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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 2024
- According to epistemic minimalism, knowledge is mere true belief; no other conditions are required. This video outlines the motivation for epistemic minimalism and discusses some objections.
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0:00 - Introduction
0:38 - What is knowledge?
4:49 - Epistemic minimalism
5:47 - Sartwell cases
12:24 - Why do we care about justification?
16:04 - Objections to Sartwell cases
26:48 - The argument from inquiry
35:41 - Means and ends
38:32 - Justification as an intrinsic value
41:50 - Incoherence?
![[UNCUT] ลูกหมี-ลิลลี่ เหงียน เปิดใจฟาด ปู มัณฑนา I คนดังนั่งเคลียร์ I 15 ก.ค.67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FKQ60Y7bJ6s/mqdefault.jpg)
On Gettier cases: th-cam.com/video/FZmHAuTBGpo/w-d-xo.html
I knew you were going to do a video on this topic-it came to me in a dream 😴
Fantastic video. I appreciated the chemistry example of using an indicator.
Thanks dawg, glad you enjoyed it!
Kane casually baking a fantastic video about theory of knowledge
I feel like, to me at least, the last 4 minutes of the video are a huge chunk of what *actually* matters for this conversation around knowledge.
After all, we came up with the concept of "knowledge" AGES before we actually had even the faintest idea of how to do philosophy formally/rigorously. So we shouldn't thoughtlessly expect that this concept from an era prior to conceptual engineering (hell, prior to *truth tables* ) just *happens* to perfectly cohere.
I've always felt this way about other words, such as "free will", but I didn't actively think about whether knowledge should go into the bin aswell until this video. Thanks bro, it is a useful mental motion.
Why do you draw a line between “truth tables/rigor” and the classical era. Where do you get this gold standard criteria for what is defined as rigorous
@@nkoppa5332 It's not that truth tables are a turning point, quite the contrary. They're pretty conceptually simple of a tool. I'm emphasizing that knowledge as a concept was coined before we had even *that* rudimentary of a tool to work with.
If you were to make an argument that even contemporary philosophers don't meet the gold standard of rigor, I wouldn't agree, but I wouldn't necessarily think the idea is crazy either (IIRC the philpaper surveys, around 20% of contemporary philosophers think philosophy hasn't made any progress in the last 200 years, so it's not a super niche idea). It's less plausible than progress having happened, I think, but nevertheless more plausible than the ancients having lucked themselves into mostly coherent concepts.
Not only you did a good coverage on the subject matter, but you presented it in a pleasurable (and sometimes even funny) way. Really good work!
4' 33" is one of my favorite pieces of music. John Cage is one of my favorite composers. You just keep getting better and better
Fantastic work as usual
Thanks dawg!
idk if sartwell would want to take this line, but maybe if we are successful in showing that natural language knowledge is incoherent, this could be taken to motivate conceptual engineering around the term. so, 1) knowledge as JTB is incoherent, 2) knowledge is a useful concept, 3) TB is close enough to our everyday usage and is coherent so C) we should replace JTB-knowledge with TB-knowledge
Your last point is the one thing that really makes sense in this entire debate. Of course "knowledge" is an incoherent notion. Philosophers, who want to examine it as if it were coherent, in their own technical sense of "coherent", create their own technical sense of "knowledge", and then proceed to talk past each other. One philosopher essentially *defines* his term (knowledge₁) as justified true belief. Another *defines* hers (knowledge₂) as any true belief. A third would single out some other criteria for knowledge₃. Once the debate leaves the solid ground of people's incoherent, but actual, use of this word, it becomes pointless.
If you do examine how people actually use the words "knowledge" and "know" (as well as equivalents in other languages!), some interesting points come up.
First, knowledge does not normally apply to propositions: "I know what I like and I like what I know"; "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio"; "Do you know the way to San Jose?"; "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still, somehow, it's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all"; "Anish Giri has an outstanding knowledge of chess theory"; "Anish Giri knows Russian"...
Secondly, in some cases we might insist on justified true belief, but in others, an unjustified untrue non-belief would do just fine (e.g., when one exclaims "I knew it!" after something bad happens to them).
Last, and by no means least, it would be perfectly appropriate to say of the same person, in the same situation, both that they "know" and that they "don't know" the same thing. Many of those Sartwell examples are of this kind.
Did Pierre de Fermat know that there are no natural numbers a, b, c and n such that a^n+b^n=c^n if n>2? Good question. It appears he was right in making that conjecture. He thought he had a proof, which was almost certainly invalid... Did those 19th-century scientists know that Newtonian mechanics is correct? An even better question. Back in the 19th century, you'd be ridiculed for suggesting otherwise.
Indeed, you may well get different answers to these questions depending on whether you stress the word "know" when asking them.
Also, do I know my comment has gotten way too long?
PS: On Newtonian mechanics, the 19th century physicists, we'd say today, didn't know it was incorrect. Which adds one more interesting factor: "I know", "I knew", "I don't know" and "I didn't know" are all expressions that function in distinct ways, and the distinction is by no means reducible to just logical negation and the two different tences.
Really nice video! On the topic of epistemology, have you made any video on the topic of the nature of (epistemic) _beliefs_? I've learnt a little bit of epistemology, but it always seems to me as though belief is taken to be a ordinary language word that needs no further explanation, which end up leaving me slightly puzzled as to what exactly has been said when for instance defining JTB.
Thanks! No, I don't have any videos on that topic yet, but it's something I've been thinking about addressing.
the intuition-appeal response is so funny to me, because i find Sartwell cases intuitively compelling and Gettier cases intuitively uncompelling. Funny how subjective that is.
Thanks for a sweet argument! Has anyone tried defining knowledge as justified belief that might not be true (possibly with side conditions about not wilfully ignoring counterindications or similar). Because if I was an educated European circa 1400, I would have known the sun went around the earth, it would have been a justified false belief in that context. On the other hand by about 1600, similar beliefs would no longer be knowledge.
Apparently, Hazlett has denied the truth condition in his paper "The Myth of Factive Verbs", though I haven't read that yet (it's freely available online if you're interested). Also relevant might be work from people like Paul Teller, who argues that there is always a trade-off between accuracy and precision so that we never have precise beliefs about the world that are strictly speaking true. In the context of European culture of the 1400s, the belief that the Sun orbited the Earth may have been "true enough"... which is to say, strictly speaking false, but still true enough to count as knowledge. I discuss Teller's work in this video: th-cam.com/video/4l5Y_Vt7Vc8/w-d-xo.html
@@KaneB Many thanks for this really interesting reply.
41:28
Moore
I would side that "justified true belief" is unobtainable and incoherent. Thus, knowledge is just "well justified belief". Good justification is what is important. If there was a game that cost $1 and had a 90% chance of winning $10 - even if I lost the game, it was still justified that I played it.
Just to be clear, you don't think knowledge requires truth? So on your view, I can know propositions that are false, provided I have justification for my belief?
@@KaneB yes. The examples in this video like Newtonian physics would count as knowledge in this definition. They knew Newtonian physics, even though later there turned out to be holes in it.
Define good justification
@@nkoppa5332 the evidence that supports a claim is stronger than any evidence against the claim.
@@InventiveHarvest what about underdetermination of data and paradigmatic interpretations of data? Your view seems to just presuppose whatever the current paradigm is must be good because there are no other standards of justification; so a pragmatism position?
Does anyone argue that truth is not necessary for knowledge? I know you kind of dismissed it at the beginning of the video, but it doesn’t seem so far fetched to me.
Nobody can ever know for certain whether a proposition is true, so there is no practical way of determining the truth of a statement. We would then be forced to conclude that nobody ever knows when they have knowledge. For any person said to know something, someone could always disagree by saying that the belief may not be true.
Knowledge can instead be thought of as a spectrum of justification. The more justified a belief is, the more likely it is to be true. True Knowledge (justifying a belief so much that it is certain) would then be a kind of unattainable ideal (the limit to which a belief’s knowledge value can approach). Inquiry doesn’t establish Knowledge, it increases the justification value of a belief, and the more justified a belief is, the more it can be said to be known.
These are just some quick thoughts, I don’t know how plausible it is. I also don’t know how this would fare against the Gettier cases. Also sorry if my thoughts aren’t clear, I just jotted them down quickly. What does everyone think?
>> Does anyone argue that truth is not necessary for knowledge?
Yeah, me. Haha. Within epistemology specifically, Allan Hazlett argues against the truth condition. There's a philosopher of science I like called Paul Teller who argues that, strictly speaking, nothing is true, but I think he would still be happy to say that we know all sorts of things about the world, so I assume he would reject the truth condition on knowledge as well.
"I don't know how this would fare against the Gettier cases." It wouldn't fare any better I would say. Take the 8 o'clock example but take the fact that the person is correct about it being 8AM out of the equation (since truth is irrelevant). Now you have a person who believes it's 8AM based on the justification that the clock reads 8. Is this a good justification? it is, if truth doesn't matter (if the person has no justification to believe the clock stopped, then they are justified in believing it reads 8AM just as they would be justified in believing it reads 8PM). it is not a good justification if truth does matter after all (if the fact that the clock stopped matters to the quality of the justification, then the person has a subpar justification for believing the clock). The problem is even if you want to say that really high quality justification requires more than one piece of evidence, you'd need to explain on what grounds any evidence or justifications are judged to be good or bad or even inadmissible (i.e. why and when something counts for or against a belief). The measure can't be the truth/the facts of the matter since knowledge is only justified belief. How would we ever judge whether somebody is justified in believing something or in believing that their justification is justified? The issue of unjustified justification introduced by the Gettier cases remains.
Hello TH-cam !
"Knowledge!"
-Tai Lopez
I'm not very partial to epistemic minimalism, as justifications seems indispensable to knowing. The Sartwell cases are not very compelling to me as counterexamples, for some of the very reasons you discussed.
On another issue, it should be noted that the Gettier Cases shouldn't be taken to imply that there is a missing, mistaken, or otherwise incoherent condition in the justified true belief theory of knowledge. Only, that justified true belief is impossible (in empirical domains, at least). There is always a level of luck or arbitrarity involved in scientific or ordinary knowledge claims.
Gettier's claim is that you can have justified true belief without knowledge, and Gettier cases are supposed to be cases where a subject has justified true belief that P, but does not know that P. If we say that justified true belief in empirical domains is outright impossible, this probably does resolve the Gettier problem. But that's not what Gettier, or most of the other epistemologists who appeal to Gettier cases, are driving at. Strictly speaking, this view would entail that there just are no Gettier cases, since the subjects in purported Gettier cases would not have justified true belief. I do agree though that the Gettier problem in itself does not force us to look for some fourth condition beyond JTB.
@@KaneB I think knowledge is mere _justified belief_ - regardless of whether it is true or false.
I have never once in my life thought of knowledge as factive. Is that weird?
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d Hmm, I think it is somewhat wierd. The reason being that a belief's being justified means that it counts as 'pointing towards truth' in some capacity. Justification requires a notion of truth that it is connected with and is attempting to align with.
Take for example a court case where an accused person X is in fact innocent of a crime. However, all the evidence seems to justify that X is guilty. Someone who says that they know X is guilty on the basis of the evidence is in fact wrong. Do they have knowledge in this situation?
@@maxmax9050 I don't really understand what is means to "require a notion of truth". What does it mean to "have" a notion of truth, as opposed to "not have" it? That strikes me as conceptually confused.
I myself am a truth deflationist, so I don't believe "truth" is even a concept. Rather, it's a label that we put on sentences. Saying "What he just said is true" is just a shorthand for repeating what he just said. The label itself has no deeper significance.
To answer your hypothetical: if their belief is actually formed on the basis of the evidence, then yes, it is knowledge.
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d Truth seems to map meaningfully to a concept to me. By truth I just mean aligning with some sort of actuality or fact of things. Propositions are labeled either true or false insofar as they align with something factual.
For instance, if someone is innocent or guilty of a crime. They either killed someone, or they didn't. Couldn't a meaningful concept of truth be applied here?
What is the meaning of "justified" in your case also? Because what would it even mean for some evidence to justify guilt or innocence in the court example if justification really has no connection to truth (an fact of the matter between guilt or innocence)?
Beginning of a reply: th-cam.com/video/4k2vNl-S47I/w-d-xo.html
You would make a fine philosophy teacher - have you embarked on your role at any university?
No, I wasn't able to get an academic career. I did teaching at my uni during my PhD, but the academic job market is brutal.
@@KaneB Oh no, are you still looking to teach/research? I recently discovered your channel, and I really appreciate the way you explain things. Honestly, much better than most of the professors in my master's, even though it's supposed to be a good institution! I'd love to see videos about your phd, and your life and your experience in general with philosophy. You are quickly becoming my intellectual role model 😄
Well with regards to the 8 o'clock example, maybe a person wouldn't be justified in believing that it's 8am, especially if the clock stopped which would be indicated by the second hand remaining stationary, and thus that belief wouldn't count as knowledge under the JTB definition. Maybe it depends on what type of clock a person is looking at. Maybe digital watches and smartphone are the kind that offer justification to our beliefs, but analog watches aren't.
Moreover, isn't the first Sartwell case a circular argument? Or at least it just rests upon mere redefining of the term knowledge, reasserting that definition in the example and falsely equivocating it with other uses of the term "to know"?
Isn't Sartwell conflating knowledge with merely being correct?
Re: earning a million dollars, again I guess there's an equivocation between what it means to earn and what it means to merely acquire.
The Sartwell cases aren't really supposed to be arguments. Instead, they are supposed to elicit intuitions. Sartwell hopes that you will have the intuition that Verity knows the solution, despite the fact that Verity does not have any justification for her belief. The argument will then be that this intuition provides a reason for taking knowledge to be mere true belief. But the intuition and the argument are distinct. You might share Sartwell's intuition, but still reject his argument -- you might think that intuitions are misleading in this case.
I don't think Sartwell can be accused of conflating knowledge with merely being correct, since he explicitly identifies them. His theory just is that knowledge is merely being correct.
Epistemic minimalism is redicules. Plato made this clear long ago. The people are just Lucky guessing. Its Knowledge perception. Its similar but even worse then Gettier cases.
Knowledge without justification is all atheist worldviews
yeah all theist worldviews too
@@KaneB not really
@@Vld45 He’s a Christian presup fyi
@@Vld45 because, some worldviews are not placing their starting point in the mind
@@nkoppa5332 based southern reformed Baptist Calvinist presup Theonomist