Thought I’d just start a new thread as to put this in Faust’s Epistemology thread would disrupt the debate.
In response to the idea that knowing that the sun will rise tomorrow does not require it being certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, in general the idea that knowledge does not require certainty, Gib posted the following well-reasoned objection.
Right, we’re going to have to move carefully here, but I think we can sort this out. Most importantly, we need to get away from the idea that knowledge is something static. Man does not produce a number of beliefs which are either assigned to the category 'knowledge or ‘not knowledge’ for all time. Rather, knowledge is a process. How does this work? Well, let’s take our putative counter-example.
Right, it’s 7pm the night before the sun explodes. I have the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. I’ve got plenty of evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, namely every day prior to tomorrow in which the sun rose in conjunction with never having observed the sun not rising. On our new view of knowledge as not necessarily certain belief, our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow can count as knowledge. So, at 7pm, we need to say that we know the sun will rise tomorrow.
Let’s move forward - it’s 5am and the sun hasn’t risen yet. It’s 6am, still not risen. 7am, etc. Do I know that the sun will rise today? I will most certainly be assailed by doubt, and most likely wouldn’t place much trust in it. So right now, at 7am, my belief ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’ does not qualify as knowledge.
But are we to say about my belief yesterday? At the time, I called it knowledge, we thought correctly. Now, do I call it knowledge? And if I were to do so, would I be correct in doing so?
I’m going to just indicate how I think we solve this problem, then hopefully we’ll get some kind of discussion going. Yesterday, I was in a particular set of circumstances. I was planning for the day ahead, thinking what I would need to get sorted to be prepared. So my belief that the sun would rise had enormous practical value, the alternative belief, that the sun will not rise, would have left me unprepared for the day ahead. I short, it was the belief that best suited the set of circumstances that seemed most conceivable to occur tomorrow. So, by our new definition, at the time this was knowledge. Flash forward to now, the belief no longer best suits the set of circumstances that we actually find ourselves in, hence why it wouldn’t be knowledge now. We may wish to say ‘I never knew that at all after all’.
Our response is this: what determines whether I knew the sun will rise yesterday is the set of circumstances that were important to me yesterday, not the set of circumstances that are important to me today. What determines whether I know the sun will rise today is the set of circumstances that are important today, not yesterday. The way we are using the word ‘knows’ is in a way that is dependent upon context. It’s as if I am cleaning my kitchen and, at a certain point, I say ‘It’s clean now’ - for everyday purposes, the kitchen certainly qualifies as clean. But suppose I were to go into a hospital, if I were to clean the hospital to the same standard it would most certainly not qualify as clean. So - was my kitchen clean before? Or was it never clean? Or, rather, was my kitchen actually clean according to the standards that are relevant for kitchens, but not the standards relevant for hospitals? Correlatively, I did actually know the sun was going to rise tomorrow according to the standards relevant yesterday, but not according to the standards relevant today.