So one cannot have knowledge and yet have doubt about it? I can’t know, for example, the correct process for repairing a machine, but when starting the process, even though I have successfully done it before, have doubts? There are category errors here. One can have all sorts of relationship to what one considers true and what is considered true by experts, scientific or other. My degree of doubt does not mean what I believe is not true or not knowledge. It is mixing the category of certainty, iow mental states that are emotional, with what assertions I would make and statements I might make about what is.
And then even in the way you want everyone to use the words belief and believe - refering to everything you would consider superstitioin - people have doubts all the time. In fact dealing with doubt, crises of faith and belief, and more related phenomena are considered more than simply a likely occurance for believers, but ongoing issues. Some religious people even consider doubt positive or a sign of healthy belief.
Which means that statements like this are confused.
And since you are now making assertions about wise choices, iow presumably meaning something like a good heuristic in relation to what one believes…
do you doubt this? has it been demonstrated scientifically? if not, by what methodology did you arrive at it and why do you not doubt it is the case? would this not be wise? And how do you then get out of the ensuing infinite regress of ‘wisdom’?
Is this a belief of yours or knowledge? By what criteria did you decide which it was? If it is merely belief why is it presented as a simple unqualified assertion. If it is knowledge, what leads to it being beyond doubt and what methodology did you use to arrive at this knowledge?
Moreno thanks for your insightful response - yes you’re right there are categorical issues here. I suppose personally knowledge, and well human knowledge in general - are two different things. I am speaking about personally knowing. Do you know how if the double slit theory experiment is valid? Not really. But is it considered human knowledge that the double slit experiment was? Yes, I would say it is. I don’t personally understand it, so I would claim I don’t know. I don’t understand the double slit theory. If you want to claim knowledge on things, that’s on you to back up with proper justification on how you know. On your hypothetical of the correct process for repairing a machine, that you have done for, well its entirely possible that you don’t know how you repaired the machine before. And why should you? Doesn’t knowledge require the ability to bring together your memory and understanding in a manner that provides certainty? Certainly I know 1+1=2, its very simple to know that. That knowledge is engrained in me. But the knowledge of the process for starting a machine? Not so much. Is it considered knowledge if you really don’t remember? I wouldn’t think so, myself. Can you doubt knowledge though? Is certainty not a requirement for knowledge? Is certainty not a requirement for belief?
I don’t know how “having doubt is the wise choice instead of having belief” is confused. I wouldn’t say I believe what I stated, I know that. I know how it is the wise choice, based on what I mean by wisdom, which shouldn’t be very different from what most others mean by wisdom, I hope. The methodology is - part of the greater thesis which needs much more explanation. Please bear with me I will have to answer this question in a much more lengthy in depth response than what I can present now. I will get back to this in another post.
That is the same for “Choice is a matter of will and knowledge on this matter, a deep insight is needed on to how to control the way we as individuals, think.”
I appreciate you asking these questions - it is certainly needed and insightful to do so, more so than many of the other responses here.
Of course not. That’s why there such things as weak/shakey beliefs and firm/strong beliefs. All that’s really required to believe something is that you think it’s more likely than not. Maybe not even that. Hope might be a sort of belief, where a person thinks something is true even though it’s against the odds.
One of the problems with these discussions is that humans do not use binary logic (true and false only). They use multi-level logic where there is a probability of truthfulness. In simplified terms, a statement may be very likely to be true, likely to be true, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, unlikely, very unlikely.
The concept of doubt is already embedded in the logic system. As is the concept of certainty.
That is why humans can act in situations which are contradictory or ambiguous.
So for example, imagine you have two small boxes in front of you. One contains a thousand dollars, the other contains a live scorpion. You must reach your hand into one of the boxes without looking and draw out the contents.
A person doing this may have no actual belief about which box has the money, as it’s 50/50. Even if you increase it to three boxes, two with money and one with a scorpion, the fact that they have a 66% chance of being right doesn’t mean they’ll have a belief about it- especially if they think of themselves as unlucky or are inordinately afraid of scorpions.
But gradually increase the number of boxes- 5, 10, 50, 10,000- each time with only one box having a scorpion, and all the rest having money. If at each point you ask them “Do you think the box you picked has a scorpion in it?” their answer will go from “How should I know?” to “Probably not” to “Nah” to “Of course not”. The number of boxes it takes for this transition to happen will be different for each person, but a belief that the box has no scorpion occurs somewhere around the line between ‘probably not’ and ‘nah’. Even with a hundred million boxes and 1 scorpion, a person may feel psychological certainty that the box they picked doesn’t have a scorpion, even though rationally they aren’t certain at all. There is a point at which the odds of something- even fully realized and recognized odds- cease to have an impact on our beliefs or decision making when they are sufficiently low.
Perhaps at not point would the person have knowledge that their box didn’t have a scorpion in it. But they would certainly form the belief, and the belief would exist long before any point of psychological certainty, because these things are a continuum, not an either/or scenario.
Yes I understand your definition of belief. I used a different definition to discuss my epistemic framework - and that definition was presented in the OP. Now - based on that definition that I am discussing I am arguing that I do not have belief - in that I don’t 1a: to have a firm religious faith b: to accept something as true, genuine, or real
Please note the difference (in bold) between your usage and mine -
Now, we can easily get sidetracked on the crux of the matter here through colloquial rhetoric and differing usages of what we mean by words - so I am being consistent in my sense as provided above. Note that when I state belief - I am only stating it in the sense as defined above. I am not stating it in any other sense, for the purpose of this thesis and a greater understanding, I hope, of how my mind and how hopefully other minds, can function - without belief.
So, when I used belief, I don’t define it as “something thought to be true” in the same manner as knowledge being something thought to be true. Remember that I had already provided reason earlier in this thread why it’s not the same in the mind, to conflate it as such in your definition is misleading and problematic.
Yeah, I got that from your posts. Prior to attaining knowledge, you claim to be in a strange limbo state of doubt, “openness to options” and non-knowledge which you say is not belief.
I don’t think that state exists nor is it possible for it to exist. I don’t think that humans think that way. I think that action would be impossible in such a state.
So Why do you not think that state exists nor is it possible for it to exist?
Let me ask you another question:
Do you think synesthesia is possible? If so, would you have thought it was possible without a report coming online without its depiction and assertion that it happens - or that it is already recognized and has its own term?
“Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise).” - wiki article on synesthesia
Difficulties have been recognized in adequately defining synesthesia:[5][6] Many different phenomena have been included in the term synesthesia (“union of the senses”), and in many cases the terminology seems to be inaccurate. A more accurate term may be ideasthesia."
Now I wouldn’t have thought this was possible. It wouldn’t have made any sense to me. I would’ve argued it, without seeing evidence of it. I hope I showed some evidence of why I don’t believe things. But maybe not to you at least. Maybe to some? Hopefully to some. I already am aware that there is a person who I think highly of, that is more in tuned with academic philosophy than I am, who is not a member of this board, who described that to me that this has the possibility of becoming a valid theory. I’m not saying this is a product of autism, or anything else, but I do think it might be possible that you aren’t wired to think that way. Of course, that I don’t know. If so, that’s fine. Not everyone is wired to think the same way. Not everyone can think the same way.
I told you. One will not act in a state where one cannot evaluate one action as better than another.
For example, you respond to a post with a specific interpretation of the poster’s meaning. If you had no reasonable interpretation, then you would not respond. If you had multiple interpretations then you would have multiple responses in the form of “If you mean this, then my response is this. If you mean that, then my response is that.”.
But you don’t do that because in spite of your claims, you don’t actually think that way. The evidence is in your own behavior.
So that’s interesting - is it a starting point? Why can’t we be agnostic about our senses, to get started? Then agnostic precepts become justified empirically…
To me, questioning whether or not a state is possible isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that ANGRY is demonstrably not in that state, based on the way he uses language, makes assumptions about what other people believe, and resists being correct on obvious errors. He’s believing in the exact same way as everybody, he merely doesn’t like the word, because he wants to reserve it for people he doesn’t like.
That’s what it comes down to. He’s got the exact same basic epistemology as any other dabbler in philosophy. He’s merely scrambled his words all around such that he talks about the same experiences everybody else has without using the word ‘belief’ to describe them. When absolutely forced, he’ll stick ‘interpretation’ or ‘understanding’ in as a synonym.
You claim to believe things because you associate belief with irrational religious nuts and you don’t want to think of yourself in those terms.
Everyone is telling you that “irrational belief without evidence” is a tiny fragment of the meaning of the word ‘belief’ but you won’t listen. You have a phobia of the word. You’re not the only one. It’s common among atheists.
You are on a pointless quest to alter epistemology. You are wasting your time over nothing.
How do you know what I think? You don’t really, your entire argument is based on belief, as opposed to mine. I know why I don’t believe and provided reasons why whatever instance of belief you thought you caught me at wasn’t. You assume you know how I think. Only I can know how I think, unless some crazy scientific advances occur that I’m not aware of currently.