Philosophy: How Do you Know You are Reading This?

[Nita]

What is the difference between knowing, knowing certainly, and thinking something is true?

What assumptions are we making about how we know things and how can we push those back, to discover that those are actual rational conclusions based on a prior (or deeper) set of assumptions?

We have to make some assumptions in order to function, but how do we know we are actually functioning? That we know anything?

Are you sure you really want to know?

Nita

 

[Ani_Ibi]

lavalamp:

Define your terms! … we need to have… a common understanding of what it is to know (and to believe and to know you know), how we know, what assumptions are reasonable to make to turn virtual certainties into certainties etc.

OK. I’ll get us started with an appeal to authority (By the way, be careful what you ask for. Bwa-ha-ha! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!):

Philosophy: Science and Faith #7

D-oh! :doh2: The authority is me! How postmodern of me! Someone call the pomo police! No, please don’t call the pomo police – I’ll be good! (As some of you will have by now concluded, Ani by her own admission has gone radically looney-toons – that happened on one of Truthstalker’s previous philosophy threads.)

lavalamp:

I would analyze it this way: I have a model of the world that translates… certain things I see into letters and certain letters I see into words and certain words I see in to parse-able statements/questions and statements into relationships between concepts that can be tested against/ support or weaken the model I have for the way the world works.

Truthstalker will be very annoyed with me for asking this – because he does not like General Semantics – but: is the map the territory? (Korzybski)

Let me see if I can find something on the internet on the KK Principle.

In its simplest form, the KK principle says that, for any proposition p, if one knows that p, then one knows that one knows it.

Uh-oh! Williamson was responding to Kuhn who said:

For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained…not… determined by, logical processes. The… choice between paradigms involves setting two or more “portraits" against the world and deciding which likeness is most promising. In the case of a general acceptance of one paradigm or another, Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists. Acceptance or rejection of some paradigm is, he argued, more a social than a logical process.

Williamson, Knowability and the Modal Closure Principle
deRose on Williamson: Knowledge and its Limits

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Though he’s perhaps best known for his work on vagueness :hypno:] … Williamson’s approach is that he does not take knowledge to be something to be analyzed… but something to be used in the elucidation of other concepts… Thus, Williamson argues impressively for important knowledge-based accounts of evidence, evidential probability, and assertion: one’s total evidence is just one’s total knowledge…

Uh-oh! (See Ani run)

Knowing, Williamson admits, is not a transparent [or luminous] state: In many imaginable cases, and even in many actual cases, subjects are not in a position to know whether they know something. For instance, Williamson points out, victims of elaborate deceptions fail to know various things, though they’re in no position to know that they don’t know them…

See Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Doesn’t one have to be in a position to know what one’s evidence is, in order for it to really function as evidence?

So, if we are not being deceived, then we can know things. Alrighty then. Which hurries us right along to: Mr Magoo’s critique of KK.

lavalamp:

I [am] very certain as to the general direction of your inquiry

How can you be certain? Please define certainty? Thank you.

lavalamp:

hence this post.

What post?

OK, I’ll chill. :blushing: Further to knowledge: from where did you get your model of the world? From first assumptions? Or from observations? By what means can each be known with certainty?

Pragmatics: is it necessary to know something with certainty? Or can we just make good gambles as to what works satisfactorily?

Lord Kelvin by the way said of knowledge: to measure is to know. How can we measure what works satisfactorily?

 

[Mirdath]

Does it really matter, as long as I think I am?

Nope.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Truthstalker:

What is the difference between knowing, knowing certainly, and thinking something is true?

What’s in it for me if I tell you? :bounce:

Truthstalker:

What assumptions are we making about how we know things and how can we push those back, to discover that those are actual rational conclusions based on a prior (or deeper) set of assumptions?

Are you trying to lure us into discussing non-A, that is deductive reasoning? Note: I said non-A, not null-A.

Truthstalker:

We have to make some assumptions in order to function, but how do we know we are actually functioning?

Well, in a contemporary world we have separated being from language. Language is not being but ‘a being’ in its own right. The map is not the territory, the map being language and the territory being ‘being.’

:hypno:

Because of this separation, we have to make some assumptions in order to function.

Was primitive woman chained to assumptions for her existence? Or did she simply participate in the ‘beingness’ of the world in order to function?

Those folks who whirl around doing ballroom dancing: are they making assumptions? Is the kind of knowledge which they deploy in the world sapientia (wisdom), scientia (knowledge of how things happen), or techne (skill)? I say it is techne, or skill.

Perhaps primitive woman had no need for sapientia or scientia because her techne (skill) for participating in the ‘beingness’ of the world was not fallen, not broken.

 

[Semper_Fi_1]

Why do need to know? I am.

I am can answer almost all philosophical questions.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Does it really matter, as long as I think I am?Nope.

Good question. I like it. Can we agree that ‘mattering’ is about ‘the good’?

Is it for ‘the good’ to be certain that one knows anything?

Or is the requirement for certainty some kind of morbid perfectionsim?

Uncle Herbivore says that perfectionism is the enemy of ‘the good.’

So we are left with maybe it is for ‘the good’ to only think that one knows anything.

And we are also left with maybe it is for the ‘good’ to have not the slightest clue whether or not one knows anything. (Witness the huge contributions -]lunatics/-] … er… -]idiotsavants/-] … er… geniuses like myself have made to society without having a clue whether or not I know anything.)

In spite of my own example which may be unique in this world, is it for ‘the good’ for the rest of you to be satisfied with a world which deems uncertainty to be satisfactory? I don’t think so.

:dts:

So between the extremes of morbid perfectionism and rampant nonchalance, is there a moderate balance which is for ‘the good’? I say yes. :yup:

But I don’t know where that moderate balance lies. :crying:

Does anyone else know where that moderate balance lies?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

mikeledes:

Since we’re getting all philosophical and stuff, I have a question. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

first1Myr.wav :tiphat:

 

[mikeledes]

Okay, some of you need to get a grip. Yeah, I’m talkin to you Ani Ibi.

If we keep on discussing this we’ll end up going crazy. :hypno: It’s bad enough that we’re Catholic.

God bless,
Michael

 

[Ani_Ibi]

mikeledes:

If we keep on discussing this we’ll end up going crazy. :hypno:

I’m already crazy. I think it was Truthstalker’s Null-A thread that sent me over the edge. But it could have been the Prove You Exist thread.

mikeledes:

It’s bad enough that we’re Catholic.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Are you sure you are reading this? How do you know? Do you know? Are you sure what you are reading is what wrote?

I’m sure enough for practical purposes. I don’t believe absolute certainty is possible - a high degree of probability will do for all everyday matters: because the universe is a cluster of probabilities, so, in saying that probabilities are sufficient, one is not living in a universe in which a life based on probabilities is ill adapted to the universe.​

So you are a cluster of probabilities, as is your question, & my perceiving it, & my thinking I do. I can’t even be absolutely sure that your question is written in English, & is about philosophy: but the probabilities, taken together, give a high degree of practical certainty.

This is why sin is problematic - it obscures the nature of the universe, including its nature as something to know about. It introduces confusion, where before there was lack of absoluteness; where there was contingency.

In defence of linguistic analysis (to which an OP referred early in the thread) - that was a Scholastic concern, so there is ample precedent for it in Catholic philosophy. Philosophy is very important - especially if it looks laughably like worrying at the obvious like a dog with a bone. That’s what’s so refreshing about Wittgenstein - he asks questions about obvious things; & the obvious things are often the things that are taken for granted. If more people thought about what is meant by place (as the successors of Plato & Aristotle did), identity, & value, the Church might be in much healthier state

 

[Truthstalker]

So between the extremes of morbid perfectionism and rampant nonchalance, is there a moderate balance which is for ‘the good’? I say yes. :yup:

But I don’t know where that moderate balance lies. :crying:

Does anyone else know where that moderate balance lies?

Presuppositions galore without observations. And assertions without warrant. And what is “the good” (I feel a thread coming on!)?

You “know” something about the nature of certainty? Certainly?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Truthstalker:

Presuppositions galore without observations.

Deductive, in other words?

Truthstalker:

And assertions without warrant.

You have to be more specific than this, otherwise your assertion comes off as unwarranted. (You know using the link button and the quote button helps other posters to follow a train of thought.)

Truthstalker:

And what is “the good” (I feel a thread coming on!)?

Speaking of deductive, I believe it is a Platonic concept. The Republic, I believe.

Truthstalker:

You “know” something about the nature of certainty?

Not today thank you.

 

[Truthstalker]

You have to be more specific than this, otherwise your assertion comes off as unwarranted. (You know using the link button and the quote button helps other posters to follow a train of thought.)

yep

Later. Gotta go discontinue the continuum and dequantify the quanta.