Epistemology

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Why is Epistemology so boring? Reading about subject-sensitive invariantism must be the least sexy thing in the world. Actually, it isn’t so much Epistemology as the guys I’ve been assigned to read in this class. Has anyone here struggled through Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits? Man, that takes real effort. What annoys me is that what he’s saying really isn’t all that complicated, he just makes it sound like it is. He does love presenting everything schematically.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, I’m struggling through John Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Lotteries. Here’s a (philosophical) question for you all to ponder,

Me: I know I won’t be able to afford to go on Safari this summer.
John: No you don’t, you’ve got a lottery ticket, remember?
Me: Ah, well I guess I don’t know.

Whats going on here? Did I ever know I couldn’t go on Safari? Do I still know? Does ‘know’ mean the same thing in both of my statements?

Oh, and try to answer as if you weren’t a world-weary sceptic, like most people on here. Just content yourselves with knowing that when epistemologists talk about knowing things they tacitly assume that knowledge doesn’t require absolute certainty. Those answers are quite possibly correct, but they don’t require much mental ingenuity. If some philosophers didn’t spend their careers defending absurdities it’s amazing how much they could get done I suspect, some of the solutions you read to this stuff are just incredibly clever.

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It’s not necessarily so that you’ll win the lottery and get the money for the trip. It’s only possible. So if you can only know-know things which are necessary, then you can’t know-know what’s only possible.

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I just put a lewis article in the thread that’s in my signature about just this sort of thing. It’s called “individuation by stipulation and acquaintance”. He talks about knowlege de dicto and de se. Good shit.

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I don’t know-know about that.

When I’m not thinking its boring, I like the guys who make knowledge context-dependent. Lewis did that, so you’ll have to agree with me here.

5

rene descartes was a wind bag sac of pretentious garbage… figurativley speaking

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If we stipulate that we can only have knowlege by stipulation,(at least some kind of identity theory) then sure, you can have knowlege that’s deductive and context dependent.

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and if you stipulate a big pile of nonsense, it is stipulated… one may call it stipulated knowledge but it remains a big pile…

-Imp

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Exactly. This is the kind of skepticism which cannot be defeated.

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I love the level of intellectual discussion on ilp.

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We’re still awaiting for the return of our king…

Bob from the trailer park!

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David Hume, and Freidrich Nietzsche destroyed epistemology. It now belongs firmly to metaphysics. Anyone who is trying to revive it is just whistling past the graveyard.

The way philosophy is taught leaves something to be desired.

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I’ll rally behind that. =D>

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You know, when it comes to Epistemology I sort of agree. But only sort of. If nothing else it’s one hell of a way to work at your reasoning skills. Trying to figure out what some of these guys are saying, and how their arguments work, really helps you reason properly.

Epistemologists have very cunningly redefined knowledge so it doesn’t require certainty, or any of the stuff thats hard to get. I suppose there is something to the view that things we say we know must be a bit different to things we are just guessing at, what plane are you going to get on, the one built using all our knowledge of physics or the one built with guess-work?

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See there’s always going to be the one asshole who says that physics is guess work. Then what?

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Well, yeah, it is. Intelligent guess work mind. I can’t be bothered finding it but there’s a video clip of Richard Feynman explaining how physics works. Basically, he produces Karl Popper’s Falsificationism in 5 minutes. But then you get it experimentally verified, and you get scientific knowledge, which does mean something more than guesswork.

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I’m not disagreeing. I’m just saying there are people who will that aren’t really thinking about it.

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Yeah, well, anyway I guess the point is that modern epistemology takes it that there is a difference between propositions which we ‘know’ (whatever that means) and other propositions. You’re happy to say that you know we won’t be going on African Safari this summer, I’m happy to say that I know I won’t be able to afford graduate study next year without taking a year out, despite the fact that there is a non-zero objective chance that neither of these things are going to be the case. Physicists are happy to say that they know that when they drop a ball it’ll fall towards the centre of the Earth. Something elevates these things above statements like ‘the quark is the smallest sub-atomic particle’ or ‘it won’t rain tomorrow’. So we just call the former statements knowledge, the latter mere belief or opinion, despite the fact that none of them are certain.

Of course, once we’ve decided that we can only use ‘know’ in this non-strict way without giving into scepticism the entire point of Epistemology becomes a bit lost… But, hey, at least we’ve got somewhere.

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my intellect is best expensed in matters which are of interest to me, i read your post but couldn’t provide meaningfull commentary, so i simply tried to relate to where you were coming from…

P.S: making fun of dead people is ok!

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C’mon, whats your intuition? Surely it’s correct in some situations to say ‘I know I won’t go on Safari this summer’, for example when you’re buying books in Blackwells and your friend asks you why you aren’t buying African guidebooks. But, then, it also seems that once it’s pointed out to you that you’ve got a lottery ticket you realise that you don’t know. Whats going on?

I didn’t know Descartes personally so I can’t really comment…

Although he did carry a sword.

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i warned you it wouldn’t be all that meaningful but here goes…

when you first stated " know i wont be able to afford to go on a safari this summer" you merely stated the conclusion of an inductive assumption…

you would bet that you won’t win the lottery, so you would also bet that you won’t be able to afford to go on a safari.

it is in that confidence which the assertion was made, though logically the statement was in fact based in uncertainty…

it is perhaps impossible to make a future prediction with absolute certainty given that we do not have absolute information with which to deduce…

yes, know and know are the same word. The dialogue illustrates an objection to an inductive argument…

here’s an example…

i know that i will turn twelve next year…

i make this claim with an absolute resolve…

“but what if you die before then?”

I had not considered that i could die before then… i did not realize that there was a possibility of me not turning twelve next year. in this sense the statement itself was wrong

yet i still make the same claim with an absolute resolve…

why? because i think that i will be alive tomorrow despite me uncertainty…

probabilistic reasoning…

so either you knew you had a lottery ticket and simply doubted you would win or you forgot that you even had a ticket…

the funny thing about this scenario is that there are perhaps an infinite amount of objections to the initial statement…

“what if you make an invention”

“what if you become famous”

“what if you become a safari tour guide”

so ya… i pretty much state the obvious… perhaps you gleaned something from it…