Heard of Huemer in DePoe/McNabb’s Debating Religious Epistemology from Gage/McAllister on Phenomenal Conservatism. So ordered Huemer’s self published book on Amazon. Thanks for doing a vid on PC!
Lung cancer is caused by lungs... if there were no lungs to become conditioned by "smoking" then there could be no lung cancer...therefore; smoking is not a sufficient "cause" of "cancer".
Reflecting on the use of an idea to give more access to knowledge than strict definition. Does knowledge also have an emotional component? Like confidence, excitement, or peace? Those emotions change the way we interact with ideas and communicate them. The ideas can become more applicable or usable based on associated feelings. Can you tell that you actually know something without processing a feeling about it?
We don't believe as we do BECAUSE those beliefs are "true." Rather we call our beliefs "true" AFTER we have come to believe them for other reasons. This is why we can focus on those reasons and ignore what you call "truth" and yet still come to the same conclusions we come to now.
The way i see it, it is quite simple: If there is no certainty, then there is no real knowledge. There is just "almost knowledge" justified belief that seems to be true. And yes, we should be trying to understand each other, but it is not easy. I allways try, but sometimes i just cannot understand the line of reasoning of my opponents at all. I am literaly forced to think that they are stupid or dishonest or both. ☹
With the broken clock analogy, you can't determine that it's NOT 3 o'clock based on the fact that the clock is broken. It may very well be the case that 3 o'clock is the time; the important distinction to be made here is that the clock isn't going to help in making that determination.
The proposition that the clock is broken doesn't refute the proposition that it is 3 o'clock, but it stops the observation of the clock from being a justification, hence stopping the understanding that it is 3 o'clock to be knowledge.
Can you believe justification to be internal or external based on differing domains of knowledge? I think empirical beliefs are externally justified, whereas metaphysical beliefs are internally justified.
Why would the existence of my hands be more plausible than the idea that you can't know something without a reason for it? Just because one is abstract and the other is experienced, does not mean that the one that is experienced is more plausible. This is just an assumption you make unconsciously and without defence.
You talk about being patient and understanding and trying to see what others see. However, every theist I have ever encountered is simply dishonest. They lie. They refuse to answer questions. When a theist tells me that I believe something came from nothing, they are making a false statement. When a theist tells me that they cannot understand how I could love my children because I do not believe in their particular version of god, then they are just plain fucking stupid. There is a big difference between the attitude of trying to figure out what is true and the attitude that one has been given the TRUTH and if two plus two is four conflicts with TRUTH, then the truth of two plus two is four must be sacrificed.
I am so far intrigued by this topic as it's been a philosophical hangup that's been plaguing me for some time. I have a recommendation; If you would consider using more jarring audio queues (like the one in the first 10 mins) to help listener only viewers and NeuroD people snap back into the video should our minds wander. Just a small request, thanks for making this video. I would have never known about this subject and never have been able to scratch that incessant itching in my brain about this topic that I'm certain affects a lot of people today. Or so it would seem...
Problem with Moorean arguments is that they suck. And I love Moorean arguments. They sadly don't refute skepticism, they just harrumph it by ignoring it's actual arguments.
"Justification" is a pretty vague word, but it is probably best understood in a practical sense. When we ponder whether we are justified in buying a large-screen TV, we want to look at how much the TV will cost us and how much we will get in return for that price. What enjoyment will the TV give us, and what else might we have spent that money on, and so on. If we determine that buying the TV will most likely make our lives better, then the purchase is justified. In the same way, justifying a belief should entail that holding the belief will likely make our lives better. Of course false beliefs are unlikely to make anyone's lives better, so justifying a belief should include all the usual precautions to determine that the belief has a fair chance of being true, but the bigger problem for justifying beliefs is finding some benefit that the belief will give us to balance against the risks involved. Almost any belief will have some chance of being false, and that opens us up to all the negative consequences of holding a false belief. In return for taking that risk, what can the belief give us? What useful purpose can we achieve with this belief that we could not achieve just as easily without the belief? We can look at a clock and see that it is 3pm, and then go do whatever we had planned at 3pm, all without needing to believe that it is actually 3pm. If we cannot find some purpose for having the belief, then the likelihood of the belief being true is irrelevant. Beliefs seem to be all risk and no reward, like buying a big screen TV and never watching it, or like pounding in a nail at the risk of hitting your thumb when that nail serves no structural purpose. People seem to want beliefs just for the sake of having them, without any plan for how the beliefs will actually benefit them and with no way to eliminate the risks that tend to come with beliefs. The reason that knowledge is impossible is not because we could be wrong about anything we believe, but rather because having beliefs is a bad idea on a practical level. To say, "I know that I have hands," is not just a claim about my hands, but rather it is a claim about me being justified in holding this belief, but that belief is pointless and apparently based on obliviousness to the possibility of being in a dream or a delusion. If such a belief is justified, then let us have one good reason why we should hold it instead of keeping an open mind.
Oh hello again, what a coincidence, and i was thinking i have heard the exact some argument before somewhere. I like that you fleshed it out a little more this time but you still do the same mistake. Believing you have hands is helpful, if you didn't they wouldn't be a tool in your considerations and your problem solving ability in daily life would go way down. It's true that people seek internal consistency and frequently assume things not yet supported by data but that fit well in their, knowledge structure let's say, very well. But that's part of the consequences of having a false belief which you already outlined, not some proof that people want to believe stuff for the sake of believing stuff. They just used the following syllogisms: A -> B A ---------- B or even the heuristic one A -> B B ---------- A more likely
@@kkounal974 : Why do we need to believe we have hands before we can use them? I could be dreaming. My hands could be a figment of my imagination. Since I am aware that my hands might not be real, I choose not to baselessly accept that I truly have hands, but this has never stopped me from performing tasks as if I had hands. I can use dream hands within a dream just as well as I could use real hands, so it seems to make no difference to me. I say that people believe stuff just for the sake of believing stuff not because I can prove that, but rather because I see no other reason for having beliefs. If you have a reason, please explain it.
@@Ansatz66Because you rely on that belief all the time, you don't go jumping off cliffs even if it's transportation wise more efficient sometimes, because you don't believe you have wings. To consciously use your hands you have to believe they are there in the first place, you have to take them into account. Dreams and sleepwalking are weird, because you aren't really conscious but you can't manipulate your hands freely either. You can manipulate them inside your dream because you aren't actually doing that only conjuring images inside your head. You can even enter a state of limited consciousness during NREM sleep and trigger muscle memory sometimes hence things like sleepwalking but again that isn't really relevant to what I'm arguing besides maybe pointing out that there are various levels of consciousness one can exhibit and therefore various levels of manipulation one can be capable of. I guess the edge case here is reflexes, you don't have to believe anything to have reflexes they come pre-packaged along with your body. Still, conscious or not of them you cannot manipulate them. I don't think it goes against my argument that to manipulate something you need to be conscious of it and therefore believe that it exists. It would be a problem if i said that being conscious of something is enough to manipulate it, but I'm merely arguing that it's necessary not always also enough to manipulate it. Why do people have beliefs? Because it's necessary to navigate the world. To perform any kind of action analysis you need some data and some axioms to make sense of the data.
@@kkounal974 : Axioms do not need to be believed. Axioms are reasoning tools and we can use them like tools even if we believe that they are actually false. We can just pretend that they are true for the sake of reasoning, never actually accepting them. We can say, "If axiom A were true, then proposition P would follow," based on our analysis of axiom A, but that is a systematic application of logic that has nothing to do with what we believe. In the same way we can take data from our senses without needing to believe that our senses are reliable. Dream data is just as useful for reasoning as real data.
@@Ansatz66Now we are back to the conversation we had last time, sure we don't need to believe in something to reason about the consequences, but we do rely on specific axioms all the time. We somehow elevate them above any other possible axioms we could have chosen to use, (including adopting the exact opposite propositions as axioms). Dream data is good only for reasoning about the dream. The dream doesn't have to mirror the world.
understanding knowledge is quite the ordeal, but what is even harder to understand is how someone which such based philosophical views can also be a right libertarian, i would love to see him be debated on that subject by Dustin Crummet, i think Crummet can be quite the eloquent and rigorous defender of socialism.
@@EmersonGreen yes i did see and like that debate, but i would rather see a debate that touches on socialism as well, rather than strictly on political authority only, after all the form political authority takes under a socialist system is very different from the standard liberal views. Also his debate with Ben Burgis about taxation was good as well, although Ben fumbled a bit a failed to respond to one of Huemer's mains paints in a satisfactory way in my opinion. The best responses to Huemer's views are one's like Jesse Spafford's views, i recommend you check out his paper "social anarchism and the rejection of private property"
I am more of a socialist myself but I think libertarian views are the most coherent and philosophically developed on the right side of the political spectrum. We tend not to see this because there is so much philosophical development on thr left that we can easyli think we're the "side of thinking" but that is only mostly true
There's a lot to like about CF (I'm still a foundationalist, obviously) but I think CF is too restrictive. Phenomenal conservatism is a lot more permissive, which some people see as a problem, but I tend to agree with the proponents of PC that we're unable to count many ordinary beliefs as rational or justified if we reject PC. CF would incorrectly lead us to think that a number of beliefs that we typically take to be reasonable would actually be unjustified. Again, it seems too restrictive. Additionally, I think the self-defeat argument for PC basically works: All non-PC theories are ultimately self-defeating.
@EmersonGreen do you think that risks begging the question? It appears to me that we should adopt an epistemology based on its success in actually securing justified beliefs (as opposed to permitting us to have whatever common beliefs which we might want). Also, which specific ordinary beliefs do you think that CF disallows? Have you, by any chance, read John DePoe's criticisms of Huemer's self-defeat argument? He argues (correctly to my mind) that Huemer confuses the presence of a seeming when forming a justified belief with depending upon that seeming for justification.
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 Seemings are not justifiers. At least, not automatically so. You can be a foundationalist whose foundation says: _these specific seemings_ (seemings of a certain kind) count as justifiers. I don't accept foundationalism, but at least _that_ worldview is much more "sane" than phenonemal conservatism.
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 As I said, I'm not a foundationalist (I lean towards "Neurath's boat" style coherentism). That's just a problem for all foundationalists: at some level, it's an arbitrary choice of which axioms to go with. Maybe choose the ones which _seem_ to have a good track record in finding truths. Or choose the kinds of seemings you're most "familiar" with, the ones which you rely on in everyday life (which is sort of like the "proper function" account: those seemings which occur under normal conditions for a human). I'm just saying that the axiom "ALL seemings are justifiers" is one of the worst possible foundations to have, from my (outsider) point of view.
Does he say something about Kant and Hegel? If you want to know even further important things I would recommend reading both. The transcendental and dialectical method is essential to have in your repertoire.
Idk. Maybe I have different intuition than you, but to it seems that among the mutually exclusive options, the claim towards knowledge is not necessarily the strongest. That's kindof the point of the argument. Sure, seems obvious or trivial even that if one has to choose between a higher and lower probability claim, one should believe the former. I don't even know what it to simultaneously believe a claim one understands to have a lower probability, while rejecting the one known to have a higher probability. As you pointed out, people's priors can be different. It's possible to rationally disagree. Besides, given a set of reasonably plausible yet mutually exclusive claims, I see no reason to for not reserving judgment. Seem to me that by you've already staked your claim once you've determined which claims are more or less probable. Seems to me that more work is required if one wishes to move from somethings being more plausibly than others to rejecting one and accepting the others.
So for internalism (in the justification sense), a cartesian demon wouldn't be a defeater of the J in JTB, but the T in JTB would nevertheless be defeated... right? If a cartesian demon exists, then my beliefs aren't true, therefore I don't have knowledge, even though I'm justified. I don't know, it just seems like JB is all the matters, or at least it's all that I'm trying to communicate to someone else when I say that "I know" something. Or perhaps I would split it up for first-person knowledge and 3rd person confirmation of knowledge. For first-person knowledge, JB is all that is needed to use the word "know", I mean it's all that we can possibly have. But for me to agree that a 3rd party "knows" something they must have JB + I'm not aware of defeaters for them. I mean, the defeater part is really only relevant from a 3rd person point of view, because if I myself was aware of a defeater to my justification, then I wouldn't have called myself justified to begin with, or at the least I would agree that with this new awareness of a defeater that I wasn't justified in the past. To put it another way, just as you said that "it's enough to know something, you don't have to know that you know something", I likewise think of the T in JTB as an excessive "know that you know" element. Or maybe it just seems to me like "true" is baked into "justified". I'm a square circle if I have a justified false belief, and if a 3rd person has a false belief, I would reveal it is false to them by revealing that I have a defeater to their justification. Is there something I'm missing here about why "justified" implicitly seems to include "true"? P.S. the analog clock joke was 10/10
>a cartesian demon wouldn't be a defeater of the J in JTB No, that would be a defeater. If you find out your belief that P was caused by a deceptive demon, that would defeat your justification for believing P. So you wouldn't have knowledge that P. And while a defeater for your justification exists, you don't know about it in the demon scenario. From your perspective, then, it's still reasonable to believe P. I see what you're getting at in the second paragraph, but when we're analyzing "knowledge", we're trying to take up a 3rd-person point of view. We can just stipulate that P is true, even though we can't do that in reality. I still think that in order to have knowledge, you have to actually be *right* about P. I still think that's the case, even though as you point out, from a first-person perspective we could never really say more than "I think I know P."
@@EmersonGreen I never once in my life thought of knowledge as "factive", i.e. requiring truth. That's just a completely bizarre idea to me. "Justified Belief" seems to be pretty much what I mean when I say "knowledge". With the internalist version of "Justified". "S knows P" = "S was exposed to the experience/information/whatever that justifies P, and formed his belief that P based on that"
I'm reading Iain McGilchrist's 'The Matter with Things'. To paraphrase clumsily, a thing or thingy-ness exists as a mental abstraction (left brain drive to manipulate reality) whereas life/consciousness/reality is a flow of interrelatedness. If you think about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle you're on the right track. So it's no surprise that epistemology runs into various dead ends. Analytical philosophy as a whole has this quality. Everything really IS fuzzy around the edges.
Lets launch an Epistemic Justice & Virtue Epistemology movement in North America together! (England has a fledgeling one... I'm working on North America + China)
@@EmersonGreenWhat philosopher isn't, actually? Isn't epistemology one of the major branches of philosophy? Even if not all philosophers specialize in it, all should've studied its basics, right?
@@Nexus-jg7ev I'm a PHD student who specializes in ethics, I know some epistemology and find it quite interesting, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert in it. Honestly, I've learned some stuff in this video even though I'm a PHD student and I've taught philosophy for 3 years.
Lost me at "moral knowledge". If knowledge is such a loose term that it includes something so legitimately controversial with regards to a truth value then it is too vague. Also if the prelude to respecting disagreement is some demon setting up a solipsistic universe to play a trick then you're burying the lede. Yes, in principle everyone can be reasonable and justified when they hold their beliefs, but not all of these positions are just equally reasonable and justified, including intentionally concocted solipsistic nightmares vs a physical universe. I think we should respect people just to be decent and not to alienate them instead of asserting that everyone is comparably reasonable.
@@pinecone421 knowledge is typically used with regards to something that evaluates to a truth value. When we agree that we "know" something we typically mean that the statement of this knowledge is true. I'm raising the issue of metaethics, whether the term "knowledge" can even apply to morality.
33:20 Mereological maximalists might reject A on the basis that they have some ridiculous number of overlapping hands and the statement could be expanded to be more plausible and more inclusive of people with congenital deformities and people with amputations. So I'll modify it to this for my own purposes. "I know that I have at least one head or that I have at least one hand or that I have at least one foot or that I have at least one belly button." Edit: Oh! Immediately after you showed an even better alternative, "I know that I exist." :D Though since personal identity nihilists may reject the existence of themselves but maybe not reject the existence of thought in general I might amend it to "I know that I exist or that thought exists."
So, at 24:24 I pressed the pause button and opened my Amazon app and bought the book. It should arrive in about a week.
Heard of Huemer in DePoe/McNabb’s Debating Religious Epistemology from Gage/McAllister on Phenomenal Conservatism. So ordered Huemer’s self published book on Amazon. Thanks for doing a vid on PC!
Lung cancer is caused by lungs... if there were no lungs to become conditioned by "smoking" then there could be no lung cancer...therefore; smoking is not a sufficient "cause" of "cancer".
Very much enjoyed this!
Nice to hear Ichika Nito's music get around
Thanks, I really like the music played on this channel and was going to ask what it was.
Good video reminds me of early “philosophize this!” Episodes with the Ichika Nito electric guitar between the different parts of the video
Great stuff as always Emerson. Keep it up.
Reflecting on the use of an idea to give more access to knowledge than strict definition.
Does knowledge also have an emotional component? Like confidence, excitement, or peace? Those emotions change the way we interact with ideas and communicate them. The ideas can become more applicable or usable based on associated feelings. Can you tell that you actually know something without processing a feeling about it?
We don't believe as we do BECAUSE those beliefs are "true." Rather we call our beliefs "true" AFTER we have come to believe them for other reasons. This is why we can focus on those reasons and ignore what you call "truth" and yet still come to the same conclusions we come to now.
The way i see it, it is quite simple: If there is no certainty, then there is no real knowledge. There is just "almost knowledge" justified belief that seems to be true.
And yes, we should be trying to understand each other, but it is not easy. I allways try, but sometimes i just cannot understand the line of reasoning of my opponents at all. I am literaly forced to think that they are stupid or dishonest or both. ☹
for some reason, in this video, any word with the letter S sounded really sharp and loud. Maybe try a de-esser?
With the broken clock analogy, you can't determine that it's NOT 3 o'clock based on the fact that the clock is broken. It may very well be the case that 3 o'clock is the time; the important distinction to be made here is that the clock isn't going to help in making that determination.
The proposition that the clock is broken doesn't refute the proposition that it is 3 o'clock, but it stops the observation of the clock from being a justification, hence stopping the understanding that it is 3 o'clock to be knowledge.
there isnt anything such as "knowledge". we have information and form beliefs.
Can you believe justification to be internal or external based on differing domains of knowledge? I think empirical beliefs are externally justified, whereas metaphysical beliefs are internally justified.
I see an unexpected parallel here with Proudhon of all people, who concluded that there is no criterion for certainty.
Why would the existence of my hands be more plausible than the idea that you can't know something without a reason for it? Just because one is abstract and the other is experienced, does not mean that the one that is experienced is more plausible. This is just an assumption you make unconsciously and without defence.
how many times am I allowed to use my hands to slap you before you're convinced they're real
You talk about being patient and understanding and trying to see what others see. However, every theist I have ever encountered is simply dishonest. They lie. They refuse to answer questions. When a theist tells me that I believe something came from nothing, they are making a false statement. When a theist tells me that they cannot understand how I could love my children because I do not believe in their particular version of god, then they are just plain fucking stupid. There is a big difference between the attitude of trying to figure out what is true and the attitude that one has been given the TRUTH and if two plus two is four conflicts with TRUTH, then the truth of two plus two is four must be sacrificed.
I think to know something one must hold an justified affirming belief in a claim which is demonstrably true
Awesome that you included a Joe Schmidt clip in here :D
They've helped me so much with my own thinking
Let's hangout and play magic the gathering?
He is right particularly about libertarianism.
I am so far intrigued by this topic as it's been a philosophical hangup that's been plaguing me for some time.
I have a recommendation;
If you would consider using more jarring audio queues (like the one in the first 10 mins) to help listener only viewers and NeuroD people snap back into the video should our minds wander.
Just a small request, thanks for making this video. I would have never known about this subject and never have been able to scratch that incessant itching in my brain about this topic that I'm certain affects a lot of people today. Or so it would seem...
Problem with Moorean arguments is that they suck. And I love Moorean arguments. They sadly don't refute skepticism, they just harrumph it by ignoring it's actual arguments.
Fantastic work!
I like the Oppenheimer background :)
But what do you mean "Do"? And what do you mean "you"?
J'aime beaucoup l'idée de commencer par chercher un angle. Quel archétype d'histoire ce mariage raconte t il? Au top!
"Justification" is a pretty vague word, but it is probably best understood in a practical sense. When we ponder whether we are justified in buying a large-screen TV, we want to look at how much the TV will cost us and how much we will get in return for that price. What enjoyment will the TV give us, and what else might we have spent that money on, and so on. If we determine that buying the TV will most likely make our lives better, then the purchase is justified. In the same way, justifying a belief should entail that holding the belief will likely make our lives better.
Of course false beliefs are unlikely to make anyone's lives better, so justifying a belief should include all the usual precautions to determine that the belief has a fair chance of being true, but the bigger problem for justifying beliefs is finding some benefit that the belief will give us to balance against the risks involved. Almost any belief will have some chance of being false, and that opens us up to all the negative consequences of holding a false belief. In return for taking that risk, what can the belief give us? What useful purpose can we achieve with this belief that we could not achieve just as easily without the belief? We can look at a clock and see that it is 3pm, and then go do whatever we had planned at 3pm, all without needing to believe that it is actually 3pm. If we cannot find some purpose for having the belief, then the likelihood of the belief being true is irrelevant.
Beliefs seem to be all risk and no reward, like buying a big screen TV and never watching it, or like pounding in a nail at the risk of hitting your thumb when that nail serves no structural purpose. People seem to want beliefs just for the sake of having them, without any plan for how the beliefs will actually benefit them and with no way to eliminate the risks that tend to come with beliefs. The reason that knowledge is impossible is not because we could be wrong about anything we believe, but rather because having beliefs is a bad idea on a practical level.
To say, "I know that I have hands," is not just a claim about my hands, but rather it is a claim about me being justified in holding this belief, but that belief is pointless and apparently based on obliviousness to the possibility of being in a dream or a delusion. If such a belief is justified, then let us have one good reason why we should hold it instead of keeping an open mind.
Oh hello again, what a coincidence, and i was thinking i have heard the exact some argument before somewhere. I like that you fleshed it out a little more this time but you still do the same mistake.
Believing you have hands is helpful, if you didn't they wouldn't be a tool in your considerations and your problem solving ability in daily life would go way down.
It's true that people seek internal consistency and frequently assume things not yet supported by data but that fit well in their, knowledge structure let's say, very well. But that's part of the consequences of having a false belief which you already outlined, not some proof that people want to believe stuff for the sake of believing stuff. They just used the following syllogisms:
A -> B
A
----------
B
or even the heuristic one
A -> B
B
----------
A more likely
@@kkounal974 : Why do we need to believe we have hands before we can use them? I could be dreaming. My hands could be a figment of my imagination. Since I am aware that my hands might not be real, I choose not to baselessly accept that I truly have hands, but this has never stopped me from performing tasks as if I had hands. I can use dream hands within a dream just as well as I could use real hands, so it seems to make no difference to me.
I say that people believe stuff just for the sake of believing stuff not because I can prove that, but rather because I see no other reason for having beliefs. If you have a reason, please explain it.
@@Ansatz66Because you rely on that belief all the time, you don't go jumping off cliffs even if it's transportation wise more efficient sometimes, because you don't believe you have wings. To consciously use your hands you have to believe they are there in the first place, you have to take them into account.
Dreams and sleepwalking are weird, because you aren't really conscious but you can't manipulate your hands freely either. You can manipulate them inside your dream because you aren't actually doing that only conjuring images inside your head. You can even enter a state of limited consciousness during NREM sleep and trigger muscle memory sometimes hence things like sleepwalking but again that isn't really relevant to what I'm arguing besides maybe pointing out that there are various levels of consciousness one can exhibit and therefore various levels of manipulation one can be capable of.
I guess the edge case here is reflexes, you don't have to believe anything to have reflexes they come pre-packaged along with your body. Still, conscious or not of them you cannot manipulate them. I don't think it goes against my argument that to manipulate something you need to be conscious of it and therefore believe that it exists. It would be a problem if i said that being conscious of something is enough to manipulate it, but I'm merely arguing that it's necessary not always also enough to manipulate it.
Why do people have beliefs? Because it's necessary to navigate the world. To perform any kind of action analysis you need some data and some axioms to make sense of the data.
@@kkounal974 : Axioms do not need to be believed. Axioms are reasoning tools and we can use them like tools even if we believe that they are actually false. We can just pretend that they are true for the sake of reasoning, never actually accepting them. We can say, "If axiom A were true, then proposition P would follow," based on our analysis of axiom A, but that is a systematic application of logic that has nothing to do with what we believe. In the same way we can take data from our senses without needing to believe that our senses are reliable. Dream data is just as useful for reasoning as real data.
@@Ansatz66Now we are back to the conversation we had last time, sure we don't need to believe in something to reason about the consequences, but we do rely on specific axioms all the time. We somehow elevate them above any other possible axioms we could have chosen to use, (including adopting the exact opposite propositions as axioms). Dream data is good only for reasoning about the dream. The dream doesn't have to mirror the world.
I'm skeptical of TH-cam maintaining the soundness of my 2 prior messages, hollar at me for an Epistemology shadow library maintaining friend
understanding knowledge is quite the ordeal, but what is even harder to understand is how someone which such based philosophical views can also be a right libertarian, i would love to see him be debated on that subject by Dustin Crummet, i think Crummet can be quite the eloquent and rigorous defender of socialism.
He did debate someone else on Dustin’s channel on political authority. Very fun debate!
@@EmersonGreen yes i did see and like that debate, but i would rather see a debate that touches on socialism as well, rather than strictly on political authority only, after all the form political authority takes under a socialist system is very different from the standard liberal views.
Also his debate with Ben Burgis about taxation was good as well, although Ben fumbled a bit a failed to respond to one of Huemer's mains paints in a satisfactory way in my opinion.
The best responses to Huemer's views are one's like Jesse Spafford's views, i recommend you check out his paper "social anarchism and the rejection of private property"
@@lolroflmaoization Interesting, will do!
Right libertarianism isn’t as incoherent as you think it is lol
I am more of a socialist myself but I think libertarian views are the most coherent and philosophically developed on the right side of the political spectrum. We tend not to see this because there is so much philosophical development on thr left that we can easyli think we're the "side of thinking" but that is only mostly true
So, my ignorance secures my knowledge. Got it.
Good stuff! 😊👍
Why do you prefer phenomenal conservatism over classical foundationalism?
There's a lot to like about CF (I'm still a foundationalist, obviously) but I think CF is too restrictive. Phenomenal conservatism is a lot more permissive, which some people see as a problem, but I tend to agree with the proponents of PC that we're unable to count many ordinary beliefs as rational or justified if we reject PC. CF would incorrectly lead us to think that a number of beliefs that we typically take to be reasonable would actually be unjustified. Again, it seems too restrictive.
Additionally, I think the self-defeat argument for PC basically works: All non-PC theories are ultimately self-defeating.
@EmersonGreen do you think that risks begging the question? It appears to me that we should adopt an epistemology based on its success in actually securing justified beliefs (as opposed to permitting us to have whatever common beliefs which we might want).
Also, which specific ordinary beliefs do you think that CF disallows?
Have you, by any chance, read John DePoe's criticisms of Huemer's self-defeat argument? He argues (correctly to my mind) that Huemer confuses the presence of a seeming when forming a justified belief with depending upon that seeming for justification.
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 Seemings are not justifiers. At least, not automatically so.
You can be a foundationalist whose foundation says: _these specific seemings_ (seemings of a certain kind) count as justifiers. I don't accept foundationalism, but at least _that_ worldview is much more "sane" than phenonemal conservatism.
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d I would want to know what the relevant difference is between justificatory seemings and other types of seemings.
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 As I said, I'm not a foundationalist (I lean towards "Neurath's boat" style coherentism). That's just a problem for all foundationalists: at some level, it's an arbitrary choice of which axioms to go with. Maybe choose the ones which _seem_ to have a good track record in finding truths. Or choose the kinds of seemings you're most "familiar" with, the ones which you rely on in everyday life (which is sort of like the "proper function" account: those seemings which occur under normal conditions for a human).
I'm just saying that the axiom "ALL seemings are justifiers" is one of the worst possible foundations to have, from my (outsider) point of view.
Does he say something about Kant and Hegel? If you want to know even further important things I would recommend reading both. The transcendental and dialectical method is essential to have in your repertoire.
He does have a chapter about Kant, yeah
@@EmersonGreen what does he say?
where can i get the pdf 😅
There's a kindle version on amazon :)
@@Lukainka umm 🤔, how do you know? just curious:)
@@manavkhatarkar9983 here it is library.bz/uploads/main/645caa815e985e207ac0e0f2f663b20a.pdf
Idk. Maybe I have different intuition than you, but to it seems that among the mutually exclusive options, the claim towards knowledge is not necessarily the strongest. That's kindof the point of the argument. Sure, seems obvious or trivial even that if one has to choose between a higher and lower probability claim, one should believe the former. I don't even know what it to simultaneously believe a claim one understands to have a lower probability, while rejecting the one known to have a higher probability. As you pointed out, people's priors can be different. It's possible to rationally disagree.
Besides, given a set of reasonably plausible yet mutually exclusive claims, I see no reason to for not reserving judgment. Seem to me that by you've already staked your claim once you've determined which claims are more or less probable. Seems to me that more work is required if one wishes to move from somethings being more plausibly than others to rejecting one and accepting the others.
A person is truly dead only if you destroy his belief
So for internalism (in the justification sense), a cartesian demon wouldn't be a defeater of the J in JTB, but the T in JTB would nevertheless be defeated... right? If a cartesian demon exists, then my beliefs aren't true, therefore I don't have knowledge, even though I'm justified.
I don't know, it just seems like JB is all the matters, or at least it's all that I'm trying to communicate to someone else when I say that "I know" something. Or perhaps I would split it up for first-person knowledge and 3rd person confirmation of knowledge. For first-person knowledge, JB is all that is needed to use the word "know", I mean it's all that we can possibly have. But for me to agree that a 3rd party "knows" something they must have JB + I'm not aware of defeaters for them. I mean, the defeater part is really only relevant from a 3rd person point of view, because if I myself was aware of a defeater to my justification, then I wouldn't have called myself justified to begin with, or at the least I would agree that with this new awareness of a defeater that I wasn't justified in the past.
To put it another way, just as you said that "it's enough to know something, you don't have to know that you know something", I likewise think of the T in JTB as an excessive "know that you know" element.
Or maybe it just seems to me like "true" is baked into "justified". I'm a square circle if I have a justified false belief, and if a 3rd person has a false belief, I would reveal it is false to them by revealing that I have a defeater to their justification. Is there something I'm missing here about why "justified" implicitly seems to include "true"?
P.S. the analog clock joke was 10/10
>a cartesian demon wouldn't be a defeater of the J in JTB
No, that would be a defeater. If you find out your belief that P was caused by a deceptive demon, that would defeat your justification for believing P. So you wouldn't have knowledge that P. And while a defeater for your justification exists, you don't know about it in the demon scenario. From your perspective, then, it's still reasonable to believe P.
I see what you're getting at in the second paragraph, but when we're analyzing "knowledge", we're trying to take up a 3rd-person point of view. We can just stipulate that P is true, even though we can't do that in reality. I still think that in order to have knowledge, you have to actually be *right* about P. I still think that's the case, even though as you point out, from a first-person perspective we could never really say more than "I think I know P."
@@EmersonGreen I never once in my life thought of knowledge as "factive", i.e. requiring truth. That's just a completely bizarre idea to me. "Justified Belief" seems to be pretty much what I mean when I say "knowledge". With the internalist version of "Justified".
"S knows P" = "S was exposed to the experience/information/whatever that justifies P, and formed his belief that P based on that"
I'm reading Iain McGilchrist's 'The Matter with Things'. To paraphrase clumsily, a thing or thingy-ness exists as a mental abstraction (left brain drive to manipulate reality) whereas life/consciousness/reality is a flow of interrelatedness. If you think about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle you're on the right track. So it's no surprise that epistemology runs into various dead ends. Analytical philosophy as a whole has this quality. Everything really IS fuzzy around the edges.
Hahaha the Ben Shapiro scuba guy
Lets launch an Epistemic Justice & Virtue Epistemology movement in North America together! (England has a fledgeling one... I'm working on North America + China)
is Michael H an epistemologist?
indeed
@@EmersonGreenWhat philosopher isn't, actually? Isn't epistemology one of the major branches of philosophy? Even if not all philosophers specialize in it, all should've studied its basics, right?
@@Nexus-jg7ev I'm a PHD student who specializes in ethics, I know some epistemology and find it quite interesting, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert in it. Honestly, I've learned some stuff in this video even though I'm a PHD student and I've taught philosophy for 3 years.
Lost me at "moral knowledge". If knowledge is such a loose term that it includes something so legitimately controversial with regards to a truth value then it is too vague. Also if the prelude to respecting disagreement is some demon setting up a solipsistic universe to play a trick then you're burying the lede. Yes, in principle everyone can be reasonable and justified when they hold their beliefs, but not all of these positions are just equally reasonable and justified, including intentionally concocted solipsistic nightmares vs a physical universe. I think we should respect people just to be decent and not to alienate them instead of asserting that everyone is comparably reasonable.
so you believe no human whatsoever has ever had any knowledge of what's moral?
@@pinecone421 knowledge is typically used with regards to something that evaluates to a truth value. When we agree that we "know" something we typically mean that the statement of this knowledge is true. I'm raising the issue of metaethics, whether the term "knowledge" can even apply to morality.
But what is a woman?
Take your confusion to a video commentary where it would be a relevant topic of discussion.
@@donnievance1942 it was a joke and pretty sure a response to a rhetorical question from the video.
33:20 Mereological maximalists might reject A on the basis that they have some ridiculous number of overlapping hands and the statement could be expanded to be more plausible and more inclusive of people with congenital deformities and people with amputations. So I'll modify it to this for my own purposes.
"I know that I have at least one head or that I have at least one hand or that I have at least one foot or that I have at least one belly button."
Edit:
Oh! Immediately after you showed an even better alternative, "I know that I exist." :D Though since personal identity nihilists may reject the existence of themselves but maybe not reject the existence of thought in general I might amend it to
"I know that I exist or that thought exists."