One of my professors recently made a point that I’ve been mulling over ever since. We’re all familiar with the model (Platonic, IIRC) of K = JTB… knowledge as a justified, true belief. Belief, obviously, is self-explanatory. The problem, so my professor argues, lies with truth and justification…which he claims to be essentially the same thing. The only way to even come close to accessing the truth of a proposition is in the justification that underlies it, so the truth element of the formula is somewhat irrelevent.
My spidersense tells me there’s something wrong with this, but I can’t quite pinpoint it. Comments?
Could it be that the Knowledge we start with at birth is given to us by a diety? Logic contradicts this notion, as it is only clear that as we may recieve elements of our personality from our parents, so do we recieve evolutionary knowledge. Basic instinct is but an echo of our past existence. We tend to inherit this Knowledge to progress our evolution, and from this past existence of early humanity who came to figure out basic Knowledge from trial and error, just as we come to figure out the secrets of the universe the same way.
Or, what is possibly more striking, I suppose the same belief could have exactly the same justification in two different cases, yet be true in one and false in another.
E.g. to take a classic gettier-style example, a famer looks out of his window and thinks he sees a sheep in a field, and thence forms the belief that the field in question contains a sheep. Of course, what he saw was not a sheep, but was, in fact, a large white dog, which he mistook for a sheep.
When this example is used as an illustration of the Gettier problem, we say that there was in fact a sheep in the field, but it was obscured by a bush, or something, so the farmer didn’t see it. But he did have a belief that was justified and true, but not knowledge etc. etc.
However, we could easily have assumed that there wasn’t a sheep in the field. In this case the farmer’s belief would have been justified, but false. Hence, surely, justifiication and truth are neither equivalent nor are they neccessary and sufficient for one another. Or is this an oversimplification of the problem?
when the veracity of the proposition is not attained from the justification in question, any supposed knowledge which may or may not be the case, is not actually justified, ergo the proposition never “rises to the level” of knowledge…
hume’s problem of induction is a serious problem however…
(and the bit about seeing nothing better is a great line)
The link that Impenitent posted was my first reading of the Gettier problem, so forgive me if I’m offbase…but I think there’s a hole in his argument. I’ll use the “sheep in the field” scenario that was posted earlier. The farmer’s belief that there is a sheep in the field is based solely on the fact that he is apprehending something (a large, white dog) that he believes to be a sheep. The presence of an actual sheep in the field, is, to me, irrelevent…inasmuch as the farmer’s belief could be more narrowly restated as “I see something which I believe to be a sheep that is standing in the field”. In this case, even though he is wrong about the species of the thing in the field, he is correct that he is apprehending something with similar accidental qualities of a sheep. The farmer takes a bit of a leap in assuming that it is, in fact, a sheep…but I hardly think such a leap can form a hearty criticism of the standard K=JTB.
It seems so clear to me…which is usually a sign that I’m oversimplifying.
I agree with the professor that there’s an issue with truth and justification being redundant. The real issue, however, is that truth is a placeholder for what our knowledge determines – truth is the result of knowledge, not a component of it.
Knowledge is the method by which we determine truths. If you want to find it if someone knows x, you ask them “Is x true?” According to JTB, the person must then consider if they believe x, if x is true, and if x is justified. Clearly, part 2 there begs the question.
Gettier simply shows more of the inherent problems of the JTB account, but draws entirely incorrect conclusions by trying to compound the mistakes by adding yet a forth criteria (externalism).
I say knowledge is justified belief. The level of justification we wish to require for the belief to call it knowledge varies by circumstance, but (at least non-analytic) knowledge is always fallible.
the sccientific method answers this question quite well.
you start with a belief, called a hypothesis. you conduct experiments, calculations, etc. to verify that your belief corresponds to what actually happens. Thus, when you justify your belief through experimentation, it becomes a theory, and eventually a law, which is accepted as knowledge.
I certainly agree this is the best we can do, but I have a hard time accepting a justified false belief as knowledge.
I suppose that for Max’s professor there is no such thing as a justified false belief…if “justified” is no different than “true.” But I think that we can come up with a few historical examples of common beliefs that were justified but did not turn out to be true. For example, I doubt we could call Ptolemy’s belief that the sun revolved around the earth unjustified; to a 2nd century astronomer using primitive scientific tools, it would have defied common sense and all available evidence to think otherwise. And yet it doesn’t seem right to talk about Ptolemy knowing the sun revolved around the earth.
Perhaps there’s a double standard here. We call certain contemporary theories knowledge that could, in the future, turn out to be just as wrong as Ptolemy’s. This double standard seems to me so built into the word’s use that it makes little sense to try and give a philosophically defensible meaning to it. Of course, “knowledge” has a meaning…and since we all (roughly) understand that meaning, we shouldn’t give up using the term. But perhaps we should give up analyzing it.
knowledge is the system of all fully qualified propositions considered as true by the subject. hence there can be operationally defined john’s knowledge, the british parliament’s knowledge of matters of afgan foreign policy et seq.
truth is the quality of a proposition that is not contradictory to a system. hence the truth of a proposition depends on the system in which is evaluated.
justification, or reasoning, is a string of propositions that fit an arbitrary pattern, used by a certain subject or group or subjects to estimate the truth of a given proposition with respect to an [usually complex] system.
a system is a set of non contradictory propositions
a proposition is a predicative linguistic structure
a linguistic structure is any set of linguistic symbols and is predicative if it contains more meaning than the sum of its parts.
now regarding knowledge as justified true belief becomes obviously a redundant approach, that is usefull for the purpose of education/communication between humans. while it is clear that the only relevant quality of a proposition is wether it is true or not within a given system, the demand for justification is simply a matter of method, aiming to simplify the education/communication process by avoiding the undesired position of having to prove a negative, because it is always alot harder to prove a negative than to assert the respective affirmative. hence the concept of burden of proof.
ofcourse the concept that truth is relative to a system will be hard to swallow by many, but alas there is no helping it. there is no absolute truth, and can not be absolute truth for very many reasons. moreover, the belief in an absolute truth is just as naive (in the sense it breaks about the same logic rules and reasonable expectations) as beliveing in santa claus.
Knowledge has to be justified by true belief. Then of course, psychological elements do play in the human psyche when it comes to what knowledge is justifiable and true. Besides that point, there are different verification methods where one can analytically determine what knowledge is justified as true belief. There is a ‘‘JTB’’ analysis of knowledge, for example:
(i) p is true;
(ii) S believes that p;
(iii) S is justified in believing that p is true.
We all know that what is false can’t be known, for it can’t be true/justified. When someone makes a claim about something, it is natural for us to think for ourselves whether or not their claim is true. So if P is true, but S does not believe it to be true, then S would have to investigate him/herself. If S finds something contradictory to what P believes, then research would have to be conducted in a more proficient manner with evidence/logic/reasoning. Then S or P may be justified.
X = X. This statement has to be true. If it weren’t, you could say the following:
X != X;
1 != 1;
2 != 2;
1+1 != 2;
…
M != M;
Thus, if something is not what it is, then nothing else is what it is either, through multiplication. Every false statement is mathematically transformable into every other false statement.