AWESOME! Thanks for all that you are doing. I am 32 and I am a construction worker. I love philosophy, but university isn't an option for me and perhaps never will be. This is my university! So I appreciate it greatly :) P.S. Can't wait for the advanced logic course!
I really appreciate these videos also. I am a Philosophy major at SFSU, but I have few teachers who can compose a lecture that is as insightful and interesting as yours. Kudos to you. I hope you can keep this up!
Sorry it has taken me this long to reply, but I really appreciated your comment. I hope other struggling philosophy students will find this series helpful.
Second example addresses the question: "does Smith have knowledge of this disjunctive claim?". I argue that we step back and evaluate the requirements to consider the claim justified: "A disjunction claim is JUSTIFIED when AT LEAST ONE disjunctive (independent of the rest) is justified and the rule of inference is used?" Alternatively we can require that: "A disjunction claim is JUSTIFIED when ALL disjunctives (independent of the rest) are justified" Under the latter, the example would not satisfy "justified".
Audio and video were done two weeks ago! Computer glitches at home held me up, so I have to go to the library to convert into a movie...two days max til I put it out. Don't worry though; skepticism parts 1, 2 and 3 are getting put together in the meantime and will be published as a group. Yeehaw!
The first example is a case of equivocation, i.e. the use of the same terms at different stages of an argument, but the terms (ALTHOUGH the SAME) refer to DIFFERENT things. The first time the terms "man who will get the job" were used, was to represent Smith's belief in written language. However, Smith was NOT actually referring to the general category of "That X such that X is a man and X gets the job", Smith belief specifically refers to "Jones". The statement: "Jones (a man), who will get the job, has 10 coins in his pocket" is a more accurate representation of Smith's actual belief. Subtlety removing the specificity of "Jones" in describing Smith's belief is the problem. The second time the terms "man who will get the job" were used, was NOT referring to "Jones" specifically, it is in this second case "That X such that X is a man and X got the job", which refers to "Smith" and it is DIFFERENT from the first usage of the terms. So the same terms referred to different things at different stages in the example, i.e. equivocation. In conclusion, the statement: "Jones (a man), who will get the job, has 10 coins in his pocket" 1) is an accurate statement representing Smith's actual belief 2) it is justified 3) it is NOT true.
Maybe the problem lies with JTB in "justification"? Maybe justification works the same as knowledge - it can be absolute, or not absolute. Maybe for knowledge we need absolute justification?
I did not get why in the sheepdog example, it was not based on false belief/premises. Wasn't the belief based on wrong evidence, using the dog's white fur(wrong evidence) to make the claim. What am I missing here ?
This is an example of what's wrong with philosophy. JTB is just fine, it is exactly what people mean when they say that somebody knows something. The thing is that common usage doesn't worry about the details of how much justification is needed. If it turns out you're wrong then, of course, not enough justification. The only way to make sure that the justification is enough is for it to provide absolute mathematical style PROOF of the belief. That rules out ever having enough justification for anything but tautologies ( even then however you might have made a mistake!) so there winds up being no knowledge at all. It's an idealized concept that is never fulfilled. Like circles, there are no ideal circles but it's still a very useful concept. It's a very dead issue but philosophy / philosophers keep beating this dead horse. They do it because they can publish papers, sound like they are trying to settle an important issue whatever. It should just be taught as an example of a useful idealized concept that , like circles and lots of other things in math, doesn't actually exist. So JTB is just fine, it's what people mean when they say it , it just has no actual instances.
agree. It's a question of empirical accuracy. Idk wtf all this is about. I'm not interested in whatever this is. I'm interested in rigor. I don't see how attack on JTB is rigorous. I would simple add that the justification must be true. was that so hard? I think lot of philosophers may actually be perversely myopic. Idk. It's no wonder philosophers seem to get a bad rap. I think at some point we could somehow classify all this as 'juvenile'. I'm sorry for how arrogant that sounds. Maybe they are just concerned with something i find impractical. I find there IS a practical side to philosophy. I don't find that here.
How many philosophers are there? They have to have something to write about, their jobs depend on publications. It is very practical for them, getting paid. As soon as they admit that it's so much nonsense they have to find something meaningful to discuss. There just isn't that much available and to say anything at all significant is very hard. *I'm sorry for how arrogant that sounds.* You're apologizing for saying that the Emperor has no clothes. It isn't arrogance at all. The system that produces the nonsense needs to be exposed. Keep it up.
About 30 yrs ago in junior college. I think I sorta 'dismissed' philosophy. I think that was mainly because so many of them seemed to not be intellectually rigorous. I thought Decartes 'I think therefore I am' was great, then he want on to display spectacularly epic systemic intellectual failure, lol. Early philosophers were amazing for their time I think. But I find it disappointing that the lack of rigor persisted (and apparently still does) long after the wide adoption of the scientific method. It seems not all philosophers are non-rigorous, just maybe way too many. I was (mostly) impressed by John Searle. (though I've only seen a couple of hist talks). I think we call him an epistemic philosopher, but he seems to be doing it in a well-reasoned way. This seems in contrast to what 'all' these others were/are doing, and it remains difficult for me to understand the 'academic culture' that results in their works being deemed worthy of devoting college classes to them. Which is why I tend to think I may be 'missing something' but I don't' know what! lol. I almost want to use terms like pseudo-science. Oddly I guess I'm confused if philosophy is a science and somehow just a subset of them are doing it scientifically, or if it's something else that isn't science. But then if it is something else I don't know what to call it. Psychology, for example, certainly has at least come into being a science. I suppose I'm being metaphilosophical, idk. I feel like I 'have a philosophy' that isn't really so compatible with much of philosophy. It's a minor dilemma for me I think I'll get sorted. I'm neither so pessimistic or so arrogant as to think I'm so alone. I'm just tying to figure out where more of 'us' are and what we call ourselves. I hope to find more like Searle and less like this stuff. I think Sam Harris and Rickard Dawkins are quite competent. Idk if we'd call them philosophers first or something else (certainly not Atheists first) . I respect and agree with their views not firstly because they are Atheists. I respect and agree with that thinking because it's really a much more broad and fundamental higher competency in general that has Atheism as just one of its products. That's even loosely paraphrasing things they've said. It's only that level of competency I'm interested in. Sound thinking doesn't seem a style, or opinion, it seems more like 'doing math right'. I don't know if it could ever be taught like math, (that's a really difficult-seeming truth to try do deal in, understand, explain, articulate). But that sort of notion is of interest to me. My 'reviewing and getting up to date' experience about philosophy is mostly reintroducing me to what it was about most modern philosophers I had previously disrespected. Ultimately I struggle to find a clear use for it, or struggle to find the context in which it is useful. I wonder what Harris and Dawkins would have to say about the ambitions and limitations of JTB and the 'folksy squabbling' that seems to surround it. I wonder how they could categorize and characterize all that type of stuff.
You make me proud sir! Sorry that I am still tardy with my follow up video. I'll get cracking. After that, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, Ethics and Advanced Logic are next. Regards.
Would you say that epistemology is the "foundation" of philosophy? Should it be studied before metaphysics and ethics or should I start with one of those first?
A crumb has the makeup of the thing it was once, the truth entailed, the remainder, the loose change of the whole represented in the exchange, conclusion follows, contained in the signified transfer of knowledge - the notion of NOT, the subtle, the representation of containing what's public/privately known and not.
Sheep dog example is also a matter of equivocation. The statement "That field has a sheep in it" has the term "sheep", which is being used to represent the driver's belief, but author of the example is leaving out from the statement an important aspect mentioned within the example. Namely, the driver's belief is more accurate represented by the statement: "That field, has (which is a sheep) in it" The above statement makes EXPLICIT use of a property mentioned in the example and the author simply leaves it out. The belief is in the subjects head, the statement we decide to write on the video to represent that belief may not include a very important part....but that doesn't mean the audience is incorrect in filling the implicit blanks. The driver's belief, when accurately represented, would NOT be true.
Well, if you go back to the definition of truth in logic (something can only be true if it cannot be false), considering that a perception can be false, it can never be used as a justified basis for knowledge. If we keep the idea that knowledge must be true, it would clear up this mess quickly. PhilHelper what do you think about this?
Andrew W. There is a problem with your definition of truth. Something is true in classical logic only if it IS NOT false. The words "cannot be" don't belong in the definition. If they were there, then the only truths would be necessary truths. That is far too limited a set of truths. Thanks for your comment.
+PhilHelper "That is far too limited a set of truths" And why do you say this? Is it a justified true belief? You seem to be asserting it with absolutely no justification at all. Why do you think that a concept that just evolved bumping along by people tossing it about has to have more than a hit and miss approximate validity? I thank you for your direct statement that you reject the argument simply because of it's conclusion. Any argument then that reaches this conclusion is thereby rejected. Why? "If they were there, then the only truths would be necessary truths." What you say here , I completely agree with.(If ...then...) But reject what you just don't like based on a presupposition. "That is far too limited a set of truths" Says who? Where do you get that idea? Is there empirical evidence for it? Studies? Is it a logical truth? Isn't "truth" just a word that people use when they THINK that their belief is justified. Why can't it be just a convenient coinage for that? That by no means that it ever is actually fulfilled. Circles and tons of other words are like that, maybe all words. Scientific discussions frequently acknowledge this. It's accepted to say say something is true but admit that empirical verification is needed. Even then we never measure to infinite precision so better measurements may change everything or basic concepts may be changed to throw the whole conceptual scheme out. Even with all that we may have just gotten an incredibly wild statistical fluctuation so what we thought the "justification" was just dumb luck after all. This is always a possibility, in ordinary life and science as well.
+PhilHelper No, my definition is correct. A logical truth needs to stay true under all circumstances, meaning it CANNOT be false. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_truth
+Andrew W. You are correct that a logical truth needs to stay true under all circumstances. But there are more truths than merely logical truths. There are, for example, truths of mathematics not reducible to logic. And I'm pretty confident that there can be truths of science...however, this simply means that in contrast to yourself I believe in "contingent truths," things that are actually true but could have been otherwise. Make sense?
@4:00...I have to add here that our preferred epistemology came crashing down with Quantum Mechanics. Let's hope that our macro world doesn't seriously begin to turn on this axis, because we are not mentally equipped for it.
Seems with the barn and sheepdog examples it is 'Justification' that is the issue. Seeing that our eyesight can be easily deceived, justification on a knowledge claim based solely on eyesight is the issue.
Third example can either be attributed to: 1) equivocation...similar to what I argue in my first comment. Namely, the statement: "One of my employees owns a ford mustang" used to represent the Manager's belief is inaccurate; the terms "One of my employees" is (on the one hand) being used to represent the Manager's belief, when in actuality he specifically beliefs "NOGOT, which is one of my employees, owns a ford mustang". This representation of his belief is more accurate and is NOT true. On the other hand, the terms "One of my employees" is being use to refer to "Any X such that X is my employee", which is not inclusive of the specificity of "NOGOT", it is not the Manager's actual belief. Ultimately rendering his belief as NOT true. 2) I think the argument in my second comment, about the requirements of what entails disjunction claims as justified, is perhaps more illustrative of the problem. The terms "One of my employees" is implicitly disjunctive: "Either NOGOT owns a ford mustang, or HAVIT owns a ford mustang, or ETCETERA owns a ford mustang". In this case we can argue that in order to consider the disjunction claim as JUSTIFIED, each disjunctive (independent of the rest) must be justified. Since this is not the case for the Manager (he is not justified about HAVIT (independent of the rest). So, the statement "One of my employees owns a ford mustang" under that requirement would not be justified.
After only watching a few minutes I have to say, wow, this has nothing to do with epistemology. Yes it has a connection with Aristotle but that was two and a half millennia ago. We have come a long way since then. Philosophy does big and the biggest quest in philosophy is epistemology. The big names in the history of philosophy tackled the biggest problem in philosophy and you won't find any continentals there. We go forward by standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing further. The latest giant in the epistemological world was Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and Objective Knowledge (1972). We have solved the epistemological problem. Knowledge grows by trial and error elimination; problem (P1), tentative solution (TS), testing (EE, error elimination), better understanding of the problem (leading to P2) repeat. If Smith or Jones believes something about a job or a car that's fine as they are an interested party. But who gives a monkeys what anyone believes. Epistemology is not concerned with belief or opinion (subjective knowledge) but only with objective knowledge. Come-on, we only do big. We are concerned with going forward with the scientific method (P1, TS, EE, P2, repeat), growing our knowledge as effectively as possible. But we are equally concerned with bad knowledge, pseudo-science and dogmatic beliefs. And for these we repulse with our epistemological arsenal which includes logic, rational argument, maths and stats and the demarcation criteria (if its not testable then why should we take it seriously). You may visit lots of sites on RUclips where they discuss epistemology. They are all rubbish. We don't ask where you got your knowledge from, empiricism or intellectualism (Locke or Descartes), we only ask "how can we test it?". If it passes critical third party testing it improves its truth-likeness and passes from being a guess to becoming objective knowledge until it is displaced by a better guess with greater universality, truth-likeness and explanatory value. Comments welcome.
+David Lilley I'm of a different opinion. Popper (though I admire him) did not convince his peers of his view, often termed "falsificationism." In fact, he and the rest of philosophers did not have a successful time defining the term "falsified." They gave it a mighty shot in the 70s. Even worse, every attempt to formulate the scientific method has failed to gain prominence in the field. There is no accepted view on what constitutes a problem (see Larry Laudan for the best work on this issue), no consensus on why proposed tentative solutions are acceptable for research or not (see Thomas Kuhn or Wesley Salmon's "Rational Prediction"), as mentioned above there is no received view on falsification...also, it seems that the cycle you described does not lead to a better understanding of the original problem, but that the original theory and its problems are replaced with new theories which generate new problems. I'm going to definitely have to put my Philosophy of Science series into gear...if I can ever complete this epistemology series!
+PhilHelper Thank you for your kind reply. I read everything by Popper when studying mechanical engineering in the early 70's. Us spanners did as much maths as a maths graduate and learned of all the contributors to fluid mechanics, thermo, dynamics, controls, metallurgy, mechanics, electrics, electronics and many other subjects. Far too much for me and others to take in. But it did give us a love of logic, maths, Newton, Hook and hundreds of contributors to our scientific knowledge. Popper's falsification criteria is dated 1934. Popper's P1, TS, EE, P2 is dated 1972. It may not be as precise but I have always substituted the word testable for falsifiable. And who could knock "knowledge grows by trial and error elimination" or "trial and error". Its not knockable. Who could knock "if we cannot test it then how can we possibly know whether it is true or false"? And who could knock Tarski's logically derived definition of the long standing definition of truth "truth is correspondence with the facts". I wish you a happy Christmas and thank you for your feedback.
My answer tot he gettier problem: ( i would love criticism if any is to be had) My respons assumes that we are talking about synthetic propositions. Knowledge is True "Well-justified " belief. What is "Well-justified"? Well justified means that the justification can be used to reliably predict the logical implications of the conclusion. For instance with the ford example. Smiths justifications for Jhones's ownership of the ford, does not allow him to predict the logical implications of ownership. Let us say the ford is now impounded and will be returned to its owner, as long as the owner comes to retrieve the car himself. A line of people hoping to get a free car shows up. Jhones is among those people. now what justification can we use to predict who will get the car? well we know that the owners SSN is on the pink slip. So Jhones swearing to ford is not proper justification for ownership, nor is him having the correct keys (he could have stolen them). But let us say that Jhones name is on the pink slip. When we use that as justification, we can now predict, that the one showing the ID papers with a SSN matching the SSN on the pink slip, will get the car. However!!!! In daily life Jhones having the keys, getting in the car that Jhones claims is his, would be sufficient justification for us to call it knowledge, albeit that it would not suffice in an academic setting. This is due to the fact that in day to day life we make a lot of assumptions. As long as something is within social norms, or regular occurrences, we take it for ample justification. Also how often do you experience a college going to work in a car he stole himself. Q: How do you know that the pink slip is not forged :P A: pinkslips are stored electronically, and intercepting the registration process is far more trouble than it is worth
+Gunsong1 Interesting approach. I'll offer a few thoughts. (1) You might not want to couch justification strictly in terms of prediction. Some beliefs are well-justified because the explain data we already have rather than predicting new stuff. Prediction is future-oriented only... (2) Your reply involved notions of what possibly may occur...and where predictions can go wrong with respect to these possibilities. It seems highly similar to the no-defeater solution in that regard. I think it inherits the difficulties of that view, namely, being "well-justified" seems to now require omniscience or infallibility regarding one's belief. What do you think?
PhilHelper Hey First of all sorry for the redicolous response time. i have been looking for a new job for the last month or so and your response got drowned im affraid. Second thank you for your response it got my mind going and it made me realize just how far off my answer was. To respond. I agree my definition is not good enough and relying solely on prediction means that in fact my answer to the gettier problem is a quasi ansawer. Why? What if our lucky dunce becomes a very lucky dunce? reliablity check, prediction check, and gettier is back with a vengence. i at least need to get some relevancy of evidence into the mix and some constraints that limit the kind of inferances one can make. I can even suplement with a real life story to shoot down my attempt here. A few years back i was either the european or world cup in football(soccer if you are american) as a funny extra bid a squid was asked to predict the outcome of each match. To be specific a big ball with the relevant national flag was placed in an aquarium, whatever ball the squid decided to rest on was said to be the winner of the match. Lo and behold the squid was right more often than not. Im not willing to give up the wording of well-justfied, but i have to admit that my defintion of well-justified was not very good.
+Gunsong1 I had to read your reply a few times...got me thinking. So it could not have been that rediculous of a reply. Keep it up! :-) Perhaps you meant that a conclusion is well-justified if the justification it provides for the conclusion is also good justification for what that conclusion strongly implies? It's a challenging thought...constructing counterexamples would be a fun mental exercise though!
PhilHelper Hey Its not that i completly disregard the well-justified wording. Its just the way i defined well justified was not enough. An yeah basically i mean to say that you need a very good justification before i agree that it is knowledge. I still mean to keep the prediction of logical implications part as i see it as a necesary attribute but not sufficient. i need to, at least, add some objective criteria for relevancy. In short i want to say that knowledge is a true scientific hypothesis, rigerously tested via an experiment, that does not have any damning weaknesses such as relevant confounding variables. Now to phrase that in terms of attributes, and find an elegant philosophical definition for that hypothesis :)
Understood. When working out your theory of "well-justified" watch out for cases of immediate perceptual knowledge (ie. sheep-dogs and barn scenarios). Most philosophers would want to count these as sufficiently justified...otherwise your requirements for knowledge might be objectionably strong. But maybe you're heading towards that already? Plausible...but it will certainly be controversial....
I don't quite understand the sheepdog-problem. The viewer believes there's a sheep, it's true and it's justified. But isn't "I'm seeing a sheep" a false premise? Then the viewer concluded "There's a sheep on that field" which happened to be right.
If "I'm seeing a sheep" were the premise, then surely the "No False Premises" solution would apply. The problem is that it is not likely at all to be the viewers premise. In fact, we almost never reason from premises when it comes to basic perceptual beliefs. Surely right now you believe that you are reading a comment on youtube...did you ever stop to say to yourself "I am seeing a comment on youtube?" Did you make any inference to the conclusion "Therefore, this is a youtube comment?" Probably not. You just believed it automatically. That's how a lot of basic perceptual beliefs work. But if so, then the sheep-dog example seems to involve a justified true belief reached without the use of false premises...but it still did not count as knowledge.
I think it is rather simple to solve these problems. Knowledge has nothing to do with the truth! Knowledge is nothing more then a claim of certainty. It is a claim that under the circumstances that the knowledge claim was made the person makeing the knowledge claim would act on their belief. So lets say we were both chased up a tree by a lion. After a while we relize the lion is not going away anytime soon and we agree to take turns sitting watch while the other gets some sleep. I take first watch and you go to sleep. At some point I wake you up and say the lion has left. You ask me "are you sure?" I respond with "Yes I know the lion is gone." You respond "Well then lets climb down and head home." If I climb down first I am deomonstrating that I have knowledge the lion is gone. If I say "after you" then I am demonstrating that I don't actually have knowledge. Yes I could be mistaken in my knwoledge, but we could actually not have been up the tree at all because we are just plugged into the matrix so how does the truth matter at all?
I think you have confused two issues. That is, (1) whether "Knowledge has nothing to do with the truth" and (2) whether "I could be mistaken in my knowledge." Yes, knowledge is fallible. So perhaps you knew the lion would be gone even if your knowledge was based merely in probabilistic reasoning. However, knowledge must be knowledge of a truth. If the lion were not gone (but rather ate you when you climbed down the tree) then you clearly did not know that he was gone. That point holds regardless of how certain you felt that the lion would be gone. You said "knowledge is nothing more than a claim of certainty," which was in turn defined as a claim to be willing to act on a belief. But suppose a very gullible person is absolutely certain of a great number of weird claims like "Ronald Reagan was an extra terrestrial," "My left leg is haunted by a ghost," "In a previous life I was a shark repellent," and so on. Would the large number of weird claims combined with the persons certainty of them convince you that they knew a lot about the world? That this is a genuinely knowledgeable person? Surely not.
PhilHelper Clearly you did not recognize that I do not agree with the bronze age definition of knowledge. I am closely realted to a philosophical pragmatist in my ideas. Knowledge has nothing to do with truth in my philosophy other then it is pragmatically useful to base your knowledge on truth. As for what truth is in my philosophy truth has nothing to do with the "real" world. It is completely independent of metaphisics. Truth is nothing more then a belief that has proven its ability to inform my decisions through it's predictive ability. No I would not be believe that your strange claims were knowledge. That is irrelevent. The question is only would you act on those beliefs? If so then you have knowledge of those beliefs. The fact that you have knowldege of your weird beliefs does not force me to also act on your beliefs. As such I do not consider them knowledge.
That much is settled then: we disagree on the definition of the term "truth." I'll have to dedicate metaphysics lecture to the topic in the future. It seems that your definition of "truth" (using the term "proven," past tense) will commit you to the view that there are no undiscovered truths. A counterintuitive outcome on my view. As for the term "knowledge," we'll obviously disagree there as well. It seems equivalent to your definition of "truth." Again, the result would seem to be that we know all truths.
I didn't like the marriage example simply b/c it is too vague. Whether they are legally married and whether they had a marriage ceremony are two completely separate issues. A couple may be legally married (at the courthouse) but have not yet had a ceremony to celebrate and represent the union. Awesome videos though!
The problem with all of the examples is that they are artificially splitting beliefs. In the first case, Smith doesn't have an explicit belief that a man with ten coins will get the job. He believes that Jones will get the job, and he believes that Jones has ten coins. Yes, logically, that should mean he believes that a man with ten coins will get the job, but that's a silly extrapolation. He only believes the bit about the ten coins because of his belief that Jones will get the job, and the belief about the ten coins is incidental. The other examples are the same. In the sheepdog example, the driver's belief that there is a sheep in the field is directly dependent on seeing something that looks like a sheep. Separating out the belief that there is a sheep from the belief that he is looking at a sheep is again artificial and silly. The solution to the problem then is simple. Stop needlessly splitting beliefs into their component, interdependant parts and treat interdependant beliefs as a unit. The unit in all of the cases was false.
I heard better exaple of this: Ship capitan believes that he is heading north. He justifies his belief with the fact that his compass show exactly that. The ship is actually going north. But it turns out that his compass was broken and would point north regardless of actual direction. He just got lucky to sail in the same way as his compass showed. DId the capitain *know* that he was heading north or was it a lucky guess that he thought was knowledge? No extra steps and more practical example.
I don't see how Smith is justified in assuming some sort of inherent correlation between the coins and the job. Jones will get the Job if the business owner considers hiring Jones to be in the interest of himself, Jones or the business. Or in SOMEONE OR SOMETHINGS interest. Jones having 10 coins does nothing to improve his potential in fulfilling the interest of the Business or the business owner. It's clearly an irrelevant factor.
Gettier problems are just complete bullshit. They always hinge on misuse of the idea of "justified", coupled with a verbal slight of hand. Smith's belief is that Jones will get the job. For some reason, he conspires with philsophers to select one of the many properties of Jones as the description of the victor - a property that he unknowingly happens to share. Smith has justification that Jones will get the job. He has no justification that "a man with ten coins will get the job". For that to be true, there would need to be something about having ten coins that mattered in the hiring decision. For example, imagine that the building has a metal detector. A man with ten coins can pass through it while a man with eleven coins would set it off, annoying the hiring manager. If that were the case, then it is possible to consider the number of coins in terms of the belief being justified. Since that's not the case, "a man with ten coins" is simply a label for Jones, not a property for which any belief (true or untrue) has been established. Since Smith was actually talking about Jones (via an alternate label) it turns out that he was wrong. I think the problem is philsophers failing to treat language like language but pretending it's set theory. These are always a bit like magic tricks. They start with a legitimate justification then shift to a property for which there isn't justification and claim that there is something there because the legit and illegit are glued together coincidentally. Sorry, but I think they are complete nonsense.
Here is why such philosophy does not work in reality: In a room is a box with a cat inside (Schrodinger's cat). All things being equal (justification, truth, and belief) in the real world of quantum mechanics, the cat is, in fact, both dead and alive simultaneously. What’s that, you ask? 1. In reality, prior to opening the box the knowledge of the condition of the cat is the same. I.e., we are justified in knowing the cat is both dead and alive; it’s true the cat is both dead and alive; and we (with a physics background) believe the cat is both dead and alive. 2. When the box is opened, a ‘wave function’ split occurs where both the cat and observer create two new realities. I.e., at that moment we get two different outcomes based upon the original knowledge. (The error made is there were not just two cats; there are now two observers as well.) Thus, the philosophy about Justified True Belief perfectly fails. How so? The analogies given assume that, in the end, there will be only one specific outcome. But that’s now understood to be false. Why? Both did and didn’t get the job from knowledge based upon conditions understood ‘in the same way and in the same sense.’
This entire debate sounds very stupid to me. Knowledge shouldn't be just "justified", It should be properly proven. The so called knowledge in these examples are guesses at best. Unless absolutely proven these beliefs are only beliefs. And since it is impossible to absolutely prove anything knowledge is impossible.
You can't rely on marriage as an example in a philosophy question without assuming an exclusive definition of marriage. ex. "Marriage is one man and one woman" excludes polygamists and gay couples just as, "All bachelors are unmarried" excludes bachelors. If it's not OK to exclude polygamists and gays then it can't be OK to discriminate against bachelors either.
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AWESOME! Thanks for all that you are doing. I am 32 and I am a construction worker. I love philosophy, but university isn't an option for me and perhaps never will be. This is my university! So I appreciate it greatly :) P.S. Can't wait for the advanced logic course!
hows it going man you doing okay
Sitting an exam tomorrow. Intend to use what I learned from this video. Thank you.
I really appreciate these videos also. I am a Philosophy major at SFSU, but I have few teachers who can compose a lecture that is as insightful and interesting as yours. Kudos to you. I hope you can keep this up!
Sorry it has taken me this long to reply, but I really appreciated your comment. I hope other struggling philosophy students will find this series helpful.
what puzzles me the most is how is jones watching bull fights in barcelona when bull fighting is illegal in catalonia
Second example addresses the question: "does Smith have knowledge of this disjunctive claim?". I argue that we step back and evaluate the requirements to consider the claim justified:
"A disjunction claim is JUSTIFIED when AT LEAST ONE disjunctive (independent of the rest) is justified and the rule of inference is used?"
Alternatively we can require that:
"A disjunction claim is JUSTIFIED when ALL disjunctives (independent of the rest) are justified"
Under the latter, the example would not satisfy "justified".
Audio and video were done two weeks ago! Computer glitches at home held me up, so I have to go to the library to convert into a movie...two days max til I put it out. Don't worry though; skepticism parts 1, 2 and 3 are getting put together in the meantime and will be published as a group. Yeehaw!
The first example is a case of equivocation, i.e. the use of the same terms at different stages of an argument, but the terms (ALTHOUGH the SAME) refer to DIFFERENT things. The first time the terms "man who will get the job" were used, was to represent Smith's belief in written language. However, Smith was NOT actually referring to the general category of "That X such that X is a man and X gets the job", Smith belief specifically refers to "Jones". The statement:
"Jones (a man), who will get the job, has 10 coins in his pocket"
is a more accurate representation of Smith's actual belief. Subtlety removing the specificity of "Jones" in describing Smith's belief is the problem.
The second time the terms "man who will get the job" were used, was NOT referring to "Jones" specifically, it is in this second case "That X such that X is a man and X got the job", which refers to "Smith" and it is DIFFERENT from the first usage of the terms. So the same terms referred to different things at different stages in the example, i.e. equivocation.
In conclusion, the statement:
"Jones (a man), who will get the job, has 10 coins in his pocket"
1) is an accurate statement representing Smith's actual belief
2) it is justified
3) it is NOT true.
Justified true belief can be right or it can be wrong, hence, JTB is inductive reasoning/conjecture/opinion.
Maybe the problem lies with JTB in "justification"?
Maybe justification works the same as knowledge - it can be absolute, or not absolute.
Maybe for knowledge we need absolute justification?
I did not get why in the sheepdog example, it was not based on false belief/premises. Wasn't the belief based on wrong evidence, using the dog's white fur(wrong evidence) to make the claim. What am I missing here ?
Nice video, well explained.
When's 2b coming? The anticipation is killing me! :)
This is an example of what's wrong with philosophy. JTB is just fine, it is exactly what people mean when they say that somebody knows something. The thing is that common usage doesn't worry about the details of how much justification is needed. If it turns out you're wrong then, of course, not enough justification. The only way to make sure that the justification is enough is for it to provide absolute mathematical style PROOF of the belief. That rules out ever having enough justification for anything but tautologies ( even then however you might have made a mistake!) so there winds up being no knowledge at all. It's an idealized concept that is never fulfilled. Like circles, there are no ideal circles but it's still a very useful concept.
It's a very dead issue but philosophy / philosophers keep beating this dead horse. They do it because they can publish papers, sound like they are trying to settle an important issue whatever. It should just be taught as an example of a useful idealized concept that , like circles and lots of other things in math, doesn't actually exist. So JTB is just fine, it's what people mean when they say it , it just has no actual instances.
agree. It's a question of empirical accuracy. Idk wtf all this is about. I'm not interested in whatever this is. I'm interested in rigor. I don't see how attack on JTB is rigorous. I would simple add that the justification must be true. was that so hard? I think lot of philosophers may actually be perversely myopic. Idk. It's no wonder philosophers seem to get a bad rap. I think at some point we could somehow classify all this as 'juvenile'. I'm sorry for how arrogant that sounds. Maybe they are just concerned with something i find impractical. I find there IS a practical side to philosophy. I don't find that here.
How many philosophers are there? They have to have something to write about, their jobs depend on publications. It is very practical for them, getting paid. As soon as they admit that it's so much nonsense they have to find something meaningful to discuss. There just isn't that much available and to say anything at all significant is very hard.
*I'm sorry for how arrogant that sounds.*
You're apologizing for saying that the Emperor has no clothes. It isn't arrogance at all. The system that produces the nonsense needs to be exposed. Keep it up.
About 30 yrs ago in junior college. I think I sorta 'dismissed' philosophy. I think that was mainly because so many of them seemed to not be intellectually rigorous. I thought Decartes 'I think therefore I am' was great, then he want on to display spectacularly epic systemic intellectual failure, lol. Early philosophers were amazing for their time I think. But I find it disappointing that the lack of rigor persisted (and apparently still does) long after the wide adoption of the scientific method.
It seems not all philosophers are non-rigorous, just maybe way too many. I was (mostly) impressed by John Searle. (though I've only seen a couple of hist talks). I think we call him an epistemic philosopher, but he seems to be doing it in a well-reasoned way.
This seems in contrast to what 'all' these others were/are doing, and it remains difficult for me to understand the 'academic culture' that results in their works being deemed worthy of devoting college classes to them. Which is why I tend to think I may be 'missing something' but I don't' know what! lol. I almost want to use terms like pseudo-science. Oddly I guess I'm confused if philosophy is a science and somehow just a subset of them are doing it scientifically, or if it's something else that isn't science. But then if it is something else I don't know what to call it. Psychology, for example, certainly has at least come into being a science. I suppose I'm being metaphilosophical, idk. I feel like I 'have a philosophy' that isn't really so compatible with much of philosophy. It's a minor dilemma for me I think I'll get sorted. I'm neither so pessimistic or so arrogant as to think I'm so alone. I'm just tying to figure out where more of 'us' are and what we call ourselves. I hope to find more like Searle and less like this stuff. I think Sam Harris and Rickard Dawkins are quite competent. Idk if we'd call them philosophers first or something else (certainly not Atheists first) . I respect and agree with their views not firstly because they are Atheists. I respect and agree with that thinking because it's really a much more broad and fundamental higher competency in general that has Atheism as just one of its products. That's even loosely paraphrasing things they've said. It's only that level of competency I'm interested in. Sound thinking doesn't seem a style, or opinion, it seems more like 'doing math right'. I don't know if it could ever be taught like math, (that's a really difficult-seeming truth to try do deal in, understand, explain, articulate). But that sort of notion is of interest to me. My 'reviewing and getting up to date' experience about philosophy is mostly reintroducing me to what it was about most modern philosophers I had previously disrespected. Ultimately I struggle to find a clear use for it, or struggle to find the context in which it is useful.
I wonder what Harris and Dawkins would have to say about the ambitions and limitations of JTB and the 'folksy squabbling' that seems to surround it. I wonder how they could categorize and characterize all that type of stuff.
You make me proud sir! Sorry that I am still tardy with my follow up video. I'll get cracking.
After that, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, Ethics and Advanced Logic are next. Regards.
Would you say that epistemology is the "foundation" of philosophy? Should it be studied before metaphysics and ethics or should I start with one of those first?
A crumb has the makeup of the thing it was once, the truth entailed, the remainder, the loose change of the whole represented in the exchange, conclusion follows, contained in the signified transfer of knowledge - the notion of NOT, the subtle, the representation of containing what's public/privately known and not.
+Laura Richter Wow. This is the most artistic comment I've ever gotten!
Sheep dog example is also a matter of equivocation. The statement "That field has a sheep in it" has the term "sheep", which is being used to represent the driver's belief, but author of the example is leaving out from the statement an important aspect mentioned within the example. Namely, the driver's belief is more accurate represented by the statement:
"That field, has (which is a sheep) in it"
The above statement makes EXPLICIT use of a property mentioned in the example and the author simply leaves it out. The belief is in the subjects head, the statement we decide to write on the video to represent that belief may not include a very important part....but that doesn't mean the audience is incorrect in filling the implicit blanks. The driver's belief, when accurately represented, would NOT be true.
I mean really now. There is such a thing as thinking too hard.
+Mohamed Hourani For most...not for philosophers :-P
+PhilHelper I suppose so! haha
@@lordosmosisx8653 sorry mate but if you actually believe this then you forfeit any right to have an opinion on anything
@@blueyognog Good point. I'll meditate deeply on your response and get back to you about it.
Well, if you go back to the definition of truth in logic (something can only be true if it cannot be false), considering that a perception can be false, it can never be used as a justified basis for knowledge. If we keep the idea that knowledge must be true, it would clear up this mess quickly. PhilHelper what do you think about this?
Andrew W. There is a problem with your definition of truth. Something is true in classical logic only if it IS NOT false. The words "cannot be" don't belong in the definition. If they were there, then the only truths would be necessary truths. That is far too limited a set of truths. Thanks for your comment.
+PhilHelper "That is far too limited a set of truths"
And why do you say this? Is it a justified true belief? You seem to be asserting it with absolutely no justification at all. Why do you think that a concept that just evolved bumping along by people tossing it about has to have more than a hit and miss approximate validity?
I thank you for your direct statement that you reject the argument simply because of it's conclusion. Any argument then that reaches this conclusion is thereby rejected.
Why?
"If they were there, then the only truths would be necessary truths."
What you say here , I completely agree with.(If ...then...) But reject what you just don't like based on a presupposition.
"That is far too limited a set of truths"
Says who?
Where do you get that idea?
Is there empirical evidence for it? Studies? Is it a logical truth?
Isn't "truth" just a word that people use when they THINK that their belief is justified. Why can't it be just a convenient coinage for that? That by no means that it ever is actually fulfilled. Circles and tons of other words are like that, maybe all words.
Scientific discussions frequently acknowledge this. It's accepted to say say something is true but admit that empirical verification is needed. Even then we never measure to infinite precision so better measurements may change everything or basic concepts may be changed to throw the whole conceptual scheme out. Even with all that we may have just gotten an incredibly wild statistical fluctuation so what we thought the "justification" was just dumb luck after all. This is always a possibility, in ordinary life and science as well.
+PhilHelper No, my definition is correct. A logical truth needs to stay true under all circumstances, meaning it CANNOT be false. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_truth
+PhilHelper In any case, I don't see why a necessary truth would need to be brushed off so easily.
+Andrew W. You are correct that a logical truth needs to stay true under all circumstances. But there are more truths than merely logical truths. There are, for example, truths of mathematics not reducible to logic. And I'm pretty confident that there can be truths of science...however, this simply means that in contrast to yourself I believe in "contingent truths," things that are actually true but could have been otherwise. Make sense?
@4:00...I have to add here that our preferred epistemology came crashing down with Quantum Mechanics. Let's hope that our macro world doesn't seriously begin to turn on this axis,
because we are not mentally equipped for it.
Seems with the barn and sheepdog examples it is 'Justification' that is the issue. Seeing that our eyesight can be easily deceived, justification on a knowledge claim based solely on eyesight is the issue.
Third example can either be attributed to:
1) equivocation...similar to what I argue in my first comment. Namely, the statement:
"One of my employees owns a ford mustang"
used to represent the Manager's belief is inaccurate; the terms "One of my employees" is (on the one hand) being used to represent the Manager's belief, when in actuality he specifically beliefs "NOGOT, which is one of my employees, owns a ford mustang". This representation of his belief is more accurate and is NOT true. On the other hand, the terms "One of my employees" is being use to refer to "Any X such that X is my employee", which is not inclusive of the specificity of "NOGOT", it is not the Manager's actual belief. Ultimately rendering his belief as NOT true.
2) I think the argument in my second comment, about the requirements of what entails disjunction claims as justified, is perhaps more illustrative of the problem. The terms "One of my employees" is implicitly disjunctive: "Either NOGOT owns a ford mustang, or HAVIT owns a ford mustang, or ETCETERA owns a ford mustang". In this case we can argue that in order to consider the disjunction claim as JUSTIFIED, each disjunctive (independent of the rest) must be justified. Since this is not the case for the Manager (he is not justified about HAVIT (independent of the rest). So, the statement "One of my employees owns a ford mustang" under that requirement would not be justified.
After only watching a few minutes I have to say, wow, this has nothing to do with epistemology. Yes it has a connection with Aristotle but that was two and a half millennia ago. We have come a long way since then. Philosophy does big and the biggest quest in philosophy is epistemology. The big names in the history of philosophy tackled the biggest problem in philosophy and you won't find any continentals there. We go forward by standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing further. The latest giant in the epistemological world was Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and Objective Knowledge (1972). We have solved the epistemological problem. Knowledge grows by trial and error elimination; problem (P1), tentative solution (TS), testing (EE, error elimination), better understanding of the problem (leading to P2) repeat. If Smith or Jones believes something about a job or a car that's fine as they are an interested party. But who gives a monkeys what anyone believes. Epistemology is not concerned with belief or opinion (subjective knowledge) but only with objective knowledge. Come-on, we only do big. We are concerned with going forward with the scientific method (P1, TS, EE, P2, repeat), growing our knowledge as effectively as possible. But we are equally concerned with bad knowledge, pseudo-science and dogmatic beliefs. And for these we repulse with our epistemological arsenal which includes logic, rational argument, maths and stats and the demarcation criteria (if its not testable then why should we take it seriously). You may visit lots of sites on RUclips where they discuss epistemology. They are all rubbish. We don't ask where you got your knowledge from, empiricism or intellectualism (Locke or Descartes), we only ask "how can we test it?". If it passes critical third party testing it improves its truth-likeness and passes from being a guess to becoming objective knowledge until it is displaced by a better guess with greater universality, truth-likeness and explanatory value. Comments welcome.
+David Lilley I'm of a different opinion.
Popper (though I admire him) did not convince his peers of his view, often termed "falsificationism." In fact, he and the rest of philosophers did not have a successful time defining the term "falsified." They gave it a mighty shot in the 70s. Even worse, every attempt to formulate the scientific method has failed to gain prominence in the field. There is no accepted view on what constitutes a problem (see Larry Laudan for the best work on this issue), no consensus on why proposed tentative solutions are acceptable for research or not (see Thomas Kuhn or Wesley Salmon's "Rational Prediction"), as mentioned above there is no received view on falsification...also, it seems that the cycle you described does not lead to a better understanding of the original problem, but that the original theory and its problems are replaced with new theories which generate new problems.
I'm going to definitely have to put my Philosophy of Science series into gear...if I can ever complete this epistemology series!
+PhilHelper Thank you for your kind reply. I read everything by Popper when studying mechanical engineering in the early 70's. Us spanners did as much maths as a maths graduate and learned of all the contributors to fluid mechanics, thermo, dynamics, controls, metallurgy, mechanics, electrics, electronics and many other subjects. Far too much for me and others to take in. But it did give us a love of logic, maths, Newton, Hook and hundreds of contributors to our scientific knowledge. Popper's falsification criteria is dated 1934. Popper's P1, TS, EE, P2 is dated 1972. It may not be as precise but I have always substituted the word testable for falsifiable. And who could knock "knowledge grows by trial and error elimination" or "trial and error". Its not knockable. Who could knock "if we cannot test it then how can we possibly know whether it is true or false"? And who could knock Tarski's logically derived definition of the long standing definition of truth "truth is correspondence with the facts". I wish you a happy Christmas and thank you for your feedback.
None of these examples disprove the JTB framework. They are each misrepresentations of one of the components.
My answer tot he gettier problem: ( i would love criticism if any is to be had)
My respons assumes that we are talking about synthetic propositions.
Knowledge is True "Well-justified " belief.
What is "Well-justified"?
Well justified means that the justification can be used to reliably predict the logical implications of the conclusion.
For instance with the ford example. Smiths justifications for Jhones's ownership of the ford, does not allow him to predict the logical implications of ownership.
Let us say the ford is now impounded and will be returned to its owner, as long as the owner comes to retrieve the car himself.
A line of people hoping to get a free car shows up. Jhones is among those people.
now what justification can we use to predict who will get the car? well we know that the owners SSN is on the pink slip.
So Jhones swearing to ford is not proper justification for ownership, nor is him having the correct keys (he could have stolen them).
But let us say that Jhones name is on the pink slip. When we use that as justification, we can now predict, that the one showing the
ID papers with a SSN matching the SSN on the pink slip, will get the car.
However!!!!
In daily life Jhones having the keys, getting in the car that Jhones claims is his, would be sufficient justification for us to call it knowledge, albeit that it would not suffice in an academic setting.
This is due to the fact that in day to day life we make a lot of assumptions. As long as something is within social norms, or regular occurrences, we take it for ample justification. Also how often do you experience a college going to work in a car he stole himself.
Q: How do you know that the pink slip is not forged :P
A: pinkslips are stored electronically, and intercepting the registration process is far more trouble than it is worth
+Gunsong1 Interesting approach. I'll offer a few thoughts.
(1) You might not want to couch justification strictly in terms of prediction. Some beliefs are well-justified because the explain data we already have rather than predicting new stuff. Prediction is future-oriented only...
(2) Your reply involved notions of what possibly may occur...and where predictions can go wrong with respect to these possibilities. It seems highly similar to the no-defeater solution in that regard. I think it inherits the difficulties of that view, namely, being "well-justified" seems to now require omniscience or infallibility regarding one's belief.
What do you think?
PhilHelper
Hey First of all sorry for the redicolous response time. i have been looking for a new job for the last month or so and your response got drowned im affraid. Second thank you for your response it got my mind going and it made me realize just how far off my answer was.
To respond.
I agree my definition is not good enough and relying solely on prediction means that in fact my answer to the gettier problem is a quasi ansawer. Why? What if our lucky dunce becomes a very lucky dunce? reliablity check, prediction check, and gettier is back with a vengence. i at least need to get some relevancy of evidence into the mix and some constraints that limit the kind of inferances one can make.
I can even suplement with a real life story to shoot down my attempt here.
A few years back i was either the european or world cup in football(soccer if you are american) as a funny extra bid a squid was asked to predict the outcome of each match. To be specific a big ball with the relevant national flag was placed in an aquarium, whatever ball the squid decided to rest on was said to be the winner of the match. Lo and behold the squid was right more often than not.
Im not willing to give up the wording of well-justfied, but i have to admit that my defintion of well-justified was not very good.
+Gunsong1 I had to read your reply a few times...got me thinking. So it could not have been that rediculous of a reply. Keep it up! :-)
Perhaps you meant that a conclusion is well-justified if the justification it provides for the conclusion is also good justification for what that conclusion strongly implies? It's a challenging thought...constructing counterexamples would be a fun mental exercise though!
PhilHelper
Hey
Its not that i completly disregard the well-justified wording. Its just the way i defined well justified was not enough. An yeah basically i mean to say that you need a very good justification before i agree that it is knowledge.
I still mean to keep the prediction of logical implications part as i see it as a necesary attribute but not sufficient. i need to, at least, add some objective criteria for relevancy.
In short i want to say that knowledge is a true scientific hypothesis, rigerously tested via an experiment, that does not have any damning weaknesses such as relevant confounding variables.
Now to phrase that in terms of attributes, and find an elegant philosophical definition for that hypothesis :)
Understood. When working out your theory of "well-justified" watch out for cases of immediate perceptual knowledge (ie. sheep-dogs and barn scenarios). Most philosophers would want to count these as sufficiently justified...otherwise your requirements for knowledge might be objectionably strong. But maybe you're heading towards that already? Plausible...but it will certainly be controversial....
Just add an extra criterion to truth that it cannot be coincidental.
meh
I don't quite understand the sheepdog-problem. The viewer believes there's a sheep, it's true and it's justified. But isn't "I'm seeing a sheep" a false premise? Then the viewer concluded "There's a sheep on that field" which happened to be right.
If "I'm seeing a sheep" were the premise, then surely the "No False Premises" solution would apply. The problem is that it is not likely at all to be the viewers premise. In fact, we almost never reason from premises when it comes to basic perceptual beliefs. Surely right now you believe that you are reading a comment on youtube...did you ever stop to say to yourself "I am seeing a comment on youtube?" Did you make any inference to the conclusion "Therefore, this is a youtube comment?" Probably not. You just believed it automatically. That's how a lot of basic perceptual beliefs work. But if so, then the sheep-dog example seems to involve a justified true belief reached without the use of false premises...but it still did not count as knowledge.
I think it is rather simple to solve these problems. Knowledge has nothing to do with the truth! Knowledge is nothing more then a claim of certainty. It is a claim that under the circumstances that the knowledge claim was made the person makeing the knowledge claim would act on their belief.
So lets say we were both chased up a tree by a lion. After a while we relize the lion is not going away anytime soon and we agree to take turns sitting watch while the other gets some sleep. I take first watch and you go to sleep. At some point I wake you up and say the lion has left. You ask me "are you sure?" I respond with "Yes I know the lion is gone." You respond "Well then lets climb down and head home." If I climb down first I am deomonstrating that I have knowledge the lion is gone. If I say "after you" then I am demonstrating that I don't actually have knowledge. Yes I could be mistaken in my knwoledge, but we could actually not have been up the tree at all because we are just plugged into the matrix so how does the truth matter at all?
I think you have confused two issues. That is, (1) whether "Knowledge has nothing to do with the truth" and (2) whether "I could be mistaken in my knowledge."
Yes, knowledge is fallible. So perhaps you knew the lion would be gone even if your knowledge was based merely in probabilistic reasoning. However, knowledge must be knowledge of a truth. If the lion were not gone (but rather ate you when you climbed down the tree) then you clearly did not know that he was gone.
That point holds regardless of how certain you felt that the lion would be gone. You said "knowledge is nothing more than a claim of certainty," which was in turn defined as a claim to be willing to act on a belief. But suppose a very gullible person is absolutely certain of a great number of weird claims like "Ronald Reagan was an extra terrestrial," "My left leg is haunted by a ghost," "In a previous life I was a shark repellent," and so on. Would the large number of weird claims combined with the persons certainty of them convince you that they knew a lot about the world? That this is a genuinely knowledgeable person? Surely not.
PhilHelper Clearly you did not recognize that I do not agree with the bronze age definition of knowledge. I am closely realted to a philosophical pragmatist in my ideas. Knowledge has nothing to do with truth in my philosophy other then it is pragmatically useful to base your knowledge on truth. As for what truth is in my philosophy truth has nothing to do with the "real" world. It is completely independent of metaphisics. Truth is nothing more then a belief that has proven its ability to inform my decisions through it's predictive ability.
No I would not be believe that your strange claims were knowledge. That is irrelevent. The question is only would you act on those beliefs? If so then you have knowledge of those beliefs. The fact that you have knowldege of your weird beliefs does not force me to also act on your beliefs. As such I do not consider them knowledge.
That much is settled then: we disagree on the definition of the term "truth." I'll have to dedicate metaphysics lecture to the topic in the future. It seems that your definition of "truth" (using the term "proven," past tense) will commit you to the view that there are no undiscovered truths. A counterintuitive outcome on my view.
As for the term "knowledge," we'll obviously disagree there as well. It seems equivalent to your definition of "truth." Again, the result would seem to be that we know all truths.
I didn't like the marriage example simply b/c it is too vague. Whether they are legally married and whether they had a marriage ceremony are two completely separate issues.
A couple may be legally married (at the courthouse) but have not yet had a ceremony to celebrate and represent the union.
Awesome videos though!
I am justified in believing this is a Ford advertisement
bro did u read his paper at all? He isnt saying JONES is in barcelona, he uses a whole different person entirely... BROWN is in BOSTON not JONES
tranquilo
well damn that completely changes the logic of the argument doesn't it
The problem with all of the examples is that they are artificially splitting beliefs. In the first case, Smith doesn't have an explicit belief that a man with ten coins will get the job. He believes that Jones will get the job, and he believes that Jones has ten coins. Yes, logically, that should mean he believes that a man with ten coins will get the job, but that's a silly extrapolation. He only believes the bit about the ten coins because of his belief that Jones will get the job, and the belief about the ten coins is incidental.
The other examples are the same. In the sheepdog example, the driver's belief that there is a sheep in the field is directly dependent on seeing something that looks like a sheep. Separating out the belief that there is a sheep from the belief that he is looking at a sheep is again artificial and silly.
The solution to the problem then is simple. Stop needlessly splitting beliefs into their component, interdependant parts and treat interdependant beliefs as a unit. The unit in all of the cases was false.
I heard better exaple of this: Ship capitan believes that he is heading north. He justifies his belief with the fact that his compass show exactly that. The ship is actually going north.
But it turns out that his compass was broken and would point north regardless of actual direction. He just got lucky to sail in the same way as his compass showed.
DId the capitain *know* that he was heading north or was it a lucky guess that he thought was knowledge?
No extra steps and more practical example.
I don't see how Smith is justified in assuming some sort of inherent correlation between the coins and the job. Jones will get the Job if the business owner considers hiring Jones to be in the interest of himself, Jones or the business. Or in SOMEONE OR SOMETHINGS interest. Jones having 10 coins does nothing to improve his potential in fulfilling the interest of the Business or the business owner. It's clearly an irrelevant factor.
Gettier problems are just complete bullshit. They always hinge on misuse of the idea of "justified", coupled with a verbal slight of hand.
Smith's belief is that Jones will get the job. For some reason, he conspires with philsophers to select one of the many properties of Jones as the description of the victor - a property that he unknowingly happens to share.
Smith has justification that Jones will get the job. He has no justification that "a man with ten coins will get the job".
For that to be true, there would need to be something about having ten coins that mattered in the hiring decision. For example, imagine that the building has a metal detector. A man with ten coins can pass through it while a man with eleven coins would set it off, annoying the hiring manager. If that were the case, then it is possible to consider the number of coins in terms of the belief being justified.
Since that's not the case, "a man with ten coins" is simply a label for Jones, not a property for which any belief (true or untrue) has been established.
Since Smith was actually talking about Jones (via an alternate label) it turns out that he was wrong. I think the problem is philsophers failing to treat language like language but pretending it's set theory.
These are always a bit like magic tricks. They start with a legitimate justification then shift to a property for which there isn't justification and claim that there is something there because the legit and illegit are glued together coincidentally. Sorry, but I think they are complete nonsense.
Here is why such philosophy does not work in reality:
In a room is a box with a cat inside (Schrodinger's cat). All things being equal (justification, truth, and belief) in the real world of quantum mechanics, the cat is, in fact, both dead and alive simultaneously. What’s that, you ask?
1. In reality, prior to opening the box the knowledge of the condition of the cat is the same. I.e., we are justified in knowing the cat is both dead and alive; it’s true the cat is both dead and alive; and we (with a physics background) believe the cat is both dead and alive.
2. When the box is opened, a ‘wave function’ split occurs where both the cat and observer create two new realities. I.e., at that moment we get two different outcomes based upon the original knowledge. (The error made is there were not just two cats; there are now two observers as well.)
Thus, the philosophy about Justified True Belief perfectly fails. How so? The analogies given assume that, in the end, there will be only one specific outcome. But that’s now understood to be false. Why? Both did and didn’t get the job from knowledge based upon conditions understood ‘in the same way and in the same sense.’
This entire debate sounds very stupid to me.
Knowledge shouldn't be just "justified", It should be properly proven. The so called knowledge in these examples are guesses at best.
Unless absolutely proven these beliefs are only beliefs. And since it is impossible to absolutely prove anything knowledge is impossible.
You can't rely on marriage as an example in a philosophy question without assuming an exclusive definition of marriage. ex. "Marriage is one man and one woman" excludes polygamists and gay couples just as, "All bachelors are unmarried" excludes bachelors. If it's not OK to exclude polygamists and gays then it can't be OK to discriminate against bachelors either.