[lit-ideas] Re: Can You Imagine 2 + 2 = 5?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:36:31 -0800
Andreas wrote re My Last Sentence (an unpublished poem by Robert Browning)
But knowing something doesn't guarantee that it exists. Robert's last
sentence should be (I'm guessing) "...certain that X is known, thus X
exists." We can indeed be utterly certain (not merely imagining or
guessing or illusioned or mistaken) about something, but it still won't
exist.
What I had in mind and sorry for the confusion was that being certain
that Ursula lives in Canada e.g. doesn't entail that she lives there;
i.e., it doesn't entail that the proposition 'Ursula lives in Canada,'
is true. In other words, x was standing in for a proposition.
Usually, for the most part, all things considered, given various obscure
conditions, one know THAT so-and-so. And although Mike knows many wise
things in this sense, he also knows HOW to do many things refrigerative
that would astound and amaze us.
The from-Plato-on definition of 'knowledge' is something like 'true,
justified belief (the 'justified' being added to rule out 'knowing' what
time it is from looking at a clock that unbeknownst to the 'knower' has
stopped for years.
I saw the knowledge/belief distinction used in real (i.e.
nonphilosophical) life when in a film when a prosecutor asked a witness,
'Do you KNOW, Mr. Smith, or do you only BELIEVE?' All parties (well, it
was a film after all), seemed to understand the distinction.
Robert Paul,
making it up as he goes along
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