I think there must be some confusion. I am asserting that the KK principle is false. Namely, that ~(K(p) → KK(p)) I still do not understand how what you have just written is relevant to that.
I think it is true that sometimes I do not realize or believe that I knew something I did know. But how has that anything to do with the KK principle? When I am sincere, and I claim to know that P, then I certainly believe I know that P, otherwise, I should not claim to know that P.
However:
(a) That is about believing you know, and now knowing you know.
and, more importantly,
(b) It is about the conditions of asserting or claiming knowledge. Not about knowledge itself. Suppose it were true that one should not CLAIM to know unless one knows one knows (which I think is far too stringent a condition on claiming to know). Nevertheless, what has that to do with knowing? For that would mean only that it is untoward in some way to [/i]claim[i] to know without knowing you know. It would not mean that in order to know, one has to know one knows.
I’m with you… I’m also aserting that (K(p) → KK(p)) is false.
What I was attempting to do is show you a deeper reason as to why that proposition is false that can be extrapolated to other cases as well. There are more modal modifiers out there besides “I know.” Here is an example:
If it is necessary that p then it is necessary that it is necessary that p
Which is also:
(N(p) → NN(p))
That is false also.
As soon as you realize you know something… you know that you know (have a metaproposition). I’m going to agree with Wittgenstein here and say that there are some propositions that it makes absolutely no sense to question and in so doing you end up questioning the entire language game. You have to assume something is true to question such propositions, and here you are questioning those assumptions.
Also note that you are getting an “ought” from an “is” here. Kant proved that from what is the case, we can’t derive what ought to be the case… now we are able to explain this fallacy in terms of modal confusion also.
A good rule of thumb is to always be warry when people import modal modifiers into their logical statements.
As far as I know, faith always gives the experience of surety. This experience of surety is its hallmark, as in “I am sure that my next step will be on solid ground” because I have faith in a solid ground. Is there any other knowledge than faith?
But it is not true that whenever I know some proposition is true that I am sure I know it. Take the case of the hesitant schoolboy who has studied all night for an exam on the capitals of the world. Next morning when he is asked, “What is the capital of Ecuador” he is so intimidated by his teacher that he hesitates for a long time, and finally, blurts out hesitantly, “Quito?” And his teacher replies, “See, you knew it all the time. You should have more confidence that you know what you know.” So, here is a clear case in which someone knows, but he does not have “the experience of surety”. I suppose that “faith” can be defined as very firm belief. But knowledge is not just the feeling that one knows, because one can very strongly feel one knows, and not know at all. The feeling that you know does not mean you are correct, and, similarly, strong belief that something is true is no guarantee that what you believe is true.
I might very well agree with you if I understood the notion of knowing that one knows. But I don’t. Strickly speaking, I suppose, it should mean that I know that the conditions of knowledge are satisfied in a particular case: which is (pace Gettier, to say that if knowledge is justified true belief, then to know that one knows is to know that I “possess” justified true belief. But, in fact, the expression, “I know that I know that P” is never used that way. Rather, the expression is used to express surety or confidence that one knows what he has claimed to know. It is commonly used to deflect the suggestion that perhaps the person who claims to know does not “really” know.
The Rationalists (and, in particular Spinoza) seem to have thought the when one knows that one has a kind of dazzling illumination which is undeniable. But that, of course, is hogwash. I expect that they thought so because of their misapprehension that knowledge is the name of a mental state (like belief) so that one could determine one knows simply by an act of introspection. (As one can with belief, or with some sensation). But, of course, knowledge is not the name of a mental state, since one cannot simply determine whether one knows by an act of introspection. I cannot introspect to determine (for instance) whether Quito is the capital of Ecuador. I have to look at a map, or an Atlas. Introspection will not do the job. I don’t know which “language game” Wittgenstein might have meant, but the language game of knowing (whatever that might be) is not one in which you can determine you know something simply by “glancing inside your own head”.
I don’t see how I am deriving an “ought” for an “is”, but as a matter of historical fact, it was not Kant who talked about the alleged impossibility of deriving an “ought” for an “is”, but David Hume.
The following is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Is and ought
Hume famously closes the section of the Treatise that argues against moral rationalism by observing that other systems of moral philosophy, proceeding in the ordinary way of reasoning, at some point make an unremarked transition from premises linked only by “is†to propositions linked by “ought†(expressing a new relation) — a deduction that seems to Hume “altogether inconceivable†(T3.1.1.27). Attention to this transition would “subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason†(ibid.).
“As far as I know, faith always gives the experience of surety. This experience of surety is its hallmark, as in “I am sure that my next step will be on solid ground” because I have faith in a solid ground. Is there any other knowledge than faith?”
As Hume showed, there is not even a logical connection between the commonly experienced and very convincing assurance of a cause and its effect. The experience of surety in cause and effect, the “knowledge” of such, is a faith (or as Hume would say, a habit or custom). There are of course many kinds of faith (and very often the word “faith” is used to describe instances that lack a degree of the experience of surety), but I see no reason to distinguish faith from knowledge as both are simply descriptions of a more fundamental experience of surety. That surety, by the meanings of our language which privilege the descriptive powers of one word over the other within certain discourses, is the same. They each are describing the experience of surety.
To what extent would you entertain the notion that this habit, or customary inclination towards degrees of surety concerning the appearance of the relationship between cause and effect is evolved? In other words, if we consider that we are inclined to degrees of surety because we desire comfort, could that not be an evolved characteristic-- one that survived because it worked, because it was right? Could it be that we have a tendency to feel certain that cutting off our own heads will lead to death because the mechanics of the mysterious underlying universe actually are predictable? I’m thinking about this strictly in the context of validating empiricism, at the moment.
“To what extent would you entertain the notion that this habit, or customary inclination towards degrees of surety concerning the appearance of the relationship between cause and effect is evolved?”
I would suggest that it is primary to the organism, the “conception” of which is hard-wired all the way down the food chain. The experience of the surety of cause and effect seems central to orienting oneself within the environment. I imagine that evolution played a very large part in this. That probably is why Kant’s apriori knowledge has such a compelling nature.
But that admits that the genetic survival of potential faith is a successful response to real-world experiences. Which implies that faith is but a conditioned response to real-world experience.
Without doubt faith always “gives the experience of surety” since if it does not, it isn’t faith. That’s what Anthony Flew called “the no true Scotsman” move.
He: “Every Scotsman eats oatmeal for breakfast”.
She: “But my uncle’s a Scotsman, and he eats Froot Loops for breakfast.”
He: “Your uncle is no true Scotsman”.
And if faith does not provide the experience of surety, it is not true faith.
It is like that old English ditty:
“Treason never triumphs; what’s the reason?”
“If it triumphs, none dare call it ‘treason’”
P.S. You can have the “experience of surety” as much as you like: it never guarantees that what you are sure of is, in fact, true. Just as you may believe you know all you like, believing you know never guarantees that you know.
You keep on trying to build a bridge from feelings to truth, but the bridge collapses all the time. Descartes tried the same thing using God to guarantee that a particular subjective state would guarantee an objective fact. That Divine bridge collapsed too since the argument for the existence of that bridge used exactly those subjective states Descartes tried to guarantee with the bridge he hoped to build. Thus, the celebrated “Cartesian Circle”.
“Which implies that faith is but a conditioned response to real-world experience.”
If you mean ‘conditioned’ in the behaviorist sense, yes reflexes are conditioned by social patterning, and the experience of surety plays a large part in that. Biological parameters of how space and time are experienced are further refined by ideological constraints -the invention of spatial perspective is a good example- and the various discourses within. We develop second natures and third natures and so on and so forth. All of them provide the experience of surety. But the experience of surety occurs first and most primarily within and of the body. That is why the Body is the site of most social change and struggle. It is the lense through which the world is seen and experienced. Changes in the lense bring changes in ‘reality’. But there are other ‘bodies’ as well.
The JTB definition of knowledge is just such a bridge. Public justification incorporating accepted standards ties together subjective belief and surmised reality which is all the truth we can ever have.
But I am not discussing that. I am just trying to help Dunamis build defenses for his ideas, which have philosophical merit.
I agree that surety is a peculiar mental state of all animals of adequate mental capacity. This is justified empirically by every step we take. But in invoking evolution, which is also justified empirically, and by scientific explanation, aren’t you begging the question? Aren’t you trying to avoid justification and ontology?
No. I mean other (kinesthetically) integrated systems of reading the world. For instance language is for me a body (or its prosthesis), functions as body, wherein its states are assumed to reflect the states of the world. Any mapping upon integrated relations produces body-like effects.
“Aren’t you trying to avoid justification and ontology?”
I am not avoiding justification and ontology, but simply declaring that nothing can be ontologically justified, that is verified outside of experience. Knowing is one “as if” after another. The experience of surety is the fundamental ground of knowing. Every propositional description of such simply takes us further from what “knowing” is, and what knowing can never be more than. The nesting and interlayering of mappings of the world produce more and more the experience of surety, but what ends up happening is that they begin to cohere into an ideology, (world picture) which has its own biases, its own internal blindspots. There never is a grounding or absolute verification of that experience. It is fundamental to Being. Questions beyond it simply cannot be answered. If one likes to hypothesize world pictures, orient oneself within various discourses that further ground the subject and give further experience of surety, be my guest. But never does one leave the realm of experience.
It means that while Dunamis claims that the experience of surety (belief) is knowledge, I claim that knowledge is all S that are justified by the consensus of experts in the various human discourses, such as science, literature, art, etc.
You simply experience surety by orienting yourself as a subjectivity within the discourses of which there appears the sense of a "consensus of expertsâ€. There is no problem with that, it simply is not definitive. One has to trust reading constructs, just as one has to trust the body. One checks them by cross-checking, reading the same with various bodies. That you have a community of minds that find agreement is essential to the social design of the human animal and seemingly fundamental to the experience of surety. Ideologies though are suseptable to large scale skewing, as has been shown by history, and in addition these bodies and discourses are all heterogeneous to each other, and do not necessarily form the coherent whole, or even the consensus that you comfortably imagine. Even in particular disciplines there are irreconcilable antimonies that in terms a larger world view are conveniently ignored. The point of suggesting that knowledge is fundamentally an experience is not so much to deride its importance, but rather to emphasize its body-like grounding and to suggest that the endless polishing of propositions, as analytic philosophy is want to do, really is working with third level ‘reality’ (body, word, category), further from the base of knowledge, rather than closer.
“How much of this is distilled and how much is pure Dunamis?”
I think the recipe is: two pinches of Foucault, a ladling of Lacan, fistfuls of fresh sprigs of Spinoza and the seeds of Holderlin shaken from the aias flower found only on Mt. Eleutheria, throw in the shank bone of Parmenides and three drops of Heidegger, an eyelash of Schreber, filings from a bar of pure Althusser, the dried leaves of the Campanella bush, and the essence of the peel of Plotinus fruit, a tablespoon each of finely ground Benjamin, Nietzsche and Blake, and lastly the petals of Deleuze, all in plain water and held to a gentle and sometimes agonizing boil over burning sticks of Time, until it condenses, captured, drop by drop. We are all distillations.