What is your epistemology?

[Tiberius]

I'm not sure what you'd call my epistemology. I believe knowledge is anything that you can prove through logical reasoning, which is basically only 3 things: Law of Identity, Law of Excluded Middle, Law of Non-contradiction. These are the self-evident truths of logic; anything else is based on assumption somewhere down the line.

Hence my position of extreme agnosticism; I reject that knowledge exists in the sense that we can ever actually "know" anything further than logical absolutes. Truth exists in some absolute form; knowing the truth is impossible...maybe

[theVOID]

What is knowledge? If you ignore it, it can kill you.

What?

How do we gain knowledge? Observation.

So you posit that the only way we can know something is to observe it?

How do we know what we know?

Doesn't this question ask for an uninformative tautology? We know what we know because we know it.

No, it means 'given something that is known to be true, how did we arrive at the position where we believe this to be true?'

I think a better wording is, 'How do we know something?'

Arguably the same question as, 'How do we gain knowledge?'

How do we know something would be along the lines of the TJB, knowledge is something that is true and is believed in most epistemologies, but not all. It is important to distinguish what we consider knowledge to be, can you be said to 'know' the result of a rubgy match by correctly guessing the outcome? If not then what else must we have in order to consider something knowledge?

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I'm not sure what you'd call my epistemology. I believe knowledge is anything that you can prove through logical reasoning, which is basically only 3 things: Law of Identity, Law of Excluded Middle, Law of Non-contradiction. These are the self-evident truths of logic; anything else is based on assumption somewhere down the line.

Hence my position of extreme agnosticism; I reject that knowledge exists in the sense that we can ever actually "know" anything further than logical absolutes. Truth exists in some absolute form; knowing the truth is impossible...maybe

That sure is extreme agnosticism, but it seems wildly impractical.

For instance, i know that when i press the "k" key on my keyboard the corresponding character will result, I don't have to be able to prove this logically, there is nothing necessitating that the "k" character will appear, the key could be jammed, the software in the keyboard could be send the wrong signal to the CPU etc, however I am confident in my knowledge of the result of pressing "k" because it is based on a reliable methodology that tends towards the truth.

I am therefore justified in claiming knowledge of the result of pressing "k". Absolute certainty is a triviality in this instance, because i cannot be absolutely certain that one of the two defects described above will not occur, however due to the reliability of the process resulting in "k" appearing on the screen I believe it is justified knowledge.

There is an objection of some merit to this type of explanation, known as the bootstrapping problem, however it seem to be mere semantics and does nothing for knowledge in a practical sense.

Anyhow,just as a matter of curiosity, how do you consider the logical absolutes knowable? (This may shed some light on your epistemology)

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Yep that's the one Tack

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.

I don't believe you can completely eliminate false beliefs. Through constant input, selectivity of attention and priority processing we just focus more on the things we do believe instead of those we don't.

Yes, but the fact that we believe something does not mean that it is true or that we know it to be true.

I mean have you ever been somewhere.. utterly despise it and go back years later.. and feel a strange sense of comfort or familiarity? It's sort of like that.

I know the feeling, like the secluded holiday home that used to bore me to death when i was younger, but i don't see how this has anything to do with knowledge.

What I meant with including the internalist slant on constructivism is more of a Descarte's perspective.

Could you go a little more in-depth?

It's a very cautious approach to trusting the inputs we receive and ingesting them, while wholly recognizing the necessity for the subjectivity of the senses.

So you believe roughly that If we believe P and P is true, we have an introspective ability to justify our beliefs? How so?

While I gamble I probably have a more relaxed view of the division of conscious and subconscious than you I think we can agree that the more something passes through the thalamus the more it has an affect on our views of reality.

I don't see how any of this related to our ability to know, it could play a part in the strengthening of our beliefs for sure, but i wouldn't consider the strength of my beliefs to be a justification for believing them, regardless of whether or not they happen to be true.

[lrh9]

What is knowledge? If you ignore it, it can kill you.

What?

I was alluding to a saying that reality is that which if you ignore it kills you. Knowledge is a model of reality.

How do we gain knowledge? Observation.

So you posit that the only way we can know something is to observe it?

In a nutshell. Basically all information about reality enters our mind through our nerves. If we sometimes extrapolate models from this information... then before it becomes knowledge it must be confirmed by further observation of reality.

How do we know what we know?

Doesn't this question ask for an uninformative tautology? We know what we know because we know it.

No, it means 'given something that is known to be true, how did we arrive at the position where we believe this to be true?'

'If we have x, why do we believe we have x?'

Processes are deterministic or experimental. If a process by which we acquire knowledge is deterministic then it guarantees that we have acquired knowledge. If the process is experimental then we must have a control group to measure the result against.

Can you be said to 'know' the result of a rubgy match by correctly guessing the outcome? If not then what else must we have in order to consider something knowledge?

Is validity knowledge or is certainty knowledge?

[ib.me.ub]

Direct realism is close enough I suppose. But it is probably a mixture of many.

[Tiberius]

That sure is extreme agnosticism, but it seems wildly impractical.

Forgive me, it was late when I wrote the post, and I didn't explain myself well enough.

When I say I believe it is impossible to know something, the reasoning is more based on whether you can know what you "know" is true. The way I define knowledge is in the absolute sense; i.e. knowledge has to be true in reality. For an objective observer of our reality (one who knows everything), if they see me stating something as truth, say "X is purple", and they know (through their omniscience) that X is indeed purple, then my statement is one of knowledge.

The problem occurs when a subjective observer (i.e me) tries to rationalise that knowledge. From my perspective, I do not know that what I claim is true. I could have very good reasons for believing that X is purple, but no way (other than gaining omniscience) of confirming it.

Taking your keyboard pressing example; you say that you "know" that pressing the k key on the keyboard will result in it appearing on the screen, or at least result in something (say, the key moving down under the force of your finger). One objection to this as "knowledge" would be that at the point of the action, you are unable to say whether you have actually pressed the key, or whether you are simply under a delusion that you have. Relative to yourself (your memories, consciousness, etc) you know that you have pressed the key, but relative to the rest of reality, you have no solid basis of making this declaration of knowledge.

I've brought Last Thursdayism up a few times before when discussing knowledge, and I feel it is very important. Due to Last Thursdayism being inherently unfalsifiable, I see it as one of the best arguments for showing that whilst knowledge may exist, and whilst we may be able to attain it, we cannot ever be certain that what we have attained is knowledge (truth). As I stated before, this is *only* in the most absolute way of viewing things; it does not work for relative knowledge, or what you may call your own personal knowledge. However you cannot make the claim that your own personal knowledge is "truth"; only relative truth.

So when you say "I am therefore justified in claiming knowledge of the result of pressing 'k'", you would be correct if talking in a relative sense, where knowledge need not be "true", but merely your own interpretation of truth. If you take things into absolute terms, then you are justified only in claiming belief in the result of pressing 'k'.

I hope that clears some things up. I do not think it is impractical to believe one has limits though, and the way we both go about life is probably similar; the only difference is that when you claim something as "knowledge", I claim it as "belief" (or "relative knowledge").

As for logical absolutes, they are self evident truths; our basis for understanding everything is logic, and without any of the three laws, logic falls apart. They are true in the sense that if one of them were to be removed, logic would eliminate everything.

[Paul the Human]

I'm not impressively knowledgeable in the area of philosophy (nor a particularly big fan of it in the first place), but I have read about the subject pretty extensively (note that reading and retaining are not the same thing). It has always seemed to me that (much like political ideologies), no single philosophy really works if taken entirely on it's own. Rather, each individual philosophy provides workable ways to perceive, interpret, and comprehend things and it feels perfectly natural to mix and match them as an individual... therefore not claiming to adhere to any specific one.

In other words, in every philosophy I have ever read about, there are things that I agree with and things that I do not (but might agree with a different philosophy's take, instead).

That said, I like this Reliablism. I don't recall hearing of it before.

[Existentialist]

If knowledge is that which can be proved, I know nothing. In the final analysis I cannot even prove that I am who I think I am. There are enough popular movies around like Dark City, the Matrix, the Thirteenth Floor exploring the slippery notion of proof of your own identity for us to say "I might not even be a real person. How would I know? I've got no way of finding that out." And if my personal identity is not subject to proof, how would I ever know that my personal experience of logic is valid? Maybe 2 plus 2 don't equal 4. Maybe that's just a program that's been inserted into my logic circuits to make me believe they do.

[theVOID]

Forgive me, it was late when I wrote the post, and I didn't explain myself well enough.

When I say I believe it is impossible to know something, the reasoning is more based on whether you can know what you "know" is true. The way I define knowledge is in the absolute sense; i.e. knowledge has to be true in reality. For an objective observer of our reality (one who knows everything), if they see me stating something as truth, say "X is purple", and they know (through their omniscience) that X is indeed purple, then my statement is one of knowledge.

Seems you are falling into your own gripe with non-standard definitions In philosophy knowledge is a true justified belief - That being, I can be said to "know" P if P and I am justified in believing that P.

There are essentially two definitions of knowledge, Priori such as the logical absolutes and posteriori knowledge such as that gained through certain experience - the epistemologies deal with Posteriori knowledge and basically seek to find standards that are consistent enough to form TJB - Reliablism then is an epistemology dealing mostly with justification, as belief needs to be both true and justified to be considered knowledge, it is important to approach justification with a method that is most likely to tend towards the truth while being least likely to permit contradictory conclusions and other such misnomers.

The problem occurs when a subjective observer (i.e me) tries to rationalise that knowledge. From my perspective, I do not know that what I claim is true. I could have very good reasons for believing that X is purple, but no way (other than gaining omniscience) of confirming it.

To a degree of absolute certainty that is true, however having a TJB requires no such certainty. Would you say that you cannot 'know' the effects of gravity? It seems ridiculous to put acceptance of something like Gravity down to a probability... The probability of an object falling towards the most prevalent gravitational object provided that there is no competing force (such as magnetism if the object is metallic) is 1 - This leaves no room for doubt and is "knowledge".

* From this point on i agree with you if we declare knowledge and absolute certainty to be mutually exclusive - However, I don't agree that they are mutually exclusive, certain things can be known with a degree of certainty that is absolute, however there is also knowledge that simply requires TJB*

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I'm not impressively knowledgeable in the area of philosophy (nor a particularly big fan of it in the first place), but I have read about the subject pretty extensively (note that reading and retaining are not the same thing). It has always seemed to me that (much like political ideologies), no single philosophy really works if taken entirely on it's own. Rather, each individual philosophy provides workable ways to perceive, interpret, and comprehend things and it feels perfectly natural to mix and match them as an individual... therefore not claiming to adhere to any specific one.

In other words, in every philosophy I have ever read about, there are things that I agree with and things that I do not (but might agree with a different philosophy's take, instead).

That said, I like this Reliablism. I don't recall hearing of it before.

That is somewhat true, however there are many epistemologies that are flawed and therefore cannot be true - The main point of contention in each comes with the idea of justification, it seems that some justifications have inherent flaws that make them false when applied to certain situations, traditional reliabilism (process reliabilism) too has this problem in the case of the bootstrapping problem, though the mixture of Mentalism and Reliablism proposed by Juan Comesana as far as I can tell has solved this problem.

The problem with the idea you proposed, that they are all equally valid in some way simply is not true, any justification that can allow certain things like contradictions and conclusions on absurd propositions (such as the new evil demon problem) simply cannot be seen as accurate, they are in a sense falsifiable - the hard part is determining what ones fail in this regard.

[Tiberius]

Actually theVOID, it is you who is confusing things here. Plato said knowledge was "true justified belief", however there is debate over whether this is enough of a description. Indeed, there are examples where Plato's knowledge is called into question. See Gettier problem.

In philosophy knowledge is a true justified belief - That being, I can be said to "know" P if P and I am justified in believing that P.

Actually, no. You have the belief, you have the justification, but you miss out "true" for some reason. You can only be said to "know" P if you are justified in believing in P, and P is true. I have no quarrels with the justification of some beliefs; I do have problems with whether we can "know" these things as true.

To a degree of absolute certainty that is true, however having a TJB requires no such certainty.

No, but it does require "truth". You seem to be making the very common mistake of missing that part out. Having the justified belief be "true" is very important, as without it, you could make claims of knowledge that are simply not true, even if they are perfectly justified.

Perhaps you thought that the "true" in TJB meant "honest"? If so, look over it again. Wikipedia has some helpful pages on it.

From Justified true belief:

Justified true belief is one definition of knowledge that states for someone to have knowledge of something, it must be true, it must be believed to be true, and the belief must be justified. In more formal terms, a subject S knows that a proposition P is true if, and only if:

- P is true
- S believes that P is true, and
- S is justified in believing that P is true

The justified true belief theory of knowledge suffered a significant setback with the discovery of Gettier problems, situations in which the above conditions were met but that many philosophers disagree that anything is known. Robert Nozick suggested a clarification of "justification" which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false.

Would you say that you cannot 'know' the effects of gravity? It seems ridiculous to put acceptance of something like Gravity down to a probability... The probability of an object falling towards the most prevalent gravitational object provided that there is no competing force (such as magnetism if the object is metallic) is 1 - This leaves no room for doubt and is "knowledge".

It may seem ridiculous to you, but as far as I am concerned, in an absolute sense, we cannot know that "gravity" exists. It doesn't matter how likely something is of being true; if there is an alternative explanation, however bizarre or unsettling that might be, we cannot say that "gravity is known truth". Whether through the Last Thursday example, or through delusions of our own minds, I believe it is impossible to "know" these things in any absolute way. As such, they remain very justified beliefs, but beliefs nonetheless.

[theVOID]

Actually theVOID, it is you who is confusing things here. Plato said knowledge was "true justified belief", however there is debate over whether this is enough of a description. Indeed, there are examples where Plato's knowledge is called into question. See Gettier problem.

The Gettier problem is circumstantial and only find flaws in certain types of Justification, Reliablism and Mentalism are two proposed solutions to this problem - their definitions of justification solve the Gettier problem.

In fact there are several solutions to the Gettier Problem, which is not a be-all-and-end-all, but merely an obstacle for some epistemic justifications.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Soluti...1074000876

In philosophy knowledge is a true justified belief - That being, I can be said to "know" P if P and I am justified in believing that P.

Actually, no. You have the belief, you have the justification, but you miss out "true" for some reason. You can only be said to "know" P if you are justified in believing in P, and P is true. I have no quarrels with the justification of some beliefs; I do have problems with whether we can "know" these things as true.

Refer to the underline/bold/italic - That is your "If P is true"

I have already states my case for the relative insignificance of the Gettier problem, if you want to continue this debate then i'm keen,

To a degree of absolute certainty that is true, however having a TJB requires no such certainty.

No, but it does require "truth". You seem to be making the very common mistake of missing that part out. Having the justified belief be "true" is very important, as without it, you could make claims of knowledge that are simply not true, even if they are perfectly justified.

I did not miss it out at all, you simply didn't read or didn't understand correctly. See above.

Perhaps you thought that the "true" in TJB meant "honest"? If so, look over it again. Wikipedia has some helpful pages on it.

No, and for the same reasons as above. P being true is of the utmost importance and i did not once neglect that - This is your error, not mine.

The justified true belief theory of knowledge suffered a significant setback with the discovery of Gettier problems, situations in which the above conditions were met but that many philosophers disagree that anything is known. Robert Nozick suggested a clarification of "justification" which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false.

Yeah, that is all true, i have no objections to it, nor does it impede reliablism or mentalism.

It may seem ridiculous to you, but as far as I am concerned, in an absolute sense, we cannot know that "gravity" exists.

Now you're just being a solopsist. You think we could be brains in a Vat too? What about a computer sim?

Your insistence in equating absolute certainty with knowledge leads you to such stupid and wildly impractical conclusions.

It doesn't matter how likely something is of being true; if there is an alternative explanation, however bizarre or unsettling that might be, we cannot say that "gravity is known truth".

I was speaking of the effects of gravity, they could be angels pulling shit down, but given the description of the circumstance it would still be true. The justification would not be true however, where as the explanation offered by general relativity would be justified in many senses, especially when reliabilism is used as epistemic justification.

Whether through the Last Thursday example, or through delusions of our own minds, I believe it is impossible to "know" these things in any absolute way. As such, they remain very justified beliefs, but beliefs nonetheless.

In that sense it would be impossible to know any past events to be known to be true regardless of whether or not they were in fact true, you can take this position all you like but this makes it impossible for you to be consistent on any matters of historical fact.

Again the problem is how you are using "knowledge" It does not follow that because of the Gettier problem you are incapable of knowing anything other than what is logically necessary, especially considering Gettier himself only thought it valid in certain thought experiments given certain epistemic justifications and not as an overarching problem, as you are (ab)using it.