Knowing that You Know

If what follows is essentially the criteria by which we judge if we have knowledge, then the skeptic is on sturdier ground than many think.

S knows that P if and only if: (1) P is true. (2) S believes that P. (3) S is justified in believing that P.

What special connection does the truth of P have with S’s being justified in believing that P? Does truth emit justification rays? Or is it that there is no special connection, and we can never know if we’re justified in believing that P, and therefore we can never know that P (with anything like certainty, and that is what we mean by “knows that P” isn’t it?–with certainty? If not, then isn’t it just belief?)

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Jason www.geocities.com/coflot49

Well it’s kinda been the dilema since the epistemological turn though hasn’t it.

The absolute - I’ll agree - is beyond us. We’re subjects, we’re limited to a certain frame of reference - i.e. a subjective one - and any claim to absolute knowledge, with the exception of self-awareness and tautological tautologies (ho ho ho), is most likely faulty. The Kantian solution, for instance, which many feel reconciles empiricism and rationalism (or the external and internal worlds implied by dualism) makes a few unverifiable assumptions (the fact that synthetic a priori knowledge of spatiality and temporiality constitutes an infallible foundation on which to base a solid metaphysical framework), and thus doesn’t really go anyway to eliminating this ontological gap.

However, absolute skepticism - which suggests that just because something cannot be verified 100% that it should be dismissed as meaningless (a less severe version of which exists in logical positivism) - misses the point somewhat. I cannot prove to myself - to an absolute degree - that the world exists (much less to you or anyone else), but, as Neitzsche said, “another world is entirely undemonstrable”. I may not be “certain” of anything objective, but the reality perceive - the external world I walk about in - is a damn sight more demonstrable or verifiable than any other alternative. Sure, we could all be in a Matrix like situation where our brains are plugged into robots and we’re in a perpetual state of dreaming, never quite aware of “the real world”, but it’s a baseless assumption.

On the balance of probabilities - without wishing to devise a probability table to prove it to the rest of you in the same vain as Wittgenstein - I exist, you exist, the planet exists, the universe exists more or less as we see it. There is no infallible piece of rhetoric or mathematics to support this statement, but, on the balance of probabilities, it’s far more likely the scenario than any other.

By your “knowlegde” equation, I think my approach is workable anyway. If we assume that reality is one of two possibilities (to create a potentially misleading dichotemy) - the world exists as we perceive it or it doesn’t. Assume the first possibility - that the world exists as we perceive it - is actually objectively true (which is obviously undemonstrable from a subjective frame of reference) and that this possibility equals P. We are left with:

1) P is true
2) I (as S) believes P
3) I am justified in believing P (as all evidence available to me suggests as much)

P is verifiable from all but the most stringent form of logic. But the logic we’re talking about is self-defeating in a way anyway - does absolute skepticism hold-up when faced with absolute skepticism? How do we know that such a logic exists? Is it verifiable? Is it justified? Is it meaningful? Perhaps such skeptics an hold their logic up to itself, and see how whether it is workable. For a logic that isn’t internally self-consistent cannot be treated seriously.

So how about it then? Anyone wish to prove to me that absolute skepticism exists and/or is justifiably applied to the things that it is - using only such a logic? Does the strict logic it implies actually deny itself when it is applied to itself (in the sameway that the probability structured skepicism in logical positivism is self-defeating when it is analysed with its own principles)?

Just a thought.

Wow, JP. Very illuminating stuff. I’ll have to think about your criticisms of absolute skepticism more. But, as regards your self-defeating argument, which has been brewing in my own head for some time, it would seem that the self-defeating argument against A.S. is just as self-defeating as you say A.S. is, that is, you still are using a system of logic to question the selfsame system of logic. Is this not in the same way self-defeating?

Furthermore, if we are to get rid of troublesome words like “absolute” and “certainty” when we speak of knowledge, what exactly does that make of knowledge? When you say, “I know this to be true,” don’t you just mean that you “strongly believe this to be true”? What is knowledge without certainty? I suppose this is the larger question.
Cheers, Jason www.geocities.com/coflot49

Yep, I understand your qualm. It's always going to be complicated when you apply a piece of logic to itself, because then you could go on infinately, applying the same piece of logic to itself for ever: you can use AS to analyse the merits of AS, but then you could use AS again to analyse the merits of AS analysing AS, then go on to use AS again to analyse the merits of using AS to analyse the merits of AS when applied to AS and so on, ad infinitum. Anyway, I think I'll stop there becaus my brain is starting to hurt. [img]http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/ubb/wink.gif[/img]

I'll just quickly summarise what I meant with that self-defeating principle before:

* Absolute Skepticism is a system of logic. * Every system of logic must be self-consitant and self-reflexive (if absolute skepticism is applicable to everything else, it must be applicable to itself in order to be considered a uniform logic, otherwise, if you can doubt its application to itself, you can doubt it's application to everything else). * Absolute skepticism - to use a somewhat over-simplified definition - is the logic that suggest that anything that is not objectively and absolutely verifiable is either untrue (or as good as), meaningless or both. * The piece of logic I use - that which says that absolute skepticism must be self-reflexive - was founded on the premise that logic constitutes a universally applicable piece of rhetoric that when applied to any given circumstance holds true ("all bachelors are unmarried" - given what we understand the concept of bachelorhood and marriage to be - is true anywhere in the universe). Any piece of logic that is not universally applicable is either meaningless (in that any piece of logic - no matter how absurd - can be shown to be true given a specific and arbitrary set of circumstances, so long as it is self-consistant. A nearly-universally-applicable piece of logic, is, for all intents and purposes, hardly any batter than a piece of logic that hardly applies to anything at all) or fallicious in the first place. * Absolute skepticism, when applied to itself - if we follow the logic to it's logical (pun intended) conclusions - can be said to deny the very roots of logic itself (as Descartes - the original absolute skeptic - said, perhaps a devil is tricking us into believing that the logic we devise is correct). * Thus, either AS, as a piece of logic, denies the very roots of logic qua logic, and thus denies and defeats itself, or the logic cannot be applied to itself at all, which raises the question then, why it should be allowed to apply to anything else (like I was saying before about the necessity of self-reflective logic). * Thus absolute skepticm is either fallicious or self-defeating (which amount to more or less the same thing).

And you talk of the logic I use being self-defeating? Well if I use the logic of absolute skepticism on itself, and find the the process in any way nullifies or denies itself, then there are two possibilities (that I can think of now anyway): either the logic is faulty, or my application of the logic is faulty. If the logic is faulty then the conclusion speaks for itself: AS is a fallicious piece of logic, and cannot reasonably be applied in its pure form. If my application is faulty, then the most likely scenario is that my definition of AS is wrong (which would then lead to the question of what AS is if not the logic that I outlined briefly before), or I'm applying it in the wrong way (which would have to mean that my d

Even if it is only an intuition, all judgement is knowledge based, it cannot be otherwise. But truth may not be just. For example, I could lie and that’s true, yet my lie may not be just. Another example is, there’s a person dying, he’ll die if I tell him the truth, so I’ll lie because I won’t want his death on my conscience, because we all have problems, because he’ll be better able to hear the truth later, etcetera. So, in this case my lie would be the just thing to do and truth would not be just. I didn’t really understand your P’s and the S’s. I think you mean to convey something else but whatever…

I think that it is a mistake to believe that you cannot know unless you are absolutely certain. Before I say why, let me say what I understand by “absolutely certain”. I mean what Descartes meant by it, namely, the impossibility of being mistaken. I do not mean merely what has been called “subjective” or “psychological” certainty, by which is meant a very strong feeling of confidence that you are right in what you believe is true; and nor do I mean what Descartes meant by “moral certainty” which is high practical certainty. That is the high probability that you are correct, leaving open, however, the possibility that that you are wrong.

The importance difference between the first two kinds of certainty and Cartesian certainty is that in both the case of psychological certainty, and practical certainty, neither entails truth. But in the case of Cartesian certainty, certainty does entail truth. If you are (Cartesianly) certain, then what you are certain about must also be true. And, of course, if you know for certain, then the proposition you know for certain must be true.

Now, there is a lot more to say about this, and especially why people (like you) have believed that in order to know, you have to know for certain (and why to know, you have to know that you know).

But now, let me say why I do not believe that knowledge must be certain (or that to know is to know for certain). (And I mean Cartesian certainty, because obviously, you have to be psychologically certain, namely believe with a high degree of confidence that you are right, else you should not claim that you know).

I have two reasons:

  1. If knowledge means certainty (remember, “Cartesian” certainty) then it would follow that most of what we all believe we know, we do not know. For instance, I (believe) I know that George W. Bush is now president of the United States (and so, I bet do you and everyone who is now reading this post). But I am not Cartesianly certain that is true. Therefore, it would follow that if knowledge entails Cartesian certainty, I do not know that Bush is president. That is very hard for me to believe. Another example: I believe I know that there is now a computer monitor in front of me. I bet you believe you know that there is one in front of you. Again, if knowledge is Cartesian certainty, than I don’t know it, and neither do you.

  2. If knowledge entailed Cartesian certainty, then we do not know more today than we knew 100 years ago. For we did not know, for instance, 100 years ago, that the structure of DNA was a double helix, and now we do know that. (In fact we did not know about DNA at all) And furthermore, if knowledge implies Cartesian certainty, we will not know more than we know now, 100 years from now.

Now, the question I want to ask you is this: is it more reasonable to believe that: 1. We do not know that George W. Bush is president, or that we do not know that there is a computer monitor in front of us, or that we do not know more today than we did 100 years ago, and we will not know more 100 years hence; or is it more reasonable to believe that it is not true that knowledge implies Cartesian certainty (and of course, there must be something wrong with any argument that has as its conclusion that knowledge does imply Cartesian certainty)?