of thought. Karl Popper would have rejected misogyny as an irrational and dogmatic ideology, incompatible with the values of an open society. Rooted in prejudice rather than critical reasoning, misogyny exemplifies the kind of essentialist thinking he opposed. According to Popper’s paradox of tolerance, a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerant ideologies when they threaten the dignity, rights, or equality of others. Misogyny, in this view, is not a mere difference of opinion, but a form of ideological intolerance that must be met with rational critique—and, where necessary, legal limits.

Ideas dont kill people, people kill people. — Ourora Aureis

This aphorism ignores the causal role ideas often play in motivating and legitimizing harmful actions. Ideas are not inert—they shape beliefs, influence behaviors, and, under certain conditions, directly contribute to violence and oppression.

You are arguing for the use of physical violence by the state upon the individual for the expression of certain beliefs. — Ourora Aureis

That is a misrepresentation of my position. Please show me where I supposedly advocated that. I did not endorse state violence nor the punishment of individuals solely for holding certain beliefs. While one may harbor misogynistic thoughts privately, voicing them publicly is a different issue altogether. I referred to the paradox of tolerance as articulated by Karl Popper, which poses a normative question: Should a tolerant society tolerate intolerance when such tolerance endangers its own foundations? My argument is that this paradox should inform legislative frameworks—not to justify repression, but to set necessary limits when intolerant ideologies pose a real threat to democratic coexistence. Any exercise of state power in this context must be lawful, proportionate, and aim to avoid violence wherever possible. The role of the state includes protecting the rights of all individuals, including those who hold dissenting or even offensive views—but not when those views undermine the very conditions that make open dialogue possible.

@Ourora Aureis

TLDR;
You speak the language of principle, but there’s nothing behind it — no framework, no ethical grounding, no awareness of consequence. You invoke free speech not to defend dialogue, but to excuse hostility. You don’t stand for freedom; you stand for the freedom to harm without accountability. That’s not conviction. It’s moral laziness disguised as righteousness.

- - -

It’s ironic — you speak of the sanctity of open discourse, yet your tone is anything but open. You call my position “narcissistic,” “disgusting,” and equate it with “torture.” That’s not argumentation. That’s condemnation disguised as debate. You accuse others of being intolerant while wielding your own form of rhetorical violence — not just disagreeing, but morally indicting, pathologizing, and emotionally shaming. If you believe that open conversation changes minds, why do you model the exact opposite? You speak not to understand, but to humiliate. Not to persuade, but to dominate.

You’ve misrepresented both the spirit and the substance of my argument — in some places quite aggressively. I've said the following in a discussion about a banned person (Gregory was misogynistic):

I think this touches on a crucial question: Is free speech a value in itself, or a means to an end?

In the U.S., there's often this almost sacred reverence for free speech as an absolute principle. But I’d argue that speech is only valuable insofar as it sustains the conditions for open, inclusive, and rational discourse. Once it begins to actively undermine those conditions – by dehumanizing people, inciting hatred, or flooding the space with bad-faith noise – its “freedom” becomes self-defeating.

For example: should a philosophy forum tolerate someone saying “I hope women no longer exist in 10,000 years”? Or “Blacks are genetically inferior”? Or “The Holocaust didn’t happen”? These aren’t edgy thoughts. They’re acts of exclusion. They don’t provoke thought – they shut thought down.

Take a practical case: imagine a female newcomer logs into this forum, excited to engage with deep philosophical topics, and then stumbles across a thread where someone writes “Women are a waste of time", “They make terrible friends and even worse girlfriends." or one of the other. That’s not just distasteful – it’s a message loud and clear: "You’re not really human here. You’re a problem to be explained, not a person to be heard."

Free speech isn’t sacred. It’s instrumental. And if it’s used to destroy the conditions that make real discourse possible, then drawing lines isn’t just justified – it’s necessary. — DasGegenmittel

To clarify: I am not advocating censorship because I find ideas personally offensive. I am questioning whether certain kinds of speech actively destroy the very conditions that make meaningful dialogue possible — especially for marginalized participants. If speech dehumanizes others or treats them as subhuman, it’s not part of the marketplace of ideas. It poisons it.

Calling free speech “sacred” elevates it beyond critique — but in a democratic society, no principle should be beyond examination, especially when its unchecked application can undermine the very freedoms it claims to protect. “Sacred” is a word for romantics or dogmatists — for those unwilling to examine why free speech matters. When I describe it as instrumental, I’m asking under what conditions it is necessary and sufficient for an open society, and when it ceases to be. That’s precisely what philosophy has always done: moving from mythos to logos — from unquestioned belief to reasoned analysis.

John Stuart Mill defended free speech because he believed that truth emerges through open debate. But that only works when participants engage each other as equals. When someone’s humanity is under attack, the exchange of ideas collapses into harm.

Karl Popper put it bluntly: unlimited tolerance can lead to the end of tolerance. If we tolerate speech that seeks to silence, exclude, or erase others, we’re not preserving freedom — we’re dismantling it. This is the paradox of tolerance. And this ties into a broader security paradox: you warn that restricting speech breeds resentment and unrest. But uncritically protecting harmful speech can create spaces so hostile that others are forced out of public discourse entirely. The result isn’t freedom — it’s domination. Take a clear case: when Gregory writes that “women are a disappointment” or “hopefully there won’t be any female humans in 10,000 years,” that isn’t bold dissent — it’s dehumanization. Such speech doesn’t expand discourse; it drives people out of it. Protecting that in the name of freedom doesn’t preserve open debate — it ensures that only the loudest and most hostile voices remain. Even John Stuart Mill, often cited as the patron saint of free speech, warned that speech loses its value when it targets individuals rather than ideas. For Mill, the purpose of free expression was to promote truth through rational exchange — but that requires all participants to be treated as moral equals. When speech strips people of that status, it undermines the very conditions Mill saw as essential for meaningful discourse.

You say “ideas are powerless” — but history tells us otherwise. Ideas shape societies, justify atrocities, mobilize violence. The belief that “ideas do no harm” ignores how language constructs power. Would you really argue that “The Holocaust didn’t happen” is just an idea, detached from its historical consequences?

You’re right that people need dialogue to change. But meaningful dialogue requires a baseline of mutual recognition — not spaces where someone’s humanity is a topic for debate. If I defend a community’s right to draw lines against such speech, it’s not because I fear discomfort, but because I want to preserve the space where real thought and change can occur.

And no, I don’t want to suppress you or anyone else. You have every right to argue for maximalist free speech — and I’m engaging with you now because I believe in dialogue, too. But that doesn’t mean all speech belongs everywhere. Context matters. Goals matter. Some lines must be drawn — not to silence thought, but to protect the possibility of it.

I wonder what Karl Popper would say about that.

@Cheshire I agree with much of what you’ve said. Still, I think it’s essential to show why certain approaches fail—not just that they don’t work, but that their very structure produces the instability they aim to prevent. This is the paradox of epistemic security: the more analytic philosophy tries to define knowledge in order to eliminate luck and error, the more it constructs conceptual systems that are disconnected from actual epistemic life.

The analogy to the security dilemma in international relations is helpful here: just as states provoke greater instability by seeking more security, epistemologists often end up undermining the very concept of (dynamic) knowledge through overprecise constraints. Each definitional refinement is meant to protect, but collectively they risk sterilizing the phenomenon itself. The result is a brittle framework: too rigid to account for real-world knowing, and too narrow to be practically meaningful.

In this sense, analytic philosophy’s “curative” impulse—its desire to safeguard knowledge—can itself become pathological. What’s needed is not more insulation against epistemic risk, but a better understanding of how to navigate uncertainty without denying it. True epistemic maturity lies not in eliminating risk, but in learning to orient ourselves responsibly within it.

This is my entire point. All of these examples fail to rise to something accepted into a functional system that would be called "knowledge". All of them dissolve under a short temporal arc. A diagnostic error is not medical knowledge, AI bias is in the context of how the computer believes complicates at best. Post rationalization of a stock trade isn't thought of as persistent justified belief. — Cheshire

No one has ever claimed that these cases constitute knowledge. The whole point of the Gettier problem is precisely that the definition is fulfilled, yet what we have still doesn’t count as knowledge in the way we expect it to. Ergo, JTB doesn’t work as a universal account of knowledge.

In dynamic, changing, or temporally bound environments, 100% certain knowledge is unattainable. The very nature of such contexts introduces variability that undermines the permanence and infallibility that traditional definitions of knowledge require.

What I’m getting at with this post – and the Gettier dialogue in general – is that Gettier misunderstood Plato. He ignores the ontology of the Forms, which are unchanging and timeless. As a result, he misapplies the JTB concept – which itself is more complex than the standard definition implies, as the dialogue shows – and applies it universally to everything: to the changeable and the unchangeable, to the temporal and the timeless. That this must fail is exactly what Gettier cases demonstrate. Our belief that it should work universally is mistaken. A related but secondary question is why and how we still talk about knowledge in uncertain scenarios.

All my essays and comments are meant to highlight the factors of adaptation and temporality. To put it plainly: current epistemology, as it deals with the Gettier problem, does not do this – which is why it continues to buzz around inside the fly bottle. It treats changeable and unchangeable, temporal and timeless, in the same way – and then wonders how to arrive at a 100% certain definition of knowledge. But that is impossible, because it’s trapped by its own self-imposed analytical limitations.

Anyone who incorporates temporality into the JTB definition—whether implicitly or explicitly—is necessarily moving toward a dynamic epistemology, which is indispensable for understanding knowledge in changing, context-dependent environments. In such a framework, Gettier cases do not simply disappear or get “solved”; rather, they emerge as structural indicators—features in the sense of epistemic phenomena that expose the instability of justification across time. They reveal how knowledge claims, even when seemingly justified and true at one moment, can lose their validity as conditions evolve. In this way, Gettier cases serve not as anomalies to be patched, but as diagnostic elements that signal the limitations of static definitions within dynamic systems of belief revision and information updating.

And yes: time indexing is essential. Without it, we treat epistemic states as if they were fixed, ignoring the fact that justification and truth conditions often shift over time. Temporal indexing allows us to distinguish between a belief that was justified at t₁ but no longer at t₂, and it provides the conceptual space to track when and how knowledge claims are valid. Without this, Gettier cases appear paradoxical; with it, they become predictable artifacts of dynamic belief systems.

But this only makes sense if we accept that what we’re dealing with is conceptual knowledge — knowledge understood as a temporally indexed, representational structure rather than as an unchanging metaphysical entity. It’s the subject’s best available model of a situation, justified at a specific point in time, and open to revision. In this light, time indexing isn’t a technical workaround; it’s a necessary consequence of treating knowledge as dualism. Knowledge can take a static form, but it can also be dynamic — evolving, time-bound, context-sensitive, and perspectival (as illustrated by the Rashomon effect).

@Cheshire It’s not about undermining scientific measurement — it’s about illustrating how, even with methodical reasoning, truth and justification can drift apart in dynamic or information-limited settings.

Here are a few real-world cases that echo this:

- Medical misdiagnosis: A doctor makes a diagnosis based on symptoms that align with a common illness and prescribes treatment. The patient recovers — but later it’s discovered the symptoms were from a different, unrelated condition that would’ve resolved on its own. The outcome was “correct,” but the justification was misaligned with the actual cause — a textbook case of epistemic luck.

- Algorithmic bias: In machine learning, models often produce accurate predictions — but for spurious or hidden correlations in the data (e.g. ZIP code used as a proxy for race or income). The output may be right, but the reason why it’s right is structurally flawed. These systems perform well until the background conditions change, and then they collapse — just like the clock.

- Investing on false signals: A trader acts on a technical indicator that “predicts” market movement. It works that day — not because the indicator captured a real economic signal, but because of an unrelated geopolitical event that happened to push the market in the expected direction.

In each case, we’re not dealing with belief that simply “fails to endure.” We’re dealing with beliefs that appear justified, turn out to be true, but for the wrong reasons. And that’s precisely what Gettier — and the notion of conceptual coincidence — helps uncover.

@Cheshire thanks for the response — and for raising the strawman concern. Let me clarify and build on what you’ve said.

That’s why I refer to the puzzle metaphor myself — but in the way it’s developed in the essay: real-world knowledge, especially in dynamic environments (as in Gettier cases), resembles completing a puzzle with pieces from different sets. A piece may appear to fit structurally, and the picture might seem momentarily coherent — but it ultimately belongs to another image. The danger is that we stop questioning once the piece “fits,” even though the match was coincidental. The point isn’t to abandon inductive reasoning, but to recognize that in such situations, the fit alone doesn’t guarantee conceptual integrity. What looks like knowledge may only be a coincidental alignment — a Gettier-style conceptual coincidence rather than a robust connection between justification and truth.

The problem isn’t that belief fails to endure — it’s that the justification isn’t connected to the truth-maker in a reliable way. The broken clock case isn’t a fluke: it’s a stand-in for many real-world scenarios where we reason well, but for the wrong reasons — and get it right only by chance.

That applies even in scientific contexts. We might persistently believe in a well-tested model (like GR), and be right — but later discover that our reasons were incomplete or that better evidence recontextualizes our belief. This doesn’t mean GR was useless, but it highlights how fragile even strongly corroborated beliefs can be when new conditions emerge.

I fully agree with your reading of Popper: knowledge grows through conjecture and refutation, not final proof. But that’s exactly why pseudo-knowledge is a danger — especially in systems where new variables can arise without being noticed, and where verification is still socially or institutionally treated as conclusive. Financial crises, brittle AI models, or medical recommendations later overturned are real-world versions of Gettier: beliefs that seemed justified and true, until the structure shifted.

This is why I argue for epistemic dualism — not as semantics, but as a conceptual clarification. When we use the same word “knowledge” for both timeless, deductive certainty and context-sensitive, probabilistic belief, we risk flattening important distinctions. It’s not about discarding JTB, but about supplementing it with a model that tracks change, risk, and the potential for conceptual coincidence — a kind of epistemic humility built into the structure.

So in short: I don’t think we disagree on the value of provisional knowledge or the limits of verification. But I do think Gettier still shows something important — that being right isn’t always enough, especially when we don’t control or even perceive all the variables. That’s not a strawman — it’s a call to make our knowledge models better reflect the messy, shifting nature of the world we’re reasoning in.

And in this discussion — or thread — about the dialogue, I was originally trying to show that even Plato saw what the analytic tradition often overlooks: ontology matters, the thing in question matters – especially if it changes over time.

The problem with knowledge is that it is used in a paradoxical way; we need a knowledge dualism. On the one hand, we say “I know” in cases where we can be certain that something is true, such as in mathematics. On the other hand, we use the same expression in situations involving contingency, like traffic routes. The underlying distinction is that some domains, like mathematics, involve elements that do not change—numbers, for example. The number 1 is always 1, without exception.

However, there are things like “the fastest way to work” that can change, and this is perfectly reasonable. When we say something like “I know the fastest way to work,” we implicitly mean “given the information and circumstances I am currently aware of.” If we define knowledge without considering the circumstances and the specific point in time, the definition becomes problematic. Yet this is exactly what epistemology tends to do today, which is, in my view, why it struggles with Gettier cases. This also offers a way to understand the Ship of Theseus problem: broadly speaking, Gettier cases are the epistemological counterpart to the ontological identity paradox. Both involve questions of change and time—identity over time versus knowledge over time.

In Platonic terms, some things are timeless and unchanging, while others are not. For Plato, there was no knowledge of the real, physical world—only of the eternal world of ideas, according to his special ontology. In my opinion, what Plato missed—and what we intuitively critique—is the conceptual dimension of knowledge.

Thus, we can even claim to have knowledge of things like current traffic conditions, which may be the best available to us so far, even if they don’t necessarily reflect reality. Since the world can change without our awareness, there can be no definitive knowledge about the future—only conceptual knowledge.

One might object: “But we constantly experience that we do have knowledge!” However, this is a mistaken intuition, as illustrated by Gettier cases. The problem is what Popper also pointed out in the sciences: verification is a poor guide and a pathway to pseudo-science—or in our case, pseudo-knowledge. In dynamic environments, we can only corroborate, not verify.

This is precisely what Aristotle would say re episteme. The example relies on a coincidence of accidents. Could it be reconstructed with per se predication? I don't think I've ever seen it done.

The difficulty of limiting knowledge to being is of course explaining discursive knowledge in the realm of becoming, which does seem to exist. This requires a robust metaphysics, a "metaphysics of knowledge," which is made difficult by the tendency of modern thought to put either epistemology (early modern) or philosophy of language (linguistic turn) before metaphysics.

I would guess we have pretty similar opinions here. We had a recent thread on this and my thoughts were:

[... alllll the Text]

When we get to the "metaphysics of knowledge" I don't even know if it is appropriate to call knowledge (or at least what is most fully knowledge) a "belief." When we are sure that there are cars in the oncoming traffic lane and that we mustn't drive into them, I think this is not simply a case of sense data + ratio (computational reason) = propositional belief. The reason we find it quite impossible to ignore such knowledge lies, IMHO, more in the co-identity of knower and known in such cases (a union). People find it impossible to believe otherwise because their intellect is "informed" by truth in the senses (sense knowledge), or what we might call the communication of actuality.

That's a fairly Aristotlian/Neoplatonic view, and less strictly Platonic of course. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The epistemological challenge lies in not confining knowledge solely to being, for becoming gives rise to forms of dynamic knowledge—discursive, contextual, and undeniably real. To grasp these forms adequately, we need a robust metaphysics of knowledge. And yet, as you rightly pointed out, this need has been structurally sidelined by the rise of early modern epistemology and the linguistic turn in philosophy.

I see metaphysics and epistemology as fundamentally interdependent—like heart and lungs: sever one from the other, and both collapse. This becomes especially evident in Gettier cases, where neglecting the metaphysical referents of belief leads to a breakdown of epistemological structure.

The Rashomon effect offers a telling example. It doesn’t just expose the limits of the justified true belief (JTB) model—it reveals that knowledge is socially organized, relationally mediated, and constantly at risk within context. Epistemic fragility is not the exception; it is the rule. From this, it follows: knowledge is not merely static assent to propositions, but a dynamic becoming—an ontological participation in reality.

Aristotle’s concept of epistēmē strikes at the core: knowledge is not produced by representation but by the intellect’s becoming form. “The intellect becomes all things”—not by mirroring, but by participation. (Here, Popper’s metaphor of the net is highly relevant.)

Plato’s notion of mimesis must not be misunderstood as mere copying. Rather, as layered participation—mediated through logos, perception, and memory—it aims at resonance with the essential. Even so, Aristotle’s account of the transition from potentiality to actuality, particularly as developed by the Neoplatonists, provides a more stable framework for embodied, enacted knowing.

In this light, knowledge is not merely the possession of a map (static), but the act of walking the terrain (dynamic)—not a reflection of form, but its unfolding in motion. These ways of knowing are not opposed; they are complementary—necessary companions for the journey.

You’re right to sense that Gettier highlights a missing temporal dimension in the traditional definition of knowledge. But that insight goes deeper than it first appears.

In "Justified True Crisis" I argue that in dynamic contexts, knowledge can’t be reduced to static Justified True Belief (JTB). Instead, it must adapt to changing conditions, uncertainty, and coincidence — this is what Dynamic Knowledge (DK) addresses. Imagine you believe Route A is the fastest way to work. You’ve taken it many times, it’s usually reliable, and today it gets you there quickly. But tomorrow, a construction site appears, traffic backs up, and Route B would have been faster. Your belief was reasonable — but only under yesterday’s conditions. In dynamic situations like this, what counts as “the fastest way” isn’t fixed. It depends on changing variables: traffic, roadwork, even your destination. What was right once can quickly become outdated — and that’s why knowledge in practice needs to adapt.

Knowledge, then, isn’t just “believing what is true,” but “believing what must be continuously justified as truths shift.” Belief becomes a crisis — a conscious leap under incomplete information, acknowledging that what seems true may just be accidentally right.

So your question, “How long do I have to believe it for it to be knowledge?” hits the core issue: knowledge isn’t a fixed state, but an evolving process — and it needs a framework like DK to be meaningfully understood in real-world conditions.

@Count Timothy von Icarus This is a particularly fascinating and important topic because it challenges us.

As you pointed out, both objects and entities like humans and large language models (LLMs) can contain knowledge. But before going further, it’s essential to acknowledge that there are different types of knowledge. For instance, there’s mathematical and logical knowledge, which involves necessarily true conclusions; conceptual knowledge, such as definitions (e.g., a bachelor is an unmarried man); systemic knowledge tied to structured domains like football (e.g., 11 players per team, one ball); and then there are probabilistic truths—statements likely to be true—as well as claims, falsehoods, and misinformation, which still count as a form of negative knowledge.

Books can store and present this kind of knowledge. They act as a medium—but remain passive. Nothing happens with the knowledge unless someone engages with it.

In contrast, AIs function differently. They resemble a kind of agent: acting under goals and within certain constraints. Not only do they possess information, but they also process it. Depending on their architecture, they may even have an operational awareness of the content they hold—because they verify, reference, and integrate it. This form of “awareness” should not be confused with human consciousness. Rather, it’s procedural—more about internal orientation than about being situated in the external world. One might compare it to navigating conceptual or mathematical landscapes.

In Justified True Crisis, I refer to this as DKorg—a kind of self-reflective knowledge that organizes and reorients itself over time and can refer back to its own prior states. From this perspective, consciousness is not a static property but a dynamic understanding of one’s own cognitive states across time, along with the ability to relate to them.

Of course, there remains a massive gulf between humans and machines. Humans use knowledge to navigate the world. Knowledge can be an end in itself, but more often, it serves as a foundation for action, identity, and emotion. It shapes how we see ourselves (“Who am I?”), distinguishes us from others, and prompts emotional reactions to new information—whether in stories, tragedies, or revelations. AIs, on the other hand, are not currently required to do any of this. But in the long term, such developments might be possible—even if they appear foreign or artificial to us.

What seems crucial here is recognizing that our traditional binary view of content versus agent is being challenged—especially by AI. Rather than a dichotomy, I now see it more as a multidimensional spectrum. And perhaps the fundamental questions to explore are:
1. Can a system organize itself and its information—potentially through hierarchical, evaluative processes?
2. Does it have a sense of its own cognitive states over time?
3. How can it respond to that awareness—by learning, adapting, resisting, or even displaying uncertainty?

It seems to me like you are getting at the role of understanding in knowledge, which has a phenomenological component. If truth just involved discursive justification and assigning the right truth values to linguistic utterances or symbolic strings, then LLMs would "know," right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Plato would argue that knowledge is intrinsically tied to “what truly is.” It entails a turning of the soul toward the unchanging and the realm of being, in contrast to mere opinion or belief, which pertains to the ever-shifting domain of becoming. The assignment of truth values to linguistic expressions or symbolic signs aligns more closely with the realm of opinion, as it deals with the contingent rather than the necessary. True knowledge, by contrast, is a form of “vision” or direct participation in being itself.

From this perspective, large language models (LLMs), which operate through discursive justification and the manipulation of linguistic or symbolic signs, do not possess the kind of knowledge that presupposes a deeper connection to the unchanging ground of being.

While I hold a partially divergent view, I contend that LLMs do exhibit a form of knowledge—albeit one fundamentally aligned with static knowledge (SK), rather than dynamic knowledge (DK). Their functioning is embedded within formal language systems, abstracted from lived temporality, embodiment, and situated world-orientation. Accordingly, they process and replicate patterns that remain invariant across contexts, without engaging in the evolving interplay of perception, revision, and context-sensitive responsiveness that characterizes DK. Their outputs are statistically grounded and internally coherent, yet they lack the epistemic historicity and adaptive flexibility necessary for navigating uncertainty or existential rupture. What LLMs produce is system-bound conceptual knowledge—structurally stable, context-relative, but ultimately indifferent to truth understood as existential commitment or pragmatic attunement. In this sense, their knowledge remains static: syntactically elaborate yet semantically shallow, operationally effective but epistemically inert when measured against DK’s criterion of justified transformation through time.

I’ll address your other points later. :)

Thanks for your reply and your appreciation. For many people, this is quite a boring topic—especially when discussed in such detail. ;D
Those older notions are interesting, but they can be problematic since they’re open to perceptual errors—at least from the perspective of a monistic or absolute conception of knowledge.
The typology at least provides a foundation for comparison, which opens up the possibility of recognizing perspectival and contextual differences.
JTB is absolutely ridiculous in dynamic scenarios—it just doesn’t work. Counterexamples are everywhere.
As I’ve shown in the thread “Gettier’s Gap” and my essay “Justified True Crisis”, I lean much more toward a dualistic approach.
And yes, the analytic tradition is part of the problem, reminiscent of the paradox of safety: they try to make everything as safe and secure as possible, but in doing so, they risk losing everything—especially time and change. It’s absurd.

@RogueAI

Good question.

In my perspective, I distinguish between two forms of knowledge: static and dynamic. Static knowledge is timeless and unchanging; dynamic knowledge, on the other hand, is tied to time and subject to transformation.

Take mathematics: 2 + 2 necessarily equals 4—within the system of rules we’ve established. This is a form of static knowledge. With concepts like H₂O, things become more complex. H₂O is also a clearly defined concept, rooted in scientific laws and symbolic notation—axiomatic in structure, much like mathematical expressions. It offers us a way to establish clear boundaries in how we understand the world.

However, while these concepts connect us to reality, they don’t guarantee absolute certainty. Our perception of reality is not absolute—there’s no one-to-one mapping between what we think we know and what actually is. Unexpected influences—external radiation, atomic anomalies, minor variations—can alter outcomes in ways we didn’t account for. So while concepts like H₂O help us form reliable predictions, those predictions are not necessities. They are probable, not guaranteed.

To illustrate this further: imagine you leave a bucket of water outside your house. Will it still be wet tomorrow? Not necessarily. A sudden cold front from the Arctic could freeze it overnight. Unlikely, perhaps—but not impossible. Likewise, the water might slowly evaporate. So even a seemingly stable property like “wetness” can fluctuate over time.

And what we perceive is only the surface. On a microscopic level, even in a group of ten H₂O molecules, countless processes unfold: minor radiation, electron shifts, subtle energy exchanges—all beyond our direct perception. These processes are real, even if we aren’t aware of them.

Even objects we regard as extremely stable are not exempt from change. Take the International Prototype Kilogram: a precisely protected object, stored in a secure vault, isolated from external influences. And yet, over time, it has measurably lost mass. No matter how carefully we preserve something, the world continues to move around—and within—it.

This brings us to a deeper point: statements about the future are always contingent. Our concepts give us frameworks to imagine what might come, but the future itself is not bound by those frameworks. Our assumption that things are as we perceive them—that the world is stable and consistent—is an illusion. The world is in flux, and so are we. We recognize ourselves from moment to moment, yet in truth, we are always in a process of becoming.

I’m curious… What do you think? I hope it’s not too bad to read. ;D

JTB (Justified True Belief) is both insufficient and excessive to describe the kind of knowledge I’m referring to.

On one hand, JTB is too rigid to account for culture—it struggles with context, time, and change. It doesn’t adapt well to dynamic environments.

On the other hand, it’s not process-oriented. The introduction of new information disrupts JTB—hence the Gettier cases. (See my thread “Gettier’s Gap.”)

To understand “knowledge of what it’s like,” we need a flexible, dynamic concept of knowledge. One that can organize itself and that is self-aware—aware of its own knowledge and capable of adapting and revising based on experience.

JTB lacks this. It deals in binary: things are either right or wrong, with no room for gradual shifts or evolving perspectives. It assumes a static, divine-like grasp of truth. But we don’t have divine knowledge, which is why we need a more adaptive sibling to JTB for dynamic scenarios. (See my concepts of DK and JTC: Justified True Crisis)

“Knowledge of what it’s like to be” is, in this sense, an organizational knowledge structure that is aware of its own process. It reflects on states such as perception and language over time, allowing it to become a knowledge state of its own—knowledge of what it’s like to be (at t1). But it will always be a approcimation because Its such a fuid process which is hardly graspable.

Time is crucial in cultural evolution, because what it’s like to be something changes. This links to the Ship of Theseus problem.

In life, there are many organizational structures with different ways of accessing the world—and therefore many forms of “what it’s like to be.” But there are intersections between these structures that all creatures can relate to: groups, love, fear, and a shared knowledge of the world—even without language. However, without language, this knowledge is more fleeting, because perception changes.

Static knowledge, expressed through language, offers a crucial advantage: it’s more stable over time—depending on the domain we’re looking at.

JTB has to evolve to a more flexible as definition as data can change which it doesnt account for. It has to account for time and change - we use it only implicitly that way but that doesnt work in the end because it is deterministic; but beliefs change with new information. Otherswise the truth value can change within an unreliable definition as it does as it does as you rightfully claim. It changes from a JTB with a seemingly Foreve correct future prediction to a justified false belief because These predictions are only contingent despite the expectation of a JTB - which is only likely but not necessary an therefore not certain. If knowledge shall be stable thats bad. JTC does account for that; with a stable Definition as JTB (static) and JTC as pragmatic adjustment of Dynamic knowledge as you use it implicitly. Life changes, data changes and knowledge should be able to do so too.

I have no clue what that's supposed to mean. — creativesoul

Despite popular opinion we do not need Gettier cases to demonstrate that JTB is insufficient for knowledge. Here a small explanation of what the terms mean.

Necessary and sufficient conditions:
- A necessary condition is something that must be true for something else to be true. (e.g., Having fuel is necessary for a car to run.)
- A sufficient condition is something that, if true, guarantees that something else is true. (e.g., Turning the key in a working car is sufficient to start it.)

Applying this to knowledge:
For a definition of knowledge to be valid, the conditions in the definition must be both necessary and sufficient. That is:
-You can’t have knowledge without those conditions (necessary).
- And if those conditions are met, then you do have knowledge (sufficient).

In other words, not every belief that seems reasonable or even true counts as knowledge, unless it fully satisfies all the required philosophical conditions.

Let’s consider a practical case:

Suppose Jane believes that the fastest way to work is via Elm Street. She’s driven that route many times, and it’s consistently been the quickest. She has justification: traffic data, past experience, and perhaps even GPS support. The route is indeed fast, and she believes it truly is the fastest.

Now, by the classical definition, she seems to know that “the fastest way to work is via Elm Street” — her belief is true, she believes it, and she has justification.

But let’s introduce a twist.

Unknown to Jane, a new road was opened yesterday — a bypass that cuts travel time by 15 minutes. As of this morning, that new road is now the fastest way to work. Jane is unaware of this change and continues to believe Elm Street is fastest.

So, what happens?

Her belief, though still justified based on past data, is no longer true. She continues to assert something that was true, but is no longer sufficient to define knowledge, because it doesn’t align with the current facts.

Now, here’s where the original sentence applies:

“If it is not necessary and sufficient to be the assertion it defines, then it’s not knowledge.”

Jane’s belief fails the test of necessity and sufficiency:
- Her justification is no longer sufficient — it doesn’t guarantee truth in the changed context.
- The truth condition is no longer met — the route is no longer fastest.
- So, her belief doesn’t meet the necessary and sufficient conditions to count as knowledge.

What she has, at best, is a reasonable assumption, not knowledge.

This example shows how knowledge is not static — the necessary and sufficient conditions must continue to align with the world. Once they diverge, the belief, no matter how well-justified or sincere, no longer counts as knowledge.

The example of the fastest route to work changing shows that knowledge is not static. The traditional JTB definition (Justified True Belief) assumes that if someone has a belief that is true and justified, they have knowledge.

But in real-life, dynamic situations — like when external facts change (e.g., a new faster route is built) — a belief that was once true and justified can stop being true or lose its justification, without the person realizing it.

Therefore:
The conditions of truth, belief, and justification are not always sufficient for knowledge.

The traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief fails to account for cases where justification no longer tracks truth. This shows that knowledge is not static — it evolves with context and time.

If knowledge is not static, but context-sensitive, historically situated, and dynamically linked to changing conditions (like justification evolving with new information), then this challenges the very idea of a fixed, essentialist definition.

The core implication is this:
If the conditions for something to count as knowledge can change over time or across contexts, then any single, timeless definition is inherently limited — or even impossible.

In other words:
- A definition aims to capture the necessary and sufficient conditions of a concept.
- But if those conditions are not stable, then no definition can fully capture what knowledge is in all cases.
- This shifts the project from definition to modeling: from trying to define knowledge in a rigid sense to trying to map how it functions in different contexts.

This is why my JTC approach in relation to DK is relevant. Gettier cases are just one step more complicated but we do not need them to revise JTB for Dynamic scenarios. Every day life is a counterexample already.

I will answer the question above tomorrow. I otherwise get less then 4 hours of sleep.

What is Smith's belief at the moment he forms it? — creativesoul

I know what you mean but the problem with JTB is time and change. The Definition doesnt hold over time as you show yourself. If the observer wouldnt be there it would be knowledge. So as you clarifie yourself whats a problem because it is possible to be false.

Gettier cases are conceptual councidences:

„ Gettier cases, as illustrated in my analysis, can be described as conceptual coincidence. This term captures the phenomenon of accidental knowledge within non-transitive frameworks like JTB that can arise in dynamic scenarios. They occur when an assertion is randomly confirmed by the alignment of relevant aspects, without the original conditions objectively enabling the assertion. This scenario unfolds over at least two points in (epistemic) time and relies on different but similar and not necessarily distinguishable concepts, with the aspect crucial for the confirmation of the assertion changing in such a way that it validates the assertion. In a metaphorical sense they are like a puzzle that can be completed with a piece from a different set. Although the final piece structurally fits, it is incongruous with the overall depicted image.“

Time in the Car Case:
T1: At the moment Smith forms his belief, he is justified in thinking that “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is true because he believes that Jones owns a Ford. His evidence and reasoning at this time are entirely centered on the assumption regarding Jones, which forms the basis of his justification.

T2: However, when we consider the truth of the proposition at a later point, it turns out that the disjunction is actually true solely because Brown is in Barcelona—a fact completely independent of Smith’s initial evidence. Thus, while at T1 Smith’s belief was justified by his reasoning about Jones, at T2 the truth of the statement is secured by an unrelated, coincidental circumstance.

It does not follow from the fact that predictions are incapable of being true/false at the time they're made, that there can be no such thing as knowledge in cases involving temporality and change. Assuming they're justified and believed, predictions can become true despite being incapable of being so at the time they're articulated/made. They become JTB by virtue of turning out to be true. If they turn out to be false, then they cannot be knowledge, because knowledge cannot be false. — creativesoul

If it is not necessary and sufficient to be the assertion it defines then its not knowledge but (bad/good)luck; credence (speculation which might be virtues but even that does not guaranty knowledge but only a more reliable process).

If his cases are examples of justified false belief, then his challenge to those formulations fails to hit the target. <-------Can we agree on that much, for now? — creativesoul

Since these are statements about future events, they do not constitute knowledge but rather speculation (credence), and the result is not knowledge either, as it does not necessarily and sufficiently follow from the premises. Luck is a temporal phenomenon; the outcome could have been different: good luck (JTB) & bad luck (JFB).

As the key meaningful part of Smith's own belief articulation, "The man with ten coins in his pocket" picks out one and only one individual. Jones is the ONLY man that Smith believes will get the job, regardless of pocket content. Thus, Smith's belief, as Gettier articulated, is true if and only if, Jones gets the job and has ten coins in his pocket.
On the contrary, when P is examined as a proposition that is completely divorced from Smith's inference, "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job", is true if/when any man with ten coins in his pocket gets the job. This reasoning shows that there are very different sets of truth conditions regarding P, depending on whether P is considered in isolation from the believer(Smith) or examined with consideration of that.
Hence, the first case rests on judging Smith's belief using truth conditions of what is not(as does the second case). It is only as a result of not noticing and highlighting that conflation, that it seemed/seems okay to say that Smith's belief was/is true. When the inference of Smith is rightly taken into consideration "The man with ten coins in his pocket" means Jones and only Jones. Jones does not get the job. Hence, Smith's belief is justified and false. — creativesoul

At this point, deductive reasoning is conflated with inductive reasoning, as if temporality didn’t exist. However, there are two distinct moments in time: the scenario of the original assumption (t1), and the new information that Smith also (unknowingly) has ten coins in his pocket (t2; quasi-empirical). This thematic complex refers to what I call conceptual coincidence and further break down with reference to truth-makers. But there’s a lot more going on in this example: e.g., the non-parallel construction of definiendum and definiens & the Leibniz Law violation.

On my view, predictions of future events (belief about what will happen later) are capable of neither being true or false at the time they're made. — creativesoul

Exactly. And what does that mean? There can be no such thing as knowledge in cases involving temporality and change, unless we adopt a different perspective. Gettier, and all those seeking a monastic definition of knowledge, are doomed to fail. It’s an attempt to achieve the impossible with outdated tools. We must think fundamentally differently.

This presupposes that the belief had epistemic validity to begin with. "It is three o'clock" does not follow from believing that a broken clock is working. "There is a barn" does not follow from mistaking a barn facade for a barn (believing that a fake barn is a real one). "There is a sheep in the field" does not follow from believing that a sheet is a sheep. — creativesoul

And in that sense, this must also be considered. There is no absolute certainty in the perception of the world. The person who sees the clock and draws an assertion from it doesn’t know at first that the clock is broken, but relies on their previously reliable everyday experience. Yet that, too, can be unreliable—comparable to the fake barn cases. Perception of reality is always only an approximation, never an absolute.

I may be inclined, if you like, to offer candidates of JTB that are not Gettier cases. We could then apply your concepts/reasoning to them and see what that looks like, and/or how well the criticism you levy fits a case of JTB. That could be interesting. I'm much less interested in applying criticism of JTB to cases that are not. — creativesoul

Sure, gladly—but I’m not criticizing JTB itself, but rather the use of JTB in modern contexts. My paper rehabilitates JTB for static scenarios and demonstrates why JTB must fail in dynamic ones.

Now, I've read a good portion of the essay linked by DasGegenmittel in the op, and I think the intention is to divide knowledge into two distinct types, the eternal, unchanging type (static knowledge), and the evolving type (dynamic knowledge). I would not make a division in this way. I would say that all knowledge, just like all meaning is evolving, but there are differences of degree in the rate of change. Some might propose "ideals", which would be eternal unchanging objects of meaning, but these are imaginary, fictional, because we do not have any such unchanging ideas. So "ideals" are self-defeating, as fictions which are supposed to be eternal truths. And even ideas like that signified by "2", are changing, having come into existence at some time. And we see that there are a number of different numbering systems, like natural, rational, real, etc., and the sign has a different meaning depending on the conceptual structure of the system which provides the context of usage. — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s very close to how I think about it. However, I also point out that the two types of knowledge are not independent from each other, but have points of integration and application: for example, rounding rules & epistemic standards and stakes.

But surely, if Smith's belief is a justified false belief, it is not going to count as knowledge. So what is fragile is not Smith's knowledge, but his belief. That's not a problem. — Ludwig V

The problem here is that JTB is normally conceived as static, but in this case, it is procedural. The expectation is not fulfilled, even though a JTB can initially be assumed, which then, due to its contingency, becomes a JFB, yet may still be labeled JTB due to conceptual coincidence within the framework of the truth-maker: Leibniz-law violation.

I think it is important to say more about this. My view is a trifle unorthodox. It comes down to what description works for different characters in the story. Smith is thinking of the clock, as a (working) clock. Who wouldn't? But we readers who are in the know, are thinking of it as a broken clock. Of course we are - the author of the story has told us so and authors are never wrong about what is happening in their own stories. Smith obviously cannot possibly be describing (thinking of) the clock as broken and it makes nonsense of the story to attribute such a belief to them. In order to understand the story, we have to be capable of grasping the difference and its significance. There is, so far as I can see, no way around that.
It follows that the context of belief is not fully intentional. I've never seen such a concept elsewhere in philosophy, but the facts are clear. In some circumstances, we must respect the believer's description of their own belief. In others, we need to understand (and use) another description - the truth (as we see it, of course). — Ludwig V

Correct—JTB is already refuted by the mere existence of competing JTBs as counterexamples, which I illustrate more clearly using the Rashomon effect.

This is very doubtful, and that's the point of Kant's "a priori". Some form of abstractive power, or capacity, is necessary for, therefore prior to, sensory perception. And, since the difference between the thing-in-itself, and the perception of the thing (as a type of abstraction in the mind), is fundamental to the nature of knowledge, especially the fallibility of knowledge, we need to pay close attention to the nature of this difference in any epistemology. — Metaphysician Undercover

My point was not about the truthful perception of a thing, but about differences in general. A thing can never be perceived absolutely; there are no 1:1 real-time representations.

Therefore the real meaning of mathematical symbols such as "2" may be entirely imaginary, creations of the mind which are not at all based in perceptual patterns. And I really think that this is the true nature of what is known as "pure mathematics". The mind creates categories which are not based in abstractions produced from sensory perception, but based in its own intentions. The "empty set" for example. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suspect we think quite similarly here, though we start from different positions. I understand perception not only as a worldly, but also as a mental process—the recognition of a boundary between two things or numbers as a set (of numbers).

This is Plato's point with justification. The senses deceive us, and cannot be the source for true justification. The idea that sense evidence is what justifies, is itself misleading, guiding us toward faulty justifications. We must establish principles of comparison derived from the creative, imaginative mind, which form the real basis for justification. These principles are derived from concepts of sameness rather than concepts of difference. This is why it is very important to have a very rigorous definition of "same", to start from, as that provided by the law of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct, but I would add that both sameness and difference are equally important to emphasize the definitional core of the matter. There is no delimitation without differentiation.

What if the individual under our consideration while pointing towards the broken clock said something like, "Hey guys! Yesterday, at exactly 2 o'clock, do you know that I believed that that broken clock was working. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? I just looked at it like I normally do and then went on about my business as usual. :lol: I even made it home on time!"
I don't see the nonsense in this, or my account of it. If it's there, could you set it out and show it to me? — creativesoul

He didn’t know it, but if we assume that, then he would be surprised—and according to the currently prevailing view of JTB, would have had knowledge by accident. And that’s exactly what you're describing.

I argue in favor of JTB. The account differs tremendously from historical convention though, in that I do not treat belief and propositions as equivalent. Nor do I treat belief and reports thereof as equivalent, self-reporting notwithstanding. Perhaps it may be a result of those differences that I can say that the characterization above fails. It's also odd for me to see another treat JTB as though it has agency. — creativesoul

That would indeed be strange. In the end, knowledge is—among other things and essentially—an attribution, meant to express certainty/trust so that one can act with little or no risk. JTB, in my view—as I’ve said—is rehabilitated for static scenarios within a dualistic conception of knowledge.

How do you handle this in your view of JTB as monistic, without running into problems with contingency? After all, you yourself say that no knowledge about the future is possible.

@“creativesoul” I’ll respond in more depth later—time is a bit scarce right now, but I will get back to you.

@“Metaphysician Undercover” @“Ludwig V”
Do we really need a full representational theory to make sense of 2 + 2 = 4?

I don’t think so. “2 + 2 = 4” isn’t a statement about reality as such, but about a perceptual pattern abstracted by the mind. Numbers aren’t part of the world in the same way as, say, rocks or trees. They’re tools—mental instruments that help us structure and process sensory input. They emerge after perception, not before it.

Perception introduces difference. Without difference, there’s no concept of “two.” Numbers are thus not touchable objects, but operational categories—modalities of cognition.

A more precise example than the sorites might be this:
Imagine a smartphone you bought five years ago. Over time, it receives software updates, loses battery life, perhaps even gets scratches. It’s clearly changed. Yet, at which point does it become “not the same phone”? The numerical identity depends on perceptual thresholds. If the changes are too subtle to be noticed, the “one phone” remains “one phone” in perception, even though materially, it may be quite different. The number “one” here is not describing reality per se, but summarizing a perceptual judgment.

⸻

As for the broken clock case:

To say, “S cannot believe that a broken clock is working,” misrepresents the belief. “Broken clock” is an external diagnosis, not necessarily part of S’s belief content.

If S looks at the clock at 2:00 p.m., and the clock (stuck at 2:00) shows 2:00, S forms the belief “It’s 2:00.” That belief is justified (the clock appears fine), true (it is 2:00), and believed. The Gettier problem arises here.

What this reveals: knowledge isn’t just about outcome (is the belief true?), but also about the context of assertion—the epistemic status at the moment the subject forms the belief.

This suggests: all worldly assertions are contingent—their truth may not be fully accessible even in the present. The broken clock case illustrates this: an event that matches reality (truth) intersects with a defective process of knowing. Thus, the contrast between specific event and general epistemic practice is key.

@creativesoul

It is not a rhetorical or semantic problem.

If your reliable boss says to you that a person with brown hairs, in this room will get a higher salary tomorrow. Are you justified in believing so that a person in this room with brown hair, you, will get a higher salary tomorrows? Would you "know" that you will get the higher salary?

Is Smith's belief accidentally true or is it false? It cannot be both. It is a problem for JTB, only if it's true.

If it is justified false belief, then it is not JTB and the problem dissolves completely. — creativesoul

The Problem is not only present "if it's true". The biggest problem is the "if" itself: contingency.

@creativesoul

If Gettier cases are interpreted as justified false beliefs rather than justified true beliefs, this supports — rather than undermines — the Justified True Crisis (JTC) framework. JTC does not rely on whether a belief is ultimately true or false in a static sense. Instead, it focuses on the epistemic instability that arises when a belief’s justification collapses under contextual or temporal revision.

Consider the classic Gettier case: Smith believes “the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” based on strong evidence that Jones will get the job and that Jones has ten coins. Unbeknownst to Smith, he will get the job — and he, too, has ten coins. The belief is accidentally true but justified on false premises.

If we treat Smith’s belief as a justified false belief (because at the point of justification, the actual truthmaker is not in view), JTC interprets this as a prime example of epistemic fragility. The justification is disconnected from the actual truth conditions — and once the fuller context is revealed (i.e., the crisis occurs), the belief’s epistemic validity collapses.

JTC argues that robust knowledge must withstand such crises. This requires Dynamic Knowledge — justification that can adapt and remain coherent as contexts shift. So, if Gettier cases are better classified as justified false beliefs, this does not affect the explanatory power of JTC; rather, it confirms its claim that knowledge must be crisis-resilient through conceptual knowledge and adaptation, not merely statically correct.

@creativesoul

Formally, yes — Gettier cases do fulfill the traditional criteria of JTB, and this is precisely why they are epistemologically disruptive. However, under the JTC framework, they are not considered instances of genuine knowledge. The crux of the issue lies in their lack of a stable truthmaker and their failure to endure epistemic change over time.

In many Gettier cases, the truth of the belief is contingent, grounded not in a robust truthmaking relation but in accidental or disconnected facts. The belief aligns with reality, but not because of the justification provided. This disconnect violates the principle that knowledge must not only be true and justified, but true in virtue of what justifies it — a requirement that a coherent truthmaker theory would impose.

Furthermore, JTC introduces time and contextual dynamics as epistemic dimensions. In Gettier scenarios, the belief does not remain justified over time as information shifts. Once the background conditions change or are made fully explicit the justification collapses. This indicates that the belief was never epistemically resilient to begin with. The knowledge claim fails under what we might call a diachronic stress test.

In contrast, DK entails that beliefs are not only justified and true at a moment, but that their justification is revisable, context-sensitive, and survives temporal and conceptual change. Gettier cases fail on this front. Thus, while they may satisfy static JTB conditions, they lack a sustaining truthmaker and cannot persist through epistemic re-evaluation — and for that reason, they do not constitute knowledge in the, dynamic sense that JTC defends.

The issue with this particular thread is that it grants too much to start with in granting that Gettier cases are examples of true belief. Issues with change/flux are irrelevant with respect to that. — creativesoul

The statement is a misinterpretation because it overlooks key concepts of the JTC model. While it concedes that Gettier cases may involve true belief, it misses the point that JTC focuses on their epistemic fragility. Change and flux are not irrelevant—they are essential to Dynamic Knowledge (DK). Crisis is not a side issue but the litmus test of genuine knowledge. Ignoring this reduces knowledge to the static, context-blind framework of classical epistemology.

What we have are competing explanations for the Gettier problem. One grants that Gettier has showed a problem with the justification aspect of JTB. That is the basis of the project. Another argues that both Gettier cases are examples of justified false belief, and thus pose no problem for JTB; case closed. You're arguing in the vein of the former, and I, the latter. — creativesoul

I accept your suggestion—if indeed there is a way back to actual arguments—and I welcome it.

Please take another careful look at what the Gettier problem entails according to my position, and what must be concluded from it.

In brief: in contingent scenarios—such as our dynamic reality—there is no fixed truth. We are subject to possible perceptual errors, and the concepts that underpin our assertions are therefore not absolute. Dynamic reality is an infinite game played with incomplete information.

This is precisely where the JTB concept fails: it assumes that truth is already determined, that it is static. But in dynamic contexts, truth can change unexpectedly—due to what we might call epistemic good or bad luck. JTB presumes one can reliably assert truths about the future based on current justification and belief. Crude as it may sound, this becomes evident in everyday application scenarios.

Moreover, there are at least two epistemically relevant time points: (1) the moment of justification and belief, and (2) the moment when the truth value of the proposition becomes (retrospectively) evident. The failure of JTB lies in its temporal indifference—it does not account for the possibility that a justified belief at t₁ might turn out to be false at t₂, even though no irrationality occurred.

Any JTB that is currently accepted in a dynamic scenario may turn out to be false. This is epistemologically paradoxical: JTB is meant to define knowledge strictly—but definitions, by their nature, must offer consistent and temporally robust criteria. They should fix what something is once and for all. But that doesn’t happen here.

This implies: any dynamic scenario in which one makes a justified assertion according to JTB—and in which the circumstances then change—produces a counterexample: a “justified false belief,” such as in the broken bottle or the “fastest way to work” cases. These are not marginal exceptions; they are systematic results of a conceptual flaw.

The fatal weakness of JTB is its lack of temporal precision. If it were to incorporate temporal dimensions, it would have to make them explicit. It does not. Thus, at the very least, it is imprecise—and for a definition, this imprecision is fatal, because definitions are meant to offer definitive and stable characterizations of the concept they define.

I simply wanted to highlight these core issues once more.

@creativesoul

You clearly do not understand the charge being levied against your entire endeavor/project. — creativesoul

I see a shattered ego, but no stable argument.
It’s a pity you lack the integrity to present counterarguments rigorously.
If you were serious, you would’ve brought something to the table.

I’m well aware of the matter at hand, and I’ve made that abundantly clear.
Unlike you, at least I don’t need to put others down to make a point.

If you’re really that sharp, show me your work on the topic.
What have you ever truly thought through—start to finish?
What have you articulated so precisely that it’s not just a jumble of associations in your head,
but actual, criticizable propositions?

Show me what a „devine man“ you are that your ego rises so high in the sky. What grand revelations await me? Please, do enlighten me with your professorship and boundless creativity… oh, my soul trembles in anticipation..!

And even in cases where we do not, or even cannot, know the truth we have no reason to doubt there is a truth and that it is worth seeking. — Janus

Absolutely.. ad astra per aspera..

or as a gang of philosophers once said... "step by step uhh baby": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay6GjmiJTPM

"“[…] it is the struggle itself that is most important.
We must strive to be more than we are, Lal. It does
not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal.
The effort yields its own rewards.“

Lt. Cmdr. Data to his daughter Lal
Star Trek: The Next Generation"

I think it’s a necessity of structure itself — the nature of nature, its underlying architecture. Like how perception structures thinking through differences, which eventually culminates in the consciousness of the difference between self, world, and others. But who knows. Just speaking loosely. I wasn't there as it happened.

lol

In DK Intuition is a important component for evaluating credences as the lottery Problem demonstrates.

@AmadeusD @T clark

Within the framework of DK, intuition functions as a tool for navigating epistemic uncertainty. It enables the recognition of subtle tensions when justified beliefs—such as in the Lottery Problem—appear rational yet still elicit doubt. This doubt is not merely psychological; rather, it signals a conceptual crisis. Intuition reveals that the categories under which we assess beliefs may no longer be adequate.

In such moments—when beliefs seem formally coherent but intuitively “off”—intuition plays a guiding role. It detects the atopon, the sense of strangeness or misfit within what initially seems self-evident. Often, this creates an epistemic circle: the perception of uncertainty leads to a doubt that cannot be fully articulated, yet still demands conceptual revision. DK takes such intuitively perceived crises seriously, as they indicate that knowledge must be not only justified and true, but also contextually coherent. In this way, intuition contributes meaningfully to the dynamic adjustment of concepts under conditions of uncertainty.

Thank you, @“Janus”. :)

The thing is that JTB is still necessary; but with variations. The modern discourse is misled. What needs to be addressed is the changeability of objects and time. This is something that has not been seriously examined so far—and that’s why, as I’ve argued, the Gettier problem remains unresolved.

The Gettier problem cannot be solved because, as humans, we cannot attain absolute knowledge, and therefore our assertions might always be false, no matter what we do. Knowledge is not something necessary or certain—it is only an expectation. Our (sensory) experience is a factor influenced by this uncertainty. We can be wrong: we can be deceived by illusions, trapped in a simulation, or misled in countless other ways. This is not what we want, but it is what we are thrown into. And that’s okay—but unsatisfying.

Even the rain could be an illusion, but we can still reasonably claim that it is not: see reliabilism as a tool. There may be no defeater, but if one appears, we must adjust. That is the best we can do. What is needed is an epistemological humility that is aware of this human condition.

It might be the case that the barn façade is an illusion, but we have no compelling evidence that it is. This is the best we can do. And that’s why, in my opinion, Socrates says, “I know that I know nothing” (with regard to the real world of shadows), despite Plato’s reliance on eternal ideas. But my skeptical argument goes further: we can’t even claim absolute knowledge of the present or the past—let alone the future, which is marked by contingency.

As I argue, there are not one but three distinct induction problems:
Retrospective Induction Problem (Past):
• Smith believes Jones will get the job because Jones has ten coins. Later, Smith himself unexpectedly gets the job and realizes his original assumption was incorrect—he must now retrospectively reevaluate his initial belief.

Present Induction Problem (Identification; Present):
• In the context of Gettiers application scenario.. a security guard is told: “Let in only the sole person who has exactly ten coins.” Two individuals arrive, each carrying exactly ten coins. The guard faces a problem of faulty identification due to limited criteria. There is as this variation of the situation reveals a hidden Leibniz law violation within the Gettier cases. All such cases have insofar a problem with their the truth-makers.

Prospective Induction Problem (Future):
• Every morning, the sun rises, so one assumes it will rise tomorrow as well. However, despite consistent past experiences, there is no absolute guarantee this prediction will always hold true.

Accordingly, there is always the chance of being right and the risk of being wrong based on available information—but there is never a necessity that our belief is correct in dynamic scenarios. Every assertion we make involves a fork in the road—a crisis.

The objective measure, insofar as we can achieve one, lies in having the most information and processing it adequately. This is what we often see in Gettier cases: the observer knows more than the individual making the assertion.

Moreover, there might be concurrent JTBs (Justified True Beliefs) that cannot be reliably judged—this is what the Rashomon effect illustrates.

JTC responds to this with its dualism, crisis-awareness, and the concept of conceptual knowledge—which, in my opinion, represents the best we are capable of: to show epistemic humility and cast the most reliable net we can over experience, through reflection and dialogue with others.

@Ludwig V
My wording was chosen deliberately and corresponds precisely to the intended meaning. Had I meant to say “identical,” “equivalent,” or intended another specific distinction, I would have expressed it explicitly.

There are multiple versions of the Ship of Theseus – the classical one from Plutarch and a more developed version by Thomas Hobbes. Plutarch poses the question of whether an object that has all its parts replaced over time can still be considered the same. Hobbes intensifies the thought experiment by suggesting that the original, removed parts are reassembled into a second ship – resulting in two ships, each of which could claim to be the original.

Against this backdrop, your statement – “Theseus’ ship really changes and remains the same” – lacks precision. The ship does not remain the same; rather, it appears to remain the same. And this is precisely where the philosophical challenge lies: how can identity persist despite complete material transformation? The question is not whether change occurs – it clearly does – but how it is possible that such change does not disrupt the impression of continuity or sameness. Hobbes’ version highlights this issue even more sharply by introducing not just transformation, but the problem of competing claims to identity.

Can this even be, given time passes? What could stay the same? — AmadeusD

Changeability is a spectrum.
Some things—like 2 + 2 = 4 or the concept of “1”—are unchanging. Others transform so quickly that we barely notice them: electrons or quarks in the cup of coffee you’re looking at right now, for instance. And then there is everything in between—changes that unfold over seconds, minutes, hours, days, or years.

This spectrum applies to knowledge in correspondence as well. Some knowledge is immutable; other knowledge evolves over time. While all forms of knowledge share the same demand to truth, they must be approached differently. Justified True Belief (JTB) may suffice for static knowledge, but dynamic knowledge—knowledge of change—requires a different framework. The very recognition of change is a kind of knowledge in itself, much like your knowledge of yourself as a changing being.

The underlying question, then, is: How can change be grasped as knowledge at all?
This is precisely what Justified True Crisis (JTC) seeks to address.

Incidentally, this is also where the Ship of Theseus paradox becomes relevant—something that changes over time while still being perceived as the same. In that sense, this is not just a side topic, but a foundational philosophical theme.