[lit-ideas] Re: knowledge and belief briefly revisited
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2013 11:25:11 -0800 (PST)
Sorry for sending this several times, it's Yahoo.mail again. O.K.
On Saturday, December 21, 2013 8:15 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Well, this reasoning seems circular in the sense that, if one a priori defines
knowledge so that it necessarily entails belief (JTP), then the conclusion that
there can be no knowledge without belief is tautologically true. True opinions
that are not accompanied by full-fledged belief are then excluded from our
conceptions of 'knowledge'. But this seems to make the existence of knowledge
unverifiable, since it is based on subjective 'belief' which is nearly
impossible to ascertain. Do we have to establish that Copernicus (and
Aristarchus of Samos, who also claimed it 2000 years earlier) believed that the
Earth revolves around the Sun in order to grant that they 'knew' it ?
O.K.
On Saturday, December 21, 2013 7:37 PM, Walter C. Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Please see specific replies below --------->
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> 11:26 AM (12 hours ago)
>
> [image: https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
>
>
>
> [image: https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
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>
> to lit-ideas,
>
> *Walter (?) wrote
>
> I
would have thought that any cogent / justifiable attribution of
> "knowing-that" would logically or conceptually (I'm not finicky here)
> involve an attribution of "believing-that."
>
----> Yes, Walter did write that.
>
> *I think I know by now, baroque and frivolous claims made in journal
> articles aside, that I *know* that
>
>
>
> 2 + 3 = 5
>
>
>
> and that
>
>
>
> If I touch my nose with my forefinger, my elbow will be bent.
>
--> Agreed. And we attribute "knowledge that P" to you only because we assume
that you believe that P and
you are able to provide relevant justification for
your belief. Or: We ourselves have met those 2 necessary
conditions of
propositional knowledge.
>
> and that, like Moore…
>
>
>
> …(wait—what did Moore believe?)
-----> He believed, falsely, as Witters and I correctly claim, that he *knew*
something in claiming that "Here is one hand, here is another, therefore an
external world exists and I'm justified in so claiming." Witters never thought
very highly of Moore's philosophical abilities, not least because he failed to
recognize the difference between a genuine knowledge-claim and an expression of
a "hinge-proposition" or a "river-bed proposition." The latter is not an
epistemic claim, pace G.E.. Fortunately, Witters is not buried for eternity
next to Moore. Rather is
heburied next to John Wisdom, at a cemetery just north
of Cambridge proper.
> *I was taught in grammar school, by Elizabeth Gill, that 2 + 3 = 5, and
> that was the end of it. I
wasn’t first taught to *believe* that this
> equation was correct. An attempt to do that, it seems to me, would have
> been in bad faith:
Here, RP oddly conflates logical/conceptual presupposition with
genetic/empirical matters. The idea that "knowledge-that" presupposes
"belief-that" is not an empirical claim. We don't need to hire empirical
sociologists to gather evidence confirming that truth; as if that truth could
be controverted by a majority of respondents avowing that while they know that
P, they really don't believe that P. Such presuppositions are
logical/conceptual in that one can validly infer she "believes that P" from
Alice's claim that she "knows that P."
>I wasn’t shown the numerals and symbols
necessary for
> the expression of this equation and asked if I *believed* it; no—it
> happened all in a flash. Well, not in a flash, maybe: apparently I
> *first*had to
believe that 2 + 3 = 5, and
> *then* be shown how I could come to know it. Having come to know it, I
> didn’t want to part with my belief, so I rolled it up in a rug and put it
> in the attic.
-> Again, empirical matters concerning the acquisition of belief are separate
from logical/conceptual matters. I'm not quite clear on how a rational agent
could first believe that P and then come to know that P. Isn't that an example
of an indoctrinated mind (however snug in a rug one may be) educators and
philosophers want to identify and treat?
>
>
>
> *[I’m not sure who wrote the following; Walter, I think.]
>
> As in: "Suma knows that whales are mammals" logically presupposes
that
> "Suma
> believes that whales are mammals." To claim "I know that P" while denying "I
> believe that P" is a speech act the udderrance of which requires at least 5
>
Hail Marys. (Yes, it's bovine all the way down.) But that's only if you ask
> me.
--------> Da, Walter indeed wrote that too.
Walter O
MUN
=============================================================================
> *’Logically presupposes’…Well, it certainly isn’t a logical truth that
> e.g. ‘Robert knows his name is Robert so, Robert believes his name is
> Robert. R believes his name is R is something that might come from his
> having been struck on the head by getting too close to one of Galileo’s
> experiments, and afterward forgetting, for a time, who he was. He believed
> his name was R, and then—*suddenly*—knew it was. ‘So,
first the belief,
> then the knowledge.’ This is meant to show that if one knows something one
> first believed it and therefore if one knows something one also believes
> it, for belief is something
on the road to knowledge (as in *Meno*). Yet it
> would only show this if belief were *essential* to knowledge, in some
> strange way. My suggestion is that it isn’t—that one can know outright,
> i.e., without passing Go.
>
>
>
> *The notion that if one knows something one must also believe it (so that
> one cannot claim to know something without also claiming (?) to believe it,
> any more than someone who’s just run 10 kilometers can avoid saying that
> she also ran 5 kilometers) is, I think, based on a mistake—the belief that
> knowledge is JTB, so that wherever there’s knowledge there must be belief
> sleeping inside.
>
>
>
> *It’s
been claimed that if one knows something, one must believe it also,
> so that it would be a mistake for someone to say she knew something, but
> did not believe it. (I’m not sure just what sort of
mistake it would
> be—language is funny.) If she were to say she knew something but didn’t
> also believe it, she would, on the JTB view be contradicting (?) herself.
> But of course if she meant simply that she no longer merely believed it
> (the belief had dissolved, as it were), what she said would be what she
> should have said. ‘Where there is knowledge there must also be belief
> also,’ comes from the acceptance of knowledge as JTB. And there’s no reason
> to accept that.
>
>
>
> Robert Paul
>
> ————————————————
>
> *The philosophical supposition that knowledge is true belief (which we have
> by
meandering inheritance from *Theatetus* and *Meno*), is not the only
> account of knowledge there is. It’s been called into question for some time
> by clever men like Edmund Gettier, and Colin
Radford.
>
>
>
> *(See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/).
>
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