Anyway, I'm okay with our views being different. I wasn't okay with being invited to criticize and then being given the response that was given to what was/is valid critique. I've said enough to support that criticism.

I'll leave you to it now. Pardon the interruption.

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. — DasGegenmittel

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.

I don't usually think of the Gettier cases as all alike. — Ludwig V

Yes, generally speaking.

I would further say that there are significant differences between some and others. However, all of them, I think, directly involve and/or work from the idea/notion of epistemic luck, which is usually taken as a problem with the justification aspect of JTB. However, as you may remember from our past conversation(s), I think that that grants too much to begin with by asserting that they are indeed cases of justified true belief, or assenting to such claims/conclusions. I find them to be cases of misattributing belief to S, including Russell's clock.

Many of the objections to my account of that case involve the idea/claim that S cannot believe that a broken clock is working. Yet, my account lends itself very well to experiment in which S will admit to believing exactly that after becoming aware of it. By my lights, that supersedes any and all objections based upon past conventional belief attribution practices. In addition, the experiment supports the idea that we cannot knowingly believe a falsehood and/or contradiction. It also supports the idea that we do not always know what we believe at the time we believe it, and hence when it comes to a difference between an 'objective' account of another's belief and a believer's own account, the believer's account does not always warrant deference/preference regarding which account is more accurate just because it's their own account. This, in turn, supports the idea that we cannot recognize our own mistakes and/or false belief at the time. It highlights the need for another to point them out to us, as well as underscores the need to be able to trust others enough to do so. Such is one way to manage the recognition of our own fallibility.

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? — DasGegenmittel

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.

Yes. I don't usually think of the Gettier cases as all alike. Most of the later ones avoid the (rather obvious) mistakes that the actual Gettier cases make. But it is not unfair to say that they turn on a proposition (belief) which is ambigous and is interpreted (applied) differently in two different contexts - the subject's belief/knowledge and the context of what we might call objectivity. — Ludwig V

Yep. Detached from the believer, "P" can mean very different things as is clearly shown by the difference in truth conditions between Smith's belief and the same marks examined as a proposition completely divorced from Smith. Attributing different meaning to P is to misinterpret P. I'm not fond of the notion of "objective", although I find Searle's notion/use more acceptable than others.

Since you mentioned/used it, the first case aims at Chisholm's formulation directly below.
 
S knows that P IFF, (i) S accepts P, (ii) S has adequate evidence for P, and (iii) P is true.

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.

Gettier missed/misses the mark.

Irrelevant to the point being made. Gettier's claim to fame is/was that his examples undermine/undermined two widely accepted formulations of JTB by virtue of purportedly showing how they could be satisfied, resulting in examples that are clearly not cases of knowledge, but rather were cases of epistemic luck/coincidence.

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?

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". — DasGegenmittel

Sure it is.

Gettier offered two cases which purportedly qualified as JTB yet were not knowledge. If Gettier offered two cases of justified false belief, there would be no problem at all.

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... — DasGegenmittel

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.

On your view, are Gettier cases, in both the actual paper and the various cottage industry cases, examples of justified true belief? — creativesoul

Formally, yes — Gettier cases do fulfill the traditional criteria of JTB... — DasGegenmittel

Okay. Good.

How would it affect/effect your view/explanation if both cases are examples of justified false belief, rather than justified true belief?

On your view, are Gettier cases, in both the actual paper and the various cottage industry cases, examples of justified true belief?

Good morning Ludwig! :smile:

I'm not well read on Hobbes' variation and its details/consequences, although what you say seems about right with respect to unassembled parts of ships not being equivalent to ships.

For me, and I may be missing something, the ship and the river both trade on the ambiguity of what counts as being the same thing. Things can be the same in multitudes of ways. I've not worked it out in a long time, but I suspect there's either an equivocation fallacy regarding what counts as being "the same", such that either it's used in two distinct senses in the same argument, or if all change results in a different thing, it's an untenable criterion for the reason mentioned heretofore; the impossibility of naming/talking about things.

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.

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. — DasGegenmittel

Nice example of an ad hom argument charging others of the same. Goes nicely with the earlier ad hom you offered in response to the very simple criticism of Gettier 'problems'. I was hoping for something better than a rhetorical flourish of personal attacks. I was hoping for something a bit more relevant, I suppose.

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.

Do we find agreement in this general description of our situation?

That's a start.

The ship never stops being the ship.

If a change in physical constituency demands different identity, then it would be impossible to name things fast enough.

That's where I'm at regarding everchanging ships and rivers.

I can readily accept that we don’t share the same conviction. — DasGegenmittel

Presupposes you know mine.

I don’t find your argument convincing — DasGegenmittel

Presupposed you know the argument and it's logical consequences.

it’s perfectly fine with me if you don’t share my position. — DasGegenmittel

So far, I haven’t had the impression that you’ve taken the underlying dualism seriously (or at least contingency); instead, you seem to stick to your line of thinking which is inevitably paradoxical. — DasGegenmittel

Please, set this line of thinking out, along with it's consequences.

I don’t have the time right now to go into detail, and I don’t believe you’ve thoroughly examined the arguments I’ve presented. For further questions read the introduction piece, my comments or the essay with which I made my case and lost any burden whatsoever.

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

Hey Ludwig! Hope you are well in this unsettled world.

I don’t find your argument convincing — DasGegenmittel

What argument? Set it out.

The burden here is yours, not mine. The assumption you're working from is misguided. You're assuming that Gettier showed a problem for the J in JTB. You're not alone. Most convention agrees. I've mentioned the problem. I've shown otherwise. If justification is not the problem with Gettier cases, and it's not, then the Gettier 'problem' dissolves completely, and it does. I roughly sketched this case, to which you seemed to agree with the heart of it. Now follow it through. In both Gettier cases, S's belief is not true, and Gettier's account/report of/on that belief was inaccurate(as already argued in my first post).

It's justified false belief.

If it is the case that both Gettier examples are cases of JFB, then the Gettier problem dissolves completely. Barn facades, sheets blowing in the wind, and broken clocks all suffer much the same fate. They dissolve when S's belief is more accurately put and then reexamined.

We can never be certain any particular thing is true except that, perhaps, we exist. — T Clark

I can be certain of far more than that. I think your conflating truth with certainty/confidence.

All sorts of claims are true, regardless of whether or not I am certain, regardless of whether or not we can check and see.

It means really, actually, for real true, which, of course, nothing ever is. That's why JTB is such a bonehead definition. — T Clark

Nothing is true? The irony. The name-calling doubles the icing.

Indexing or timestamping can document this shift, but they do not prevent it. — DasGegenmittel

Timestamping is not used to prevent change, whether that be changes in the way things are or our knowledge about them.

I suppose I'm not seeing the need for lengthy complicated explanations replete with the coinage of new concepts/notions/kinds of knowledge to help explain what's going on in Gettier cases.

The problem is belief, not justification. <-----That needs to be better put. The problem is that the accounting practice in use when setting out S's belief is a malpractice. Correcting the clear unambiguous misattribution of belief to S completely dissolves the purported problem.

Your notion of "change" is untenable. I'm reminded of Heraclites' river.

Change is irrelevant to JTB. At time t1(insert well-grounded true claim here) and viola!

Personally, I find no issue between JTB and change. That's what proper indexing/timestamps are for.

Gettier exposed much less familiar and/or commonly recognized issues. One main issue(by my lights) was the notion of belief Gettier worked with. Western convention shares this problem as well. One consequence of that misguided/incomplete notion of belief is that the belief under consideration in many(arguably all) Gettier cases, as well as many other traditional conventional considerations, is not equivalent to the belief of S(whomever that may be). Salva Veritate applies.

The first case, S believes he himself will get the job. "The man with ten coins in his pocket" when severed from a speaker who is only referring to themself has a very different set of truth conditions than when we keep in mind that the speaker was referring to himself. "The man with ten coins in his pocket" was referring to S himself, and no one else. Severed from S, "The man with ten coins in his pocket" refers to any man. A change in truth conditions is a change in meaning, and as such that alone serves as adequate ground to reject that example outright. S never believed anyone other than himself would get the job. We know that. S did not get the job. Therefore, S's belief was false. The lesson: Not all belief is equivalent to propositions. The problem: We treated(and still treat) belief as if it/they were equivalent to propositions.

The second example has Gettier incompletely reporting on S's belief. Belief that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is believed to be true because S believes Jones owns a Ford. The proper accounting practice keeps this in mind. Convention/Gettier does/did not. Again, the problem is severing the belief from the person and then treating it as a proposition without attachment to a believer. He believed that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" was true because Jones owned a Ford. It was not true because of that. Therefore, S's belief was false and misrepresented by Gettier/convention. Same lesson. Same problem.

:wink:

Carry on.

Interesting that someone who purportedly does not want to "control any markets" guts legislation put in place to protect consumers from all sorts of financial injury knowingly and inevitably caused by certain business practices all of which were possible as a result of a lack of those same regulations.
— creativesoul

I don't know. — frank

Clearly.

Amongst other things, some consumer protection laws used to forbid predatory and other fraudulent financial business practices where otherwise innocent and unknowing consumers trust what's being told to them by whoever is supposed to be providing them a service. Add to that the loosening of the language in banking regulations, as well as loosening of banking rules/restrictions allowing all or most banks to behave like investment banks instead of traditional banks and the sheer lack of oversight after the Clinton administration nixed Glass Steagall(which kept financial institutions from recklessly tanking the market/economy like they had earlier), and you had banks creating and selling financial instruments that 'looked like' traditional safe mortgage-backed instruments. They weren't. Rather, they were based on bad(horrible) loans that every single party involved except the consumers knew were doomed for default/foreclosure. Hence, that's the reason the instruments were created. They even had a name for them. NINJA loans. In the end, the only ones holding the bag were those poor unwitting folk who purchased these mutual funds and the homeowners.

The real estate agents, companies, underwriters, and lending institutions had already made their money.

It was called the financial crash of 2008/09. You may be too young to remember. I'm not.

Trump just dismantled the consumer protections enacted afterwards. He's also systematically firing everyone and anyone who would have oversight over his and other government officials' actions.

On the one hand, he claims to want to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and on the other he gets rid of everyone who's responsible for doing so.

Yeah. He's full of shit and has convinced all sorts of otherwise unknowing people that he's 'fixing' something. He's fixing it alright. In his and his friends' favor. Just another day in an America where the overwhelming majority of regular blue-collar working-class people are being convinced to vote against their own best interests.

For whatever it's worth...

As a youth, I had a couple of recurring very unpleasant dreams. Someone told me that although I was sleeping, I had the ability to recognize that I was in the dream again. By doing this, I could also just wake myself up out of the dream by counting to 3 and telling myself to wake up.

It worked.

There were a couple of other dreams that I could also 'control' my 'dream self' in. Flying around like Peter Pan was one. I'm pretty sure that it was only after I began waking myself up from the most unpleasant one, that I began this sort of realizing and 'controlling' my dream self.

Fast forward several years, add to the life mix a massive head injury, and now I very very rarely remember anything I dreamed the night before. Just a few times in 40 years.

Donald Trump doesn't want to control any markets, in fact he just gutted regulations that were put in place after 2009. — frank

Interesting that someone who purportedly does not want to "control any markets" guts legislation put in place to protect consumers from all sorts of financial injury knowingly and inevitably caused by certain business practices all of which were possible as a result of a lack of those same regulations. This lack of regulation leading up to 2008 played a key causal role of the 2008 financial crisis that left millions of innocent Americans financially injured without recourse. He gutted the measures put into place to stop such practices.

For someone who claims to be focusing upon waste fraud and abuse... well... that's a bit too fucking rich for my tastes.

Disgusting.

Again, there is a lot going on here. — Banno

I love this thread. When I first started doing philosophy, I despised the historical uses of "necessary", because they discolored the readers' lenses, through which my writing was being read. I remember thinking I needed to invent my own term(s) in order to avoid having my writing filtered through such sense(s).

Quite the interesting discussion involving the different senses of "necessity" and "necessary".

The misunderstanding between J and Von Icarus was quite helpful for me. I suspect that such misattributions of meaning/sense often go unrecognized and result in an ongoing unarticulated misunderstanding.

Anway, just complimenting the thread and its participants. I'm very interested and will continue to read along in the background. I've nothing to add. Better listen and learn a bit more about the historical context(s) involving the senses of "necessary" that later plagued the interpretation of my early writing.

Hope you and the wife are happy and healthy.

Cheers.

Rödl's point is that the truth of propositions can't be 'mind-independent' in the way that Frege's objectivism insists it must be — Wayfarer

Interestingly enough, I agree with that. However, my reasons may differ from Rödl's, or I suppose the biggest difference may be methodological. Part of the interest I find here has to do with some of the notions/ideas being talked about and the interplay between them within evidently incommensurate, but coherent views. However, I'm relatively certain that the notion of "mind independence" I'm working from is significantly different from convention. For me, it's a matter of existential dependency/independency.



Riding the coattails of , it seems that some things we say/think are accompanied by what is commonly called a/the subject of the sentence, even when not consciously considered at the time of utterance/thought. In that sense, "I think" certainly accompanies positive assertions(assuming sincere speech), despite it not needing to be articulated silently. If and others are correct and Rödl's target is assertion, and/or propositions, there may be other unexamined problems underwriting the project, such as the accompanying(pardon the expression) common view regarding what counts as the content of the thought/proposition.

I hadn’t responded to this and similar points earlier because it seemed to be based on a misunderstanding and I wasn't sure how to clarify it. The "I think" is not supposed be some simultaneous, conscious "thinking about thought" or "thinking that I am now having thought X." (Maybe the term "the I think" is ill-chosen, since it can suggest that misapprehension.)

But now this occurs to me: Is it possible that you don’t countenance the idea of any thoughts that are not conscious? So therefore the “I think”, on that understanding, would be either present to consciousness or nonexistent? Or another possibility: You countenance the idea of various un- or subconscious processes that accompany thinking, but want to reserve the word “thought” for what happens consciously?

Is any of this close to how you see it? — J

This has been an interesting read for me. Expressing how I see it would involve undermining the entire project. In order to do it effectively, the distinction between thought and thinking about thought would first need to be clearly explained. Then, only after it is obvious that that distinction has been neglected, could the consequences of that error begin to have light shed upon them. The scope is dauntingly broad and exceedingly pervasive. I'm not sure that that is an appropriate path. It's a subject matter in its own right.

I appreciate this thread as well as the general tone within it. Well done! I would not want to dampen it, and so I will not. Better to keep my piece for another time.

Cheers!

Yes. I deal with a number of people on a daily basis that do not seem to understand how worldviews form, grow, and evolve over time and/or how they work.

One reason I opted out of further explanation earlier was based on the succinct manner in which you drew the distinction between self-conscious thought and conscious thought. That was enough to make the basic case against the claim at the heart of the OP.

Kant's failure to draw and maintain the distinction between thought and thinking about thought.
— creativesoul

Truly, I wasn't aware there was a problem... — J

The conversation you are currently having with Russell as well as the last few days' worth of discussion in this thread ought to make you aware. To be clear, neglecting the distinction between thought and thinking about thought is not just and only a problem in Kant's view. The scope of that neglect spreads across the conventional board. It manifests in all sorts of ways within all sorts of very different philosophers' views from the Greeks through postmodernism and everything in between.

"I think" is always metacognitive. The thought/belief(p) that it prefixes is not.

Think about children's thought prior to their ability to think about other minds as well as their own. Their thought is most certainly not prefixable with "I think". When they say "That is a tree" it is not accompanied by any sort of unspoken or implied "I think". It is their thought nonetheless. It is only after we begin to realize that other people have minds that we can begin to think about minds/thoughts as a subject matter in its own right. Last I checked there is an age range spanning a few years when that begins happening. If memory serves me, it's between 3 and 7 years of age. There are several experiments showing that some children in the age range have yet to have drawn a distinction between their own minds and others. Until that happens, there is no "I think" accompanying that mind.

Thought is an activity, — Mww

Indeed. I prefer "process", but probably because I'm trying to eliminate/avoid/exhaust "mental" without using it.

:wink:

Unsurprising. I'm tired, and I may not have understood your objection in its entirety. I'm sure I do not grasp the depth of it. Nonetheless, I was referring to this...

When you ask if the Oak is shedding its leaves, are you thinking that the oak is shedding it's leaves?

If so, why ask the question? — Banno

Roughly, I took this approach to indicate that we do other stuff with words besides state our thoughts/beliefs, to which attaching "I think" is relatively unproblematic. Questions/interrogatives being just one of those other speech acts. Seems odd to attempt to prefix some of those acts with "I think".

Nice clarification. That helped me to understand quite a bit better how narrowly focused the scope of the claim at the heart of the OP really is. I appreciatchya!

Are you assuming that all thoughts could be sensibly prefixed with "I think"?
— creativesoul
Wouldn't an example of a thought that cannot be appended to "I think..." be a thought that could not be thought?

The play here is on the lack of a clear idea of what a thought is. — Banno

:razz:

I see. I wondered where you were headed. I didn't realize you were frolicking. Your example already showed a kind/species of thought that doesn't seem to sensibly accept such an appendage.

Hey Banno!

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. Are you assuming that all thoughts could be sensibly prefixed with "I think"?

↪Leontiskos

Good stuff. Thanks. — Mww

I second that!

The “I think” accompanies all our thoughts, says Kant. Sebastian Rödl, in Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, agrees with this but points out that “this cannot be put by saying that, in every act of thinking, two things are thought: p and I think p.” He calls this a confusion arising from our notation, and suggests, not entirely seriously, that we could devise a more accurate notation “that makes I think internal to p: we may form the letter p by writing, in the shape of a p, the words I think.” He interprets Kant as saying the same thing: for Kant, “the I think is not something thought alongside the thought that it accompanies, but internal to what is thought as such.” — J

However, this whole thread just glosses over the underlying issue. Kant did not draw the distinction between thought/thinking and thinking about thought/thinking. Rödi just assumes and further reinforces that error.
— creativesoul

No, it's the opposite. Here's what I wrote in the OP, with relevant passages bolded: — J

:worry:

The assumption of Kant's error has nothing to do with the parts you bolded. The mistake was agreeing with an error, and that agreement preceded the portions you drew attention to.

If Kant says that "I think" accompanies all our thoughts, and Sebastian Rödl, in Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, agrees with this but points out that “this cannot be put by saying that, in every act of thinking, two things are thought: p and I think p”, then he's still agreeing that "I think" accompanies all our thoughts. He does not disagree with Kant's failure to draw and maintain the distinction between thought and thinking about thought. <----That is to assume Kant's error. Rather, it's only how to best put this that he's disagreeing with Kant about. <-----That is to reinforce the error. Neglecting to acknowledge, let alone directly address, the problem with the agreement between Kant and Rödi is a textbook case of glossing it over.

I've read at least three other valid objections/refutations of the claim at the heart of this thread. I'll leave mine here for now.

I think about things; I don’t think p. — Mww

:smile:

Sometimes we're thinking about propositions, utterances, statements, assertions, etc. Those are things too!

:wink:

Hi M!

the issue is contingent on what one interprets the term “thought” to signify.
— javra

I tend to agree, based on the interesting responses to the OP. The key cleavage seems to be whether thought is meant to be essentially sentential or propositional, as opposed to "representational". — J

Thought could be any of the three, depending upon the sort/kind/type/species of thought under consideration. So, the 'cleavage' is not so much 'oppositional' in nature so much as comparative. They all consist entirely of correlations drawn between different things. Although, I find notions of thought being essentially 'representational' a bit more muddled than sentential or propositional thought. Thought is not 'essentially' any of those though, and that is the point here. It is 'essentially' correlational. That is, it all consists of correlations drawn between different things. All of it, not just some of it. Some is propositional(propositions are part of the content). Some is sentential(though the difference escapes me - sentences are part of the content). Some, I suppose, may be described well enough as "representational", although I'm not privy to any such notion.

Sure it is, or could be. If I thought this had a cut-and-dried answer, I wouldn't be bothering y'all with it. All opinions are welcome. — J

Cool.

So, same question to you as to Banno, earlier: If Pat is correct, does that mean that my #4 is the right response?

Well, if it is the case than not all human thought can be accurately characterized as being two thoughts, p and "I think p" - whether the "I think" is spoken or unspoken - then yes, it cannot be the case that all human thought is both(or two thoughts) p and I think p. So, #4 is 'right' in some way/sense of being right.

Pat is right to deny that that is always the case. However, some of the other answers are also correct, depending upon the specific candidate of thought under consideration.

However, this whole thread just glosses over the underlying issue. Kant did not draw the distinction between thought/thinking and thinking about thought/thinking. Rödi just assumes and further reinforces that error.

There is more than one relationship between p and I think p. It is rather obvious that the "I think" portion is superfluous in nearly the same sense that "I believe" is. It adds nothing meaningful to stating/asserting "P". I would further question your recent addition that truth is not presupposed in each and every use of "I think". In other words 'p', 'I think p', and "I think 'p'" all presuppose truth. The alternative is to deny one's own utterance. That would be to state "P but P is not true", or 'I think P, but P is not true', or "I think 'p', but I'm not thinking 'p'. Of course, there is also yet another sense of "I think" that expresses a significant amount of uncertainty regarding p. So, there's that as well.