Base_Six OP t1_jcb0qgs wrote
Reply to comment by Midrya in The Folly of Knowledge: why we should favor belief as the focus of our epistemology by Base_Six
I wrote this more aimed at the skepticism of "you are a brain in a vat" than with criticism of more grounded ideas. Neither internalist nor externalist constructions of knowledge feel, to me, like they really have teeth when confronting strong skepticism for fundamental beliefs.
For me, I think skepticism is ultimately correct when it says "you don't know that your senses describe reality", but I think I can also make the claim that it would be unreasonable for me to disbelieve my perception of reality, which is what I'm trying to argue here.
Beyond that, 90% of epistemology feels like word games that don't really change anything, including my work, so I agree with you there. Russel probably has the right approach in just brushing skepticism aside and getting on with more interesting work. There's a substrata of beliefs that we need to accept to meaningfully engage with the world, and whether we just accept them axiomatically or struggle to construct a framework for accepting them on other grounds is generally irrelevant. I personally find the axiomatic approach unsatisfying, and think that a framework that can provide those foundational answers can also be useful more generally.
Midrya t1_jcbur78 wrote
> I wrote this more aimed at the skepticism of "you are a brain in a vat" than with criticism of more grounded ideas.
That is all well and good, but I would be hesitant to call such a person a skeptic given that it requires assuming quite a few unverifiable premises. To use the language of your article, I don't believe a Strong Skeptical Hypothesis (SSH) can even exists, because such an argument requires that the one presenting it be inherently lacking in skepticism. A person who posits the idea that "you are a brain in a vat" is either a believer of some form of the simulation hypothesis, or is just being a contrarian for the sake of contrarianism.
For all it's worth, I can agree to the notion that we can't ever truly know something in the sense that we can verify that the information we posses regarding some thing is accurate; I just don't perceive any benefit in using the phrase "reasonable belief" in place of "knowledge".
Base_Six OP t1_jcc1lx9 wrote
Do you think it's possible to state that some of our beliefs are logical and well founded, even in absence of true knowing?
When you state that you "agree to the notion that we can't ever truly know something", that's the crux of why I want to discuss reasonable belief. I agree with that statement, but think we can nonetheless offer a solid basis for belief. If we can't try know things, then using the term "knowledge" for those beliefs feels hollow.
As a less skeptical example, suppose I have a clock that says it's 2:00 PM, but unbeknownst to me my clock stopped fifteen minutes ago and the time is inaccurate. It doesn't make any sense for me to say that I know that it's 2:00, given that it is not in fact 2:00, but I can state that I have a reasonable belief since I don't have any evidence that my belief is inaccurate. Now, I also have a reasonable belief that clocks in general can be wrong; if it's absolutely critical that I know what time it is I should therefore make sure I'm not reliant on that clock as my sole source of information. I can discuss all of this under the umbrella of "reasonable belief" without issue, but can't really do the same from a position of knowledge.
Midrya t1_jcccwc8 wrote
Logical sure, but not well-founded. We can absolutely arrive at beliefs which logically follow from more fundamental premises that we hold, but to be well founded we would need to demonstrate that those more fundamental premises are themselves true.
I also don't really think we can offer a solid basis for belief. I can explain to you why I believe what I do, and I could go down all the way to the fundamental premises I hold to be true, but the one thing I cannot do is prove to you that those axiomatic assumptions are "more reasonable" than some other set of axiomatic assumptions, especially if your experiences are not compatible with my axiomatic assumptions.
And the clock thing is more highlighting an issue with the article itself; you claim that a common definition of knowledge is "justified true belief", but there is no evidence provided that such a definition is in fact common. Saying you know it's 2:00 after looking at a clock which says 2:00 but is actually not accurate is only an issue if you require knowledge to be justified and true. Since the entire issue is predicated on the definition of the word knowledge, I feel it would be kind of important to establish that problematic definition is both an accepted and common definition, which a quick polling of dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge would show that they don't really list a definition that if fully compatible with the one you are using. I normally don't like pulling out dictionary definitions in discussions because it feels pedantic in all the wrong ways, but since the entire issue is contingent on the common definition of the word knowledge we need to reasonably establish that the definition being used is the common definition of the word knowledge.
Base_Six OP t1_jccz75h wrote
My central tenet for justified belief is basically this: that the evidence we have (e.g. sensory or memory evidence) is a reasonable basis for belief.
This isn't because I think we can argue that the evidence is true, but because we don't have an alternate basis for logically interacting with the world. Our evidence is singular, and we can either accept it with some degree of doubt or we have no basis whatsoever. If we were to accept a skeptical hypothesis instead, then we would have to logically conclude that we have no evidence of the external world and no means of logically interacting with it. I don't know that my evidence is true or accurate (and in fact have good reason to think that at least some of it is untrue), but it's more reasonable for me to accept it ceteris paribus than it is to reject it.
For definitions of knowledge, I would recommend looking up knowledge in a philosophical source, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. JTB is far from the only definition of knowledge, but it's the core of externalist conceptions of knowledge, which are generally more popular than internalist ones (which have their own issues, such as lack of grounding to reality or the possibility of false knowledge). I stuck with JTB because it's the simplest version and I didn't want to devote 50 pages to different forms of knowledge in this paper.
The clock problem itself comes from Russell's "Human Knowledge" and has been discussed fairly extensively as a proto-Gettier problem, largely as a criticism of JTB.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments