[lit-ideas] Re: Popper and Grice on 'knowledge'
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2015 20:08:41 +0100
JL is picking his pieces and going home, he ain't in the mood for chess...
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Well, I submit that this philosopher whom you like is wrong to confuse
> reason for a belief with cause in the physical world. This does not
> necessarily mean that beliefs are not caused, but that they are not caused
> by the states of affairs in the physical world which are the content of
> them.
>
> A: I know that the snow is white.
>
> B: How do you know ?
>
> Here it would be circular and pointless (not mentioning rather rude) to
> say: I know it BECAUSE THE SNOW IS WHITE. Some non-circular sort of
> explanation is sought, such as: "I know it because went out and looked just
> now."
>
> Thus, my belief that snow is white is caused by the experience I had, and
> NOT by the whiteness of snow. The snow can be white for all it wants
> without me ever noticing that it is white. (Just as Venus was hot for
> millions of years without causing anyone to believe that it's hot.)
>
> If this is not Sufficient Reason to reject the causality theory of
> knowledge, let's take an explanation that is just a little bit more
> sophisticated:
>
> A: I know it because snow is always white at this time of the year.
>
> Here there is a prediction based on (an interpretation of) past
> experiences, and I didn't bother to go out and look. This dispenses
> completely with the notion that it is the snow that is presently falling
> that has caused my belief.
>
> O.K.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
> DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Was Gettier the most important epistemologist?
>>
>> In a message dated 3/5/2015 2:01:54 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
>> omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:" I do hope that the Principle of Sufficient
>> will be
>> tackled tomorrow. In the meanwhile, I also know that Venus is hot. Does
>> that
>> mean that I went to Venus and felt the hotness, which caused me to hold
>> this
>> belief ? No, it doesn't; in fact nobody ever went to Venus and felt the
>> hotness. The notion that it's hot has been arrived at relatively recently
>> through various indirect calculations. Presumably Venus was hot before
>> that, but
>> it didn't cause people to believe that it's hot; a few decades ago it was
>> thought to have temperatures similar to the Earth's. The causal relation,
>> if
>> any, between the state of affairs and our beliefs is too weak to be taken
>> seriously."
>>
>> >hope that the Principle of Sufficient Reason will be tackled tomorrow.
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>> O. K. offers:
>>
>> "The Principle of Sufficient Reason appears as causality in the PHYSICAL
>> world [only], e.g. my pushing the door causes it to open. The PRS does
>> NOT
>> appear as causality in the worlds of beliefs; there a belief is
>> justified if
>> there is sufficient ground for holding it, whatever the origin of the
>> belief. In order to say that I know that the Earth revolves around the
>> sun, I
>> need not demonstrate that my belief is caused by the Earth revolving
>> around
>> the Sun, as opposed to learning it at school. It's enough to understand
>> the
>> reasoning that lead the astronomers to believe that it is so."
>>
>> Well, I think [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] works with a broader conception of
>> cause than Schopenhauer, and would NOT restrict causation to the physical
>> world (W1, in the words of Popper) but indeed, the realm of beliefs and
>> desires (Popper's W2). [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] would follow Davidson
>> here who
>> distinguishes at most between a belief or a desire being a CAUSE and a
>> belief or a desire being a REASON. Sometimes they are both.
>>
>> What surprises me is that Grice is not concerned with Hume's criticisms of
>> the idea of 'cause'. But I blame Oxford on this. Oxford is based on
>> Locke's
>> type of empiricism, never Hume (who is perhaps felt to be not Oxonian in
>> spirit), and Grice's first approach to the idea of 'cause' was from
>> Aristotle ('aitia') and Locke, say. Indeed, [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE]
>> goes on to
>> take Aristotle's 'aitia' TOO SERIOUSLY -- as in the phrase, 'a rebel
>> without
>> a cause'. This is a legitimate use of 'cause', and has nothing to do with
>> what Hume was thinking he was criticising. Here a 'cause' is something to
>> look forward to the future. A rebel with a cause is a rebel who believes
>> in
>> something. Dean was just a rebel without a cause, or his character was.
>> It's
>> not impossible to be a rebel without a cause, though -- but we have to
>> admit it's sensationalist enough to be the title for a film! (While "A
>> rebel
>> with a cause" sounds boring and overimplicated).
>>
>> So, [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] uses 'cause' rather freely, and applies it
>> to
>> the realm of beliefs and desires -- and beyond. For example, 'reason'. If
>> I say that Tom reasoned from premise to conclusion, I am committed to my
>> thinking that Tom believes that the premise is true, and that he believes
>> that the conclusion is true, and he believes that his believing that
>> premise
>> is true CAUSES his believing that the conclusion is true.
>>
>> I think Palma was referring to scales recently, and they are discussed by
>> Urmson in "Parentheticals". The idea is that there is a scale
>>
>> <know, believe>
>>
>> So, that 'not' is sometimes used 'illogically' (as I think Ducrot would
>> say):
>>
>> I don't just BELIEVE that 2 + 2 = 4: I _know_ it.
>>
>> Here it is not negated that the utterer believes that 2 + 2 = 4; only that
>> to utter that he BELIEVES, when he thinks he KNOWS is being
>> over-informative, and thus violating a maxim (of conversation, yes!)
>> that Palma finds
>> interesting!
>>
>> _Personally_ I don't think we know that 2 + 2 = 4. [THIS PHILOSOPHER I
>> LIKE] did, and took mathematical knowledge as the apex of knowledge. I'm
>> too
>> much of a Hilbertian to take 2 + 2 = 4 too seriously. If understood
>> empirically alla Mill, then I may have two apples, and then two other
>> apples, but a
>> toucan appears in the proceedings - it was kept in a cage -- and eats one
>> of the apples. So the sum is 3, not 4. For Hilbert, arithmetics is merely
>> conventional, and there may well be a system where 2 + 2 = 5 (cfr. Susan
>> Haak
>> on Deviant Logics).
>>
>> I also agree with Witters that 2 + 2 = 4 is very much like "It's raining
>> or
>> it isn't"
>>
>> Alice: So you'll sing this song to me?
>> The White Knight: I will. And the song is so nice that it will bring
>> tears
>> to your eyes or...
>> Alice: Or else what?
>> The White Knight: Or else it won't, you know.
>>
>> F. R. Plumpton ("The Foundations of Mathematics") quotes this as evidence
>> that analytic truths are not valid moves in the conversational game,
>> unless
>> we IMPLICATE. Witters, who couldn't recognise an implicature even with
>> _glasses_ will just restrict to the comment that they don't speak about
>> the
>> world -- and thus are vacuous _at the level of what is informatively
>> said_.
>>
>> Omar then speaks about the planets, or Gods.
>>
>> "In the meanwhile, I also know that Venus is hot. Does that mean that I
>> went to Venus and felt the hotness, which caused me to hold this belief ?
>> No,
>> it doesn't; in fact nobody ever went to Venus and felt the hotness. The
>> notion that it's hot has been arrived at relatively recently through
>> various
>> indirect calculations. Presumably Venus was hot before that, but it
>> didn't
>> cause people to believe that it's hot; a few decades ago it was thought
>> to
>> have temperatures similar to the Earth's. The causal relation, if any,
>> between the state of affairs and our beliefs is too weak to be taken
>> seriously."
>>
>> Well, 'hot' is a trick. I would not multiply the senses of 'hot' but what
>> is hot for me but surely not be hot for Mephistopheles (a character in
>> Gounod's "Faust").
>>
>> But assume.
>>
>> i. The planet Venus is hot.
>>
>> -- the temperature is very high, there, being close to the sun.
>>
>> ii. Stephen Hawking knows that Venus is hot.
>>
>> He is an astronomer. It's not important that _I_ know that, since I'm no
>> astronomer.
>>
>> "Does that mean that [Hawking] went to Venus and felt the hotness, which
>> caused [Hawking] to hold this belief?
>>
>> I.e. we are indeed presupposing that (ii) ENTAILS
>>
>> iii. Stephen Hawking BELIEVES that Venus is hot.
>>
>> "No, it doesn't; in fact nobody ever went to Venus and felt the hotness.
>> The notion that it's hot has been arrived at relatively recently through
>> various indirect calculations."
>>
>> which ultimately are CAUSED by the _heat_ propagated by this particular
>> planet.
>>
>> Here we have to be careful, because if you are a serious quantum
>> physicist, as Hawking is (but the Mrs. Hawking isn't -- and it's on HER
>> book that
>> the Hawking film is based) you don't indeed need believe in cause (cfr.
>> M.
>> Bunge's essay on this).
>>
>> O. K.:
>>
>> "Presumably Venus was hot before that, but it didn't cause people to
>> believe that it's hot; a few decades ago it was thought to have
>> temperatures
>> similar to the Earth's. The causal relation, if any, between the state of
>> affairs and our beliefs is too weak to be taken seriously."
>>
>> Well, those experiments that yielded that the temperature in Venus is
>> similar to the Earth's were wrong. Since the causation is indirect, you
>> have to
>> allow for a failure here and there. Note that 'hot', as Timothy Williamson
>> notes, is a 'vague' predicate, and there are places on Planet Earth which
>> are very hot, perhaps like Venus: the centre of the Planet Earth, for
>> example (cfr. novel by J. Verne, based on experience) and the desert of
>> the
>> Sahara. The lack of vegetation there, and the fact that a pond of water
>> is
>> called an oasis IMPLICATES that the heat in those areas is hight.
>> Similarly in
>> the New World, where cacti grow and you the sun is constantly shining
>> (Lowry
>> wrote about this in "Under the Volcano" and actress Sarah Miles in a film
>> set in a hot area of Africa utters the excellent utterance -- "White
>> Mischief" -- "Oh, not another [insert expletive] HOT day!" --where the
>> comic
>> effect is in the use of the expletive coming from her who is supposed to
>> represent an English aristocrat.
>>
>> So, it is indeed the heat of Venus that causes the beliefs in those who
>> care about these things that Venus is hot. If in the past, this was not
>> KNOWN
>> (since the belief people held was false) was caused obviously NOT by the
>> heat of Venus, but by some mistake in the calculation. Accidents do
>> happen,
>> you know.
>>
>> As per the ps. it's clear that the scale can be rephrased as
>>
>> <epistemic, doxastic, subdoxastic>
>>
>> Some states are subdoxastic. Some are beliefs (doxastic); some are
>> epistemic, and amount to 'knowledge', even if NOT to what _Popper_ means
>> by
>> 'knowledge'.
>>
>> The phrase 'episteme' to refer to 'knowledge' is Platonic in origin, as is
>> 'doxa', for which my favourite quote has to be, as a man said -- it's in
>> the Oxford Book of Quotations:
>>
>> "Orthodoxy is my doxy; Heterodoxy is another man’s doxy".
>>
>> Again, in the example of the student who knows that the Battle of Waterloo
>> was fought on June 18, 1815, Grice writes "(cf. causal theory)"
>> implicating
>> that he thought at the time that the link was weaker than causal. But
>> some
>> connection as to the provenance (a favourite term with Geary) of the
>> student belief to Waterloo on June 18, 1815 has to be posited if we
>> claim he
>> knows this (even if he mumbles before giving the right answer to the
>> history
>> teacher on oral examination). So it may not be that [THIS PHILOSOPHER I
>> LIKE] will be oversurprised to learn that Schopenhauer was similarly
>> cautious
>> about these matters.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Speranza
>>
>> From The Handbook of Epistemic Logic:
>>
>> "Epistemic logic and, more generally, logics of knowledge and belief,
>> originated with philosophers such as Jaakko Hintikka and David Lewis in
>> the
>> early 1960s. Since then, such logics have played a significant role not
>> only
>> in philosophy, but also in computer science, artificial intelligence,
>> and
>> economics. This handbook reports significant progress in a field that,
>> while
>> more mature, continues to be very active. This book should make it
>> easier
>> for new researchers to enter the field, and give experts a chance to
>> appreciate work in related areas. The book starts with a gentle
>> introduction to
>> the logics of knowledge and belief; it gives an overview of the area
>> and
>> the material covered in the book. The following eleven chapters, each
>> written by a leading researcher (or researchers), cover the topics of
>> only
>> knowing, awareness, knowledge and probability, knowledge and time, the
>> dynamics
>> of knowledge and of belief, model checking, game theory, agency,
>> knowledge and ability, and security protocols. The chapters have been
>> written so
>> that they can be read independently and in any order. Each chapter ends
>> with a section of notes that provides some historical background,
>> including
>> references, and a detailed bibliography."
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
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