The point of this thread is other than the thread’s title.
As they say in the south…
“Gettier done!!!”.
Crocodile baiting.
a lot of that goes on in the south, in fact. ever heard the story of amos moses?
I think it’s a fair critique of Gettier…
that, yes, in certain instances jtb can miss something
does not eliminate it as a good overarching heuristic for knowledge in general. We don’t have to throw out the baby just cause sometimes he’s got some bathwater on him.
I do think the T misleading, however, in jtb.
Because JTB looks like a set of criteria and while we can check the justification and check the belief criteria we cannot check the T criterion except by looking at the J, it makes for a messy concept.
Yes, the T is meant to be metaphysical not an epistemological criterion. IOW it will not have been knowledge if we later figure out that it wasn’t true.
But I think that since the three letters are not all of the same category, it’s a bad way to frame the idea. And ungainly as it may be
I think a well J-ed B that is not falsified is a better abstract description of knowledge and more directly fits. That’s what we work with in situ. WEll justified beliefs that are not, so far, falsified.
Of course that’s off the topic of Gettier.
If something is not entirely true, it does not mean it’s entirely false. More importantly, if something is not entirely true, it does not mean it’s useless.
The idea that JTB is a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge is not entirely true (given specific definition of the word “justification”) and that’s what Edmnund Gettier showed. But it’s not entirely false either since JTB still remains a necessary condition for knowledge.
Did Edmund Gettier (who’s still alive and kicking) ever say that Plato’s account of knowledge is entirely false?
If someone’s poking holes in a theory, does that mean they are trying to “destroy” that theory i.e. to show that it’s completely false and useless? I don’t think so. So one must be aware not to presume too much.
A well-justified belief that is not falsified can still be false.
I agree.
Dunno.
Agreed.
Of course. But that’s the position we are always in. I am trying to frame a theory of knowledge or criteria that are useful. To me adding in ‘true’ along with ‘justified’ doesn’t give me anything to work with. I can only look at the justification. Here I am, a human with limited knowledge. I can look at the justification and evaluate it and think…that’s very good. But I can’t then go check the truth of the belief and think…oh, good, it’s also true. I can only look at the justification and whether anything out there ruins that justificaiton - perhaps a clear counterexample - the black swan, whatever.
Now i know that the T is not intended as a criterion that we check off. But I think it makes JTB confused, because you do check off the justification and whether the person believes it. I think JB works better, with the proviso that nothing demonstrates it is false.
This is, in fact, how they work with knowledge in science. Does the evidence strongly support the hypothesis? There is no check where the scientists then check something else or use some other process to see if it is true. If something comes along and falsifies it later, then we find out that what we considered knowledge was not, or was only partially correct or correct in X conditions. Knowledge may always have to be revised.
There is no God’s eye view that tells us that a belief is both very well justified and true. We just have the justification.
Revision stems from from a premonition, and premonition are vaguely connected in some measure to am original hypothesis.
Then, it’s sense of justification. Only derived from a prior attempt at reverse justification .
When the apple fell on Newton, sure, the utility came much later on, it was realized at a.point which now days can enable to transcend temporal considerations , but then again , it’s utilization not widely connected to it’s
derived function.
Faust, I think that Nietzsche and philosophers somewhat like him such as Anaximander, would hold that there is only one piece of true knowledge (e.g. “the world is will to power and nothing besides”) and that all possible other knowledge is conditional on that, and thus never atomic.
Such a philosopher would not be interested in pointing out facts, rather he would reveal angles, perspectives, and, as Pedro said, make points.
I think you miss the point. The point is to define (i.e. to verbally describe) the meaning of the word “knowledge”. The question that is being asked is “What things (existent or non-existent) can be called by the name knowledge?” The question is not “How can we determine whether a given portion of reality can be called by the name knowledge?” That’s a different question. It’s a different question because it involves figuring out the content of the portion of reality of our interest. In fact, in order to be able to ask such a question one must first answer, even if unconsciously, the first question. For how can one determine whether a given portion of reality can be represented by some word if one doesn’t know what that word means?
Exactly right.
Why an epistemology must be at once a verifiable ontology.
Why there cant be a difference between categories and notions.
Ultimately why there can only be one notion, if a notion is to be had at all.
Philosophy has thus always amounted in core-concepts like physis, eros, power, in terms of which man attempted to understand his own knowing.
For philosophers intuit that when they do not understand their own knowing they can not actually know what they are knowing, so absent such self-knowledge, all that presents itself as knowledge to the mind amounts to a mere scheme to keep it occupied and locked down in a pattern.
Therefore knowledge is power; whenever it is not, you’re not actually knowing an existent being.
And my point is precisely that the meaning you say is the point, is not really meaningful to
us.
It isn’t really useful. So, I am treating, intentionally, the category with how we treat individual cases. I think it is misleading to have the category be jtb, since we cannot use jtb in specific cases, though we can use jb (that has not been falsified.) Of course I tend towards pragmatism, so, I would.
And jtb does get a carried over into individual cases, which I think leads to silliness. And, it seems to me, gettier is trying to find counterexamples on an individual case basis, to show that jtb is problematic. That is the context of the thread. Is jtb necessary and sufficient and focusing on Gettiers approach to seeing if it fails.
I am saying that it is problematic not because of problematic individual cases, but because of where we find ourselves in media res.
I did mention in one of my first posts in this thread that I understood T did not stand for a criterion, that is was a more metaphysical category here. Nevertheless I think it is problematic, precisely because of how jtb ends up being used and I think also the split between justification and truth in metaphysics. Again, coupled no doubt with my pragmatic approach.
What’s the verifiable ontology of jtb.?
What ontologies does it rule out?
How did science move through a range of ontologies in the last 200 years if there has been a verifiable ontology (that is one) at the base of science and jtb? Or did science not follow jtb? Or something else
None, that I know of.
Science is not an ontology but a method.
I have to wonder, how is it not useful to understand the meaning that people ascribe to the word “knowledge”? I am of the opposite opinion. I think it is very much useful for the simple reason that it facilitates communication.
I am not sure what “metaphysical category” means. Indeed, I do not even know what the word “metaphysics” means. But I do know what the word “true” means.
There is T in JTB for the simple reason that a belief must be true in order to be categorized as knowledge. Without it, you get a meaning that is broader than the one we intuitively assign to the word “knowledge”. In other words, you get an incorrect definition of the word “knowledge”.
How can we determine whether any given belief can be categorized as knowledge or not is a separate concern.
And I am critical of it because I think it confuses the issue. First, it looks like there are three criteria. Second, it seems to indicate that from our vantage truth and justification are different things. From our vantage. I do understand that something can be well justified and false. But in situ we don’t know when that is.
From Stanford’s online philosopy encyc… and re: my use of metaphysical earlier in the thread.
I think you could also use the term ‘ontological’.
But that is simply NOT true. We categorize things as knowledge that turn out to be false, precisely because we can only judge justification and not truth.
No, you get an accurate one. We decide that knowledge are those things that are very well justified that have not been falsified. We know that it may turn out that some of this knowledge, precisely as in the history of science may turn out to later be shown to be false or partially false. But if we are rigorous the benefits of this heuristic outweigh the faults.
And guess what, that is precisely how science functions. It allows that some of what we consider knowledge today will turn out to not be true.
the JTB definition is of course the goal, but then we cannot classify anything using it. It is intended to be true and justified, but we cannot be sure.
And notice what you wrote here…
This is not how science works. And you cannot apply the jtb in science. But you can apply jb with no current falsification.
It must not be known to be false, which is another way of saying that the justification is very good and not contradicted.
Absolute time/space turned out to be false, however it was a useful model. It was knowledge for a long time.
This is our situation, in the middle of things and fallible. We must classify things as knowledge even while acknowledging that some of them will turn out not to be true.
Well, precisely. So why does scientific epistemology need a verifiable ontology? Can it not, for example, have several? Can it not use one that is not verified, but stimulates research? That everything is physical has been an ontology in science for a long time. It is not verified. In fact they keep changing the criteria for what is considered physical. And yet it has been productive. I happen to think it is not a complete, and in that sense it is a false, ontology. But it is chugging along happily with an unverfied ontology.
If you say that a false belief is “knowledge”, that does not mean that you’re using the word “knowledge” to mean something other than “justified true belief”, it may simply mean (and in most cases, it does mean) that you mistakenly believe that a false belief is a true belief. That’s what happens in practice. The meaning of the word reamins the same, what changes is our perception of whether the belief in question is true or false.
That’s not true.
If you point with your finger at a horse and say “This is a unicorn!” does that mean that the meaning that you assign to the word “unicorn” is that of a horse? Of course not. It may simply mean that you’re using the word to represent something that cannot be represented by that word.
Not sure why you think we can’t classify beliefs using JTB. Is it because of the possibility that our classifications might be wrong? I don’t think that’s a problem with JTB.
You keep saying this, but is it really true?
Suppose that Socrates believes that “Unicorns exist.” How do you verify that his belief is knowledge? Since knowledge is justified true belief, you have to verify that his belief is BOTH justified and true. In other words, you have to check off both J and T. But how do you do that? First, you have to ask him to justify his claim (or you have to figure out his rationale on your own) and determine whether his justification is a good one or a bad one. So let’s say you ask Socrates to justify his belief. He tells you that, because he saw a bunch of unicorns once, he can conclude that unicorns exist. This is a very simple argument that is obviously valid, so you have no choice but to conclude that Socrates is justified in believing that unicorns exist. But that’s not enough to conclude that his belief is knowledge. You also need to check off T. And how do you that? You can do it any number of ways but let’s say that, for the purpose of this example, you decide to do it by spending certain amount of time looking for unicorns. At the end of your inquiry, you conclude that Socrates’s belief is false, since you did not find a single unicorn. Thus, you can conclude, Socrates’s belief, while justified, is not true, which means that it’s not a piece of knowledge.
The process is relatively the same when examining our own beliefs (instead of other people’s beliefs) it’s just not very obvious that it is.
Well actually science moves directly from epistemology to technology.
Its epistemology, as in certainty, pertains to: what works.
Note that science has an epistemology of method, not of “being”, which would have to be an ontology.
I think Nietzsche’s true insight, specially regarding epistemology, is genealogy. Even for something as pure and simple as will to power, Nietzsche viewed himself strictly, understood himself, the same way as Newton did: as standing on the shoulders of giants.
Newton’s main achievement was also very simple and very pure.
At no point did he think: “I am at an absolute threshold of knowledge, which is accessible purely by virtue of being knowable.”
Thus the whole dissection of logic which promethean once so elegantly described.
Contingency, but only contingency, gives insight into knowledge. That is why vegetables don’t know thoughts.
The same way planets are formed. By building up.
I agree, though most scientists and their groupies do not seem to realize it is a pragmatism they believe in. What works. In fact I have been tempted several times to bring up the idea of ‘what works’ as opposed to ‘the truth’ in parts of this thread, so I am glad you brought it in.