Just curious.
ToodlesKnowledge is justified true belief?
No
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_pro鈥?/a>
If Smith has a justified belief that Jones will get the job after the interview, and Jones has 10 cents in his pocket, then Smith has a justified belief that a man with 10 cents in his pocket will get the job. As it turns out, Smith gets the job, and he just happens to have 10 cents in his pocket. So his justified belief is also true. But coincidence is not knowledge.
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You don't go from ad populum arguments, and lack of proof to the conclusion: knowledge IS TJB. Should I add false authority to the list? The epistemological world changed after the Gettier paper, but there's no knock-down program for tracking justification. And since ';justification'; is the only interesting part of knowledge, and we can't ever get it right, because there's always instances of knowledge outside the justification parameters... we either have to say 1) justification requires conditions beyond our ability or 2) knowledge doesn't reduce to TJB, because justification is not analyzable. And if (1) then we have skepticism as an outcome. And if (2) then what IS knowledge such that it is analyzable?
Hint: contextual ';knowledge'; is not knowledge.Knowledge is justified true belief?
KNowledge is different from belief. Thats why the saying, ';seeing is believing'; is a false statement.
Belief (believing) means you don't have the knowledge or have seen something, but somebody told you that you can trust, and you believe him. Like religion for example, we believe what is taught by our parents about God, but we do not have direct knowledge, but we believe because we trust our parents.
Knowledge means you yourself have seen the fact or have personal encounter with something. For example, you have seen your neighbor stealing the bicycle of your other neighbor, then you have the knowledge and you do not have to believe. If you tell it to your friend, your friend believes (belief) in you but he does not have the knowledge about the stealing.
Get it?
Just for the fun of it, I'll argue against.
The problem with ';justified'; belief is that people can justify almost anything, and when we wander into the realm of belief we are usually dealing with assertions which can neither be proven nor be disproven. Most people seem to deal with that by trying to construct proofs anyway; see all the silly ';proofs'; of God's existence or non-existence that float around.
One could try to substitute ';well-justified'; but that would simply reduce the field to matters which are really subject to proof, and very little of what is true really falls in that category. The insertion of the word ';true'; simply begs the question; it offers no basis for deciding whether it applies, other than one's opinions or beliefs, so it introduces circularity.
';Knowledge'; is a comprehension, understanding, or familiarity. Its basis is experience. Unfortunately, too much knowledge can often lead to a failure to appreciate the limits to one's degrees of certainty. A beginner may consider possibilities that more experienced people fail to recognize.
Those who claim that they have ';knowledge'; tend to try to extend that claim to possession of absolute truth, and they tend to wind up, eventually, being wrong. (Long before then, they tend to wind up being annoying.)
That assetion has been around so long that it has practically become the definition. That's sort of the way meanings of words work. Today, most people mean something pretty similar to that when they talk about knowledge. David Lewis and a few others disagree, but Lewis' system ends up reducing to everything that's true being knowledge, so it doesn't really make sense. It's one of his two worst arguments, in my opinion. (His analysis of the grandfather paradox is the other.)
Most of the debate today is over what justifies a true belief enough to make it knowledge. That's a much harder question. I would tend to argue that knowledge is vague, and different degrees of justification lead to different degrees of knowledge. Peter van Inwagin is one of the chief champions of vagueness in general. I don't know about this area specifically.
Edit: Bong C,
I don't always respond to other people's answers, but when you wrote me the following e-mail:
';your comment is non-sense. See my explaination on knowledge and belief';
I felt that justified a response, even though this is not among my better answers.
There is nothing inherently wrong with your definition of belief, but it is not the way it is typically used. That is a way it is used, but not the most common. By belief, we typically mean something someone thinks is true, regardless of why they think it. Some beliefs are reasoned and some are taken on faith. Using ';I believe'; as a modifier before a sentence certainly indicates that your belief is something less than knowledge, but this isn't a necessary relationship. Most statements of fact are said to assert beliefs without using the word ';believe';.
In fact, your example of the expression ';seeing is believing'; supports this argument. Whether it is a technically true statement, it is evidence of how the term ';belief'; is used in language, and thus evidence of it's meaning.
When a belief is reasoned, the belief is stronger, and if there is sufficient reason, we think we know the subject of the belief to be true. However, most think that to be knowledge, it is not enough that we think we know something, it must also be true.
All three prongs, true, reasoned, and belief are subject to debate. Your view of belief is certainly not unheard of as a challenge to the most widely accepted theory. I would argue that usage has evolved partly in response to the pervasiveness of the idea that knowledge is a true reasoned belief. Your challenge may have been stronger at some point in the past, though I'm not sure. Today, it is pretty widely (but not universally) accepted that belief is anything that one asserts is true, regardless of the reasons.
There are plenty of challenges to the truth aspect as well, and I've discussed my view on what truth is in other threads. It's too involved to get into here.
Most challenges center on what justified means. There is tremendous debate about that and I offered a possible answer based partially on the work of van Inwagin, but I offer no real defense of that theory, I present it just as an idea to be debated.
Brief response to -.-:
Most solutions to the Gettier Problem, and other challenges, reduce to arguing about what type of justification is required for knowledge. Solutions that don't work that way usually have serious troubles.
Of course it's always possible that there is no notion of knowledge which is both internally consistent and also captures the meaning to which we have assigned it, but I'm not ready to claim that based on the debate I've read so far.
Copernicus and Galileo ';knew'; that heliocentricity was correct. The mathematical epistomolgy of astronomy could not be wrong, given the knowledge available. [Which is to say, new knowledge someday may change our concept of heliocentricity to something else; HOWEVER, the epistemology used, given the facts available, led them to ';knowledge.';]
Such knowledge as this is not a belief of any sort. If it was a belief, Galileo would have to have told the Church Court that perhaps they were right, and he was wrong, because a belief is a belief.
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