Again,

An attempt to analyse truth in terms of knowledge using a definition of knowledge in terms of truth will of course be circular. — Banno

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

From "We know that A" we can conclude that A is true, but only because that is how "We know that..." works; this is a bit of grammar only.

...where the external truth-maker is decided by the linguistic community rather than the believer. — sime

For a large class of sentences, the truth of the sentence is decided by how things are, not by how the community thinks they are.

Odd, that without evidence, or even argument, folk accept the theory that "hate speech" was specifically invented as a political weapon to silence conservatives. That seems to be where we are, at least in some countries. The term is recent, however the idea has a long history, back to outlawing libel agains groups, and blasphemy, through reactions to the harm of Nazi propaganda, tot he tension between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights problematically including protection for both freedom of expression and against discrimination. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination requires states to criminalise “all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred". Calls for action came after events in Rwanda, after which media executives were convicted of genocide. The concept of hate speech came long before the present US partisan fights.

As Pam Bondi recently discovered, there is indeed a tension between free speech and hate speech.

There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place — especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — [for that] in our society.... We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. — Pam Bondi

The United States elevates free speech in a way not seen in other jurisdictions, perhaps to the point of fetishising it. Other countries have found it possible to implement restrictions on acceptable speech. Wikipedia kindly provides a list of examples. As with gun law, the United States is an outlier. The preponderance of US citizens here will render the discussion somewhat parochial.

There are indeed plenty of philosophical issues to discuss here. It's a topic of some interest in that it sits at the intersection of ethics and language. Of particular interest to me is how Austin's distinction of perlocutions from illocutions has been used in solidifying the performative aspect of hate speech, in separating the harm caused in the utterance of some particular speech act from harm caused as a later result of that act.

...some instances of hate speech can be seen to constitute acts of (verbal) discrimination, and should be considered analogous to other acts of discrimination—like posting a ‘Whites Only’ sign up at a hotel—that US law recognizes as illegal... — SEP

There was a time not long ago when such discussions might occur in this forum. The partisan and the parochial have changed that.

I am putting it to you that it is not a useful term. — Roke

And yet there it is, being used by the United Nations. Likely the UN decided to use the term "hate" precisely because they need to motivate action and resources for what is essentially an educational approach

Perhaps take a look at the UN document, and see if there is something in the actions therein that is problematic.

The document is specific with regard to freedom of expression:

1. The strategy and its implementation to be in line with the right to freedom of
opinion and expression. The UN supports more speech, not less, as the key means
to address hate speech

Perhaps your point is more about the misuse of an expression rather than an argument that it not be used at all.

So your claim is that some hate speech is not hateful? Or at least that some language that is labeled hate speech may not meet, say, the UN definition?

Ok, so the term can be misused. But nevertheless it is a useful term. Not a nonstarter.

People - who won’t say what they mean - will decide the meaning of what you say. — Roke

It took me a few seconds to find the UN document. Who is it that "will not say what they mean"?

An attempt to analyse truth in terms of knowledge using a definition of knowledge in terms of truth will of course be circular.

The problem I think you see is of your own creation. Or so it seems to me.

United Nations Strategy And Plan Of Action On Hate Speech

...any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

So Chamberlain's declaration of war would be hate speech if it declared war on Germany because it was full of Germans, but not if it was because Germany invaded Poland...

And advocating the destruction of ticks because they are ticks would be hate speech. But advocating their destruction because they spread Lyme Disease isn't.

The difference is in the relevance of the criteria for the expressed hate. Hate speech intends to "other" particular groups because of their status as a group, not because of what they have done. It is an attack on identity, not on activity. Hate speech is intended to incite violence against a group, not to admonish a behaviour.

Now comes the bit were folk point to fringe cases in the hope of showing some inconsistency in the very idea. The existence of borderline cases doesn't invalidate a useful distinction any more than the existence of dawn and dusk invalidates the difference between day and night.

But Q1c was not about belief, but rather truth. Yes, it follows from believing something that I also believe it to be true, but that's not a reply to Q1c, which asks "Is it true?" Nothing I believe can supply the answer; it depends on the facts. — J

Well, yes, You seem to be expecting something from the JTB account that it does not provide. It's not a theory of truth.

Ok.

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. — Ludwig V

Well, yes.

The cat, as a stand-in for Wigner's friend, is presumably aware that it is not dead.

SO is the wave function collapsed or not?

Either consciousness is not what collapses the wave function; or the wave function is already collapsed by the cat; or there are multiple wave functions for different observers.

In each of these cases, there are grave problems for those accounts that rely on consciousness. Consciousness-based interpretations don't actually solve the measurement problem - they just push it around.

Presumably, if you give Wigner's friend a gas mask and put her in the box with the cat, the situation for Schrödinger, outside the box, remains unchanged... the cat is alive and dead; yet the situation for Wigner's friend is different - they can see the cat.

And crucially, Wigner's friend and Schrödinger will agree that this is the case. The rules of physics remain the same for both observers.

I'm not keen on philosophers indulging in speculative physics, but it's worth pointing out that "Shut up and calculate!" is itself a worthy metaphysical option... — Banno

I think what you're suggesting is that instead we should say, "I don't know if X is true. Such knowledge is impossible without circularity. But if it's true, then I know X. And if it isn't, then I don't." — J

No. We do have knowledge - we know things.

JTB is supposed to help us evaluate knowledge claims -- keep us epistemologically honest. And on this construal, it can't. — J

It doesn't tell us if they are true or not, so much as if they are known or not.

what use is JTB if it can't show us how to tell whether we know something or not? — J

Above, it told us that Jim was mistaken. He claimed to know something that was not true.

Q1a. Yes.
Q1b. Yes.
Q1c.Yes - follows from Q1a: if you believe it, you believe it to be true.

But if we are considering Jim's case, not your own, then it is open to us to say that while Jim believes the sentence is true, we do not, and so Q1c is false, and presumably conclude that Jim does not know what he claims.

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? — Ludwig V

Given that we believe the sentence, we believe that it is true. Do you mean more than that?

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

...my evaluation... — Ludwig V

Our evaluation might be better.

Okay, suppose that we took JTB as a criteria for interpreting the use of the word "knowledge". So we have Jim over there who says that he knows a certain sentence to be true, and we wish to determine if he is using "I know that..." correctly. First, does Jim believe the sentence? Second is the sentence actually true? Third, does Jim have some justification for his belief? If any of these fail then we can conclude that his use of "I know that..." is problematic, and how.

My point is that the word ‘truth’ doesn’t have any aspect of its meaning that transcends the context of its actual use. — Joshs

Do you see this as something with which might disagree, or which is incompatible with what has been said?

When you say “truth doesn't care about what is useful," you seem to be treating truth as something with its own independent nature. — Joshs

Not at all.

So "truth," "relevance," "significance", these aren't mapping onto features of the world so much as they're tools we use for various purposes in different contexts. — Joshs

How can they be tools if they do not in some way "map" onto the world?

My question is about how we'd know it to be true. — J

JTB sets out criteria for a sentence to count as knowledge. It is not a method for determining the truth of some sentence.

You seem to be saying that there's an independent way of determining whether X is true — J

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

JTB proposes that only true propositions can be known, AND that there is a way to determine truth apart from justifications. — J

I don't agree with the second part of this. There is a difference between a sentence being true and a sentence being determined as true. You again seem to conflate these. There is a difference between "P is true" and "J determined that P is true". JTB specifies that the sentence must be true, not that the sentence must be "determined to be true".

This seems to me to be the source of your confusion.

I don't think a JTB account is committed to this. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep.

I think JTB is intended as a test for knowledge, yes, not merely a description — J

Well, maybe not. Perhaps it's just about the grammar of the use of the term "know" - that we use the term for sentences that are justified, true and believed, and that a use contrary to these would be infelicitous. It's not a method for determining which sentences are true and which are not - which is what you seem to want it to be.

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.

Gender and race are important factors in the roles people play in unique contributions and the development of individuality. — Jack Cummins

Which of course raises the issue of why they are important, and whether they ought be.

A nullification of the butterfly effect. — jgill

Something along those lines was also at play in Asimov's Foundation series.

It strikes me as wishful thinking or a useful narrative device rather than a genuine possibility.

Yes, cheers. It's a curious topic, and apparently topical...

The anemones are quite good this year.

Yeah. The better philosophical conversations are the ones that pick out what is coherent from what isn't.

That's, on some accounts, what doing philosophy properly consists in. Not just any old thing.

So far as one's mental hygiene goes, it is worth noting that the various "what if" scenarios one might consider are made up. As such, you can always make them up differently. So for each possible world in which, say, folk are better of without you, there is an alternate possible world in which they are much worse off.

Take Granny's advice.

If you like. The ambiguity needed ironing out.

Hm. — Janus

if we know p could be false, then we don't know that it's true — Janus

No. I know the cat is on the chair but it could have been on the mat. Hence "the cat is on the chair" is true but could have been false.

Thinking we know something is not the same as knowing something — Janus

Better to use "believe". Believing we know something is not the same as knowing something.

'cause amongst other things it needs also to be true.

Folk seem to think that if, if we know something then it is true, then we can never be mistaken.

Think on it a bit.

If we think we know something and it turns out to be false, then we didn't know it.

f p is true then it cannot be false — Janus

Sort the ambiguity. p⊃~~p, but not p⊃~◇~p.

If p is true then it is not false. But not, if p is true then it cannot be false.

But is not knowing something is not false the same as knowing that it could not be false — Janus

Why the modality? Are you asking if ~K~p≡K~◇~p ? Well, no, since p does not have the same truth value as ☐p.

Drop the modal operator, do you have ~K~p≡Kp? That's also false. There are things we don't know we don't know and that's not the same as knowing those things.

If you indeed know that p, then p is true.

Yes. Made-up by professional scientists, per the (obviously mis-read) links in previous post. — Gnomon

Fixed that for you.

Shanon's equations and the work following do not equate energy and information. Wishful thinking on your part. The grain of truth is that processing information has thermodynamic consequences.

Your footnotes are veneer.

My own thought experiment is of thinking about how life would have been if I had not existed. It involves eliminating oneself from every aspect and incident in which one has ever partaken in. I wonder about how different life would have been without me for my family, friends and in all respects..How would life have been different for others without my existence in causal chains? — Jack Cummins

Modal contexts (what if's...) are stipulated. So the world could have be any way you might wish it to be. Your parents might never have met, or had a different child, or had no children at all... there is no one way things might have been; indeed there are innumerable (literally - without number) of ways the world might have been.

Which puts a lid on the speculation hereabouts. The world, without you, might have been different in any way you choose to consider.

‘Do you remember—’
‘I have a … very good memory, thank you.’
‘Do you ever wonder what life would have been like if you’d said yes?’ said Ridcully.
‘No.’
‘I suppose we’d have settled down, had children, grandchildren, that sort of thing …’
Granny shrugged. It was the sort of thing romantic idiots said. But there was something in the air tonight …
‘What about the fire?’ she said.
‘What fire?’
‘Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both.’
‘What fire? I don’t know anything about any fire?’
Granny turned around.
‘Of course not! It didn’t happen. But the point is, it might have happened. You can’t say “if this didn’t happen then that would have happened” because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say “If only I’d …” because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it. So I don’t.’ — Terry Pratchet

Pratchett, Terry. Lords And Ladies: (Discworld Novel 14) (Discworld series) (pp. 162-163).

Not sure how to read that. Are you saying that, a priori, we cannot know false propositions - that all the propositions we know are not false? Or are you saying that we cannot know a priori that some proposition is false? That seems wrong, since it seems we know a priori that "this triangle has four sides" is false.

Is your concept of truth in flux, or is the set of true propositions in flux?

And?

So your post was just made-up stuff. Ok.

The problem I see is that if we know something is true we must know it cannot be false — Janus

If we know something is true we must know it is not false. That's not the same as that it cannot* be false. It's not knowledge that is defeasible, but belief. Everything we know is true - just like every fact is true. Some things we think we know, are false - and therefore we do not know them.

If we think we know it's true, but it turns out it is false, then we didn't know it was true in the first place.

See how it works?


*Are we going to look at modality again? Let's not.

I didn't misread the reference, I just focused on the parts that were pertinent to my post :
Mensura = to measure ; Mens- = mind*1*2 — Gnomon

The root is mete, not mens.

Measurement, not mind.

And again, your own sources say this.

Nor does science equate information with energy. Bits are not joules.

Again, this lies on the unsupported claim of an essential dichotomy of: "either causes need to be abandoned or else there is only ever one cause, 'God willed it.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, no, it doesn't.

"God did it" is one way to end the causal chain; there are of course others. That chain is set up by framing physics in terms of causal sequences of events.

And that is not what science describes.

You make use of two merely rhetorical moves, an accusation of straw manning, and a slide to historical theology. Sophisticated topic-changing that appears learned while dodging the philosophical issue.

FIne.

Ok, I must be misunderstanding you. We know that we don't know whether there is sentient life on other planets...

You prefer utility to truth?

Do you think you can maintain that distinction? The truth doesn't care about what is useful.

Must I again point out the difference between "P is true" and "I know that P is true".

These are not the same.

The link between them is that one cannot know things that are not true.

which Banno has also picked up on, namely whether the T in JTB is doing any useful work. — J

Of course it is doing useful work.

When do I ever know something is true apart from having the right justifications? How can we make truth independent of justification — J

See how, again, this asks how you know that P is true, and not whether P is true?

But the T in JTB is dependent on P's being true, not on the circularity of your knowing that P is true.

Am I misunderstanding you in some way? You seem to miss this very obvious point.

I'm not seeing a difference between a justification and an understanding. In both cases what we know should fit in with our other explanations.

It's an appeal to consistency, or perhaps in Davidson's terms, to holism.

"Knowledge" doesn't have an essence. Whatever an essence is.

If the justification-truth circle is indeed a vicious one... — J

There, perhaps, is the problem.

Sentences are true or they are false, regardless of any justification.

Again,

Seems to me that folk read JTB as the claim that in order to know something, we must know that it is true. — Banno