Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Consul
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Consul »

Fcacciola wrote:I've been reading a lot on the so-called JTB account of knowledge (that knowledge is (i) a belief, (ii) which happens to be true and (iii) which we're justified in believing so).
However, I have a really hard time agreeing with the requirement of truth, which seems to be taken for granted over and over.

For instance, I see the Gettier problem as discovering that the connection between knowledge and actual truth is just accidental, and all solutions seems to me that are basically attempting to turn that accidental connection into an intentional one. Causality, Defeasability, Truth-tracking, all these seem to me to reconnect the accidental "P is true" with the "P is Justified".

But, isn't "P is true" the real root of the Gettier (and related) problem?
No, it isn't. Gettier says that the JTB account of knowledge "does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition." ("Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?") He doesn't thereby reject the truth-condition of knowledge. He doesn't say that truth is unnecessary for knowledge. What he says is that there are cases where a belief is both justified and true, and yet isn't knowledge.

"That essential insight is this: in the classical Gettier counter-examples the state of affairs that makes the belief true (or the believed proposition true) – its truthmaker, so to say – is not the state of affairs that has given rise to the justification for the belief. Though normally they would be the same, in these cases they have come apart, and having come apart, the agent has a true belief, which happens also to be justifed, but it seems only a matter of luck that that is so."

(Heathcote, Adrian. "Gettier and the Stopped Clock." Analysis 72/2 (2012): 309–314. p. 309)

-- Updated February 19th, 2017, 3:31 pm to add the following --
Atreyu wrote:I agree with the general proposition Truth should not be a requirement for Knowledge, since we truly know very little. However, once something is known to be false, we can no longer call it "knowledge". Now, it's simply a lie....
What we believe or claim to know can (turn out to) be false, but it doesn't follow that what we really know can (turn out to) be false. False "knowledge" isn't (and hasn't ever been) knowledge but false knowledge-belief.

-- Updated February 19th, 2017, 3:34 pm to add the following --

"If I am to know that there is someone outside the door, then there really must be someone outside the door. Before the belief is entitled to be called 'knowledge', what is believed must be true. If I say 'I know that P' and then find out that P is false, I will withdraw my claim to knowledge: I will say that I thought I knew that P but did not really know it."

(Musgrave, Alan. Common Sense, Science and Scepticism: A Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. p. 2)

-- Updated February 19th, 2017, 3:38 pm to add the following --
Cuthbert wrote:Truth is definitely not sufficient for knowledge. But it does seem to be necessary. Nobody has offered a persuasive example of S knows that p where p is false.
Right you are!

"The dedicated link to truth is part of the essence of knowledge. We speak of 'knowing' falsehoods when we are speaking in a non-literal way (just as we can use a word like 'delicious' sarcastically, describing things that taste awful). Emphasis—in italics or pitch—is one sign of non-literal use. 'That cabbage soup smells delicious, right?' 'I knew I had been picked for the team. But it turned out I wasn't.' This use of 'knows' has been called the 'projected' use: the speaker is projecting herself into a past frame of mind, recalling a moment when it seemed to her that she knew. The emphasis is a clue that the speaker is distancing herself from that frame of mind: she didn't literally or really know (as our emphatic speaker didn't really like the soup). The literal use of 'know' can't mix with falsehood in this way."

(Nagel, Jennifer. Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. pp. 8-9)

-- Updated February 19th, 2017, 3:42 pm to add the following --
Sage4557 wrote:I think "truth" would need to be irrefutably defined so as to not undermine it's existence.
Davidson thought otherwise, and I'm inclined to agree with him:

"For the most part, the concepts philosophers single out for attention, like truth, knowledge, belief, action, cause, the good and the right, are the most elementary concepts we have, concepts without which (I am inclined to say) we would have no concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts that are simpler, clearer, and more basic? We should accept the fact that what makes these concepts so important must also foreclose on the possibility of finding a foundation for them which reaches deeper into bedrock.
We should apply this obvious observation to the concept of truth: we cannot hope to underpin it with something more transparent or easier to grasp. Truth is, as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege maintained, and Alfred Tarski proved, an indefinable concept. This does not mean we can say nothing revealing about it: we can, by relating it to other concepts like belief, desire, cause, and action. Nor does the indefinability of truth imply that the concept is mysterious, ambiguous, or untrustworthy."


(Davidson, Donald. "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth." Journal of Philosophy 93/6 (1996): 263-278. pp. 264-5)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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The way I tend to think of it at this point - all of our knowledge or truth claims happen to be relational, ie. how one object or set of objects interacts with another. We could easily I think find, perhaps many times over, that our assumptions about the more profound and surrounding structures of things are incorrect. That part would not be our fault because the relational data we had held steady over repeated testing, just that contextually we had it flipped around and couldn't have known otherwise. A good and often used example of this is Newtonian worldview giving way to quantum physics; it still works great when we're building bridges and the like but it's not the ultimate stratum.

I think this just means we need deep humility in our assumptions of how ultimate our current understanding of truth is. We can count how many times our beliefs about truth have been overturned and assume that we're in for plenty more of that ride for a while to come.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Fooloso4 wrote:Not truth but the presumption of truth.
But you can presume even false statements to be true. And in those cases you don't have knowledge. So presumption of truth is not enough even for truth, let alone for knowledge.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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If the truth-condition were abandoned. the distinction between knowledge and belief would collapse. A belief can be true as well as false, but there is no such mental state as false knowledge. Of course, there is such a mental state as belief falsely believed to be knowledge.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Papus79 wrote:The way I tend to think of it at this point - all of our knowledge or truth claims happen to be relational, ie. how one object or set of objects interacts with another. We could easily I think find, perhaps many times over, that our assumptions about the more profound and surrounding structures of things are incorrect. That part would not be our fault because the relational data we had held steady over repeated testing, just that contextually we had it flipped around and couldn't have known otherwise. A good and often used example of this is Newtonian worldview giving way to quantum physics; it still works great when we're building bridges and the like but it's not the ultimate stratum..
Indeed. Bohr, the "patron of quantum mechanics" if you'd allow me, went to serious extents explaining precisely that: physics is about models that better and better fit observable reality and match predictions. Is not a realization of any sort of Truth about nature.
The way physics (and all other natural sciences) actually work is quite similar to the way our brains construct useful models of our surroundings from the light that reaches our eyes, just so we can effectively interact with it. Our brain is not really interested in the truth: that is, in a precise and exact representation of everything it sees; instead, it is interested in a practical representation that we can easily manage (and this fallible process is the source of optical illusions).
Papus79 wrote:I think this just means we need deep humility in our assumptions of how ultimate our current understanding of truth is. We can count how many times our beliefs about truth have been overturned and assume that we're in for plenty more of that ride for a while to come.
Indeed. That's why I said that "we do know, just not necessarily the truth"
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Fcacciola »

Consul wrote:
Fcacciola wrote:But, isn't "P is true" the real root of the Gettier (and related) problem?
No, it isn't. Gettier says that the JTB account of knowledge "does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition." He doesn't thereby reject the truth-condition of knowledge. He doesn't say that truth is unnecessary for knowledge. What he says is that there are cases where a belief is both justified and true, and yet isn't knowledge.

"That essential insight is this: in the classical Gettier counter-examples the state of affairs that makes the belief true (or the believed proposition true) – its truthmaker, so to say – is not the state of affairs that has given rise to the justification for the belief. Though normally they would be the same, in these cases they have come apart, and having come apart, the agent has a true belief, which happens also to be justifed, but it seems only a matter of luck that that is so."
I think my question was poorly formulated, and if done right, the answer would be "yes". But let's skip that for the moment....

What we believe or claim to know can (turn out to) be false, but it doesn't follow that what we really know can (turn out to) be false. False "knowledge" isn't (and hasn't ever been) knowledge but false knowledge-belief.
That's one way to define knowledge. But is precisely what I contend.
Surely, we can define what we define however we want to define it, and then you could define knowledge such that only true propositions can be known (and then, it synthetically follows that there cannot be false knowledge).
But, if you do that, then knowledge is restricted to only those propositions whose value of true is logically necessary (and you can pick your preferred taxonomy here: Kant, logical positivism, etc...), but then, "(natural) scientific knowledge" becomes a misnomer, since we cannot "really know" anything in, say, physics for example.

[unless you are actually claiming that we do really know the stuff of, say, physics]

So, instead of restricting the applicability of the adjetive knowledge, I propose (as so many others) to relax the truth requirement.
"If I am to know that there is someone outside the door, then there really must be someone outside the door. Before the belief is entitled to be called 'knowledge', what is believed must be true.
Only if you so choose that requirement. And if you do, then you never ever know there is someone outside the door, so the requirement seems extremely unpractical. (I'm sure I don't need to go over all of the skeptics analysis on the possibility of determining the truth of such an external objetive proposition.. or do I?)
If I say 'I know that P' and then find out that P is false, I will withdraw my claim to knowledge: I will say that I thought I knew that P but did not really know it."
But that's not good enough. That you "later" find P is false doesn't meant P is false "later". It was always false, so, the requirement was never fulfilled to begin with, and you have been wrong all along. In other words, you unequivocally had a false knowledge even if you deny that.
We should apply this obvious observation to the concept of truth: we cannot hope to underpin it with something more transparent or easier to grasp. Truth is, as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege maintained, and Alfred Tarski proved, an indefinable concept.
"Indefinable" is a stretch, but, I agree with the intended idea.
This does not mean we can say nothing revealing about it: we can, by relating it to other concepts like belief, desire, cause, and action. Nor does the indefinability of truth imply that the concept is mysterious, ambiguous, or untrustworthy.


I wonder what the relation to cause and action is supposed to be there, but never mind, surely we can relate the hard concept of truth with other concepts (and not just those four).

But, we're talking about knowledge, not truth. And it is the unnecessary and impractical conflation of these two what I argue against.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:What we believe or claim to know can (turn out to) be false, but it doesn't follow that what we really know can (turn out to) be false. False "knowledge" isn't (and hasn't ever been) knowledge but false knowledge-belief.
That's one way to define knowledge. But is precisely what I contend.
Surely, we can define what we define however we want to define it, and then you could define knowledge such that only true propositions can be known (and then, it synthetically follows that there cannot be false knowledge).
But, if you do that, then knowledge is restricted to only those propositions whose value of true is logically necessary (and you can pick your preferred taxonomy here: Kant, logical positivism, etc...), but then, "(natural) scientific knowledge" becomes a misnomer, since we cannot "really know" anything in, say, physics for example.
There is a logical difference between [](Kp –> p) ("It is necessary that if p is known, then p") and Kp –> []p ("If p is known, then it is necessary that p"). The former doesn't entail the latter, so the truth-condition of knowledge doesn't imply that only necessary truths are known or knowable.
Fcacciola wrote:So, instead of restricting the applicability of the adjetive knowledge, I propose (as so many others) to relax the truth requirement.
Well, we would lose the very concept of knowledge if we did so.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:"If I am to know that there is someone outside the door, then there really must be someone outside the door. Before the belief is entitled to be called 'knowledge', what is believed must be true.
Only if you so choose that requirement. And if you do, then you never ever know there is someone outside the door, so the requirement seems extremely unpractical. (I'm sure I don't need to go over all of the skeptics analysis on the possibility of determining the truth of such an external objetive proposition.. or do I?)
You're confusing truth and justification. To say you cannot ever know that p unless p is true is not to say you cannot ever be justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless p is true. Of course, now the question is whether or not epistemic justification requires infallibility. What you can "relax" is not the truth-condition of knowledge but the infallibility-condition of justification (of beliefs or knowledge-claims).

(A belief or knowledge-claim is infallibly justified iff the justifying evidence e for a proposition p believed or claimed to be known logically entails the truth of p, such that it is logically impossible that e & ~p.)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:If I say 'I know that P' and then find out that P is false, I will withdraw my claim to knowledge: I will say that I thought I knew that P but did not really know it."
But that's not good enough. That you "later" find P is false doesn't meant P is false "later". It was always false, so, the requirement was never fulfilled to begin with, and you have been wrong all along. In other words, you unequivocally had a false knowledge even if you deny that.
No, again, "false knowledge" is really nothing but false belief or false knowledge-belief. You cannot acceptably say "I falsely knew that p" but only "I falsely believed (to know) that p".
Fcacciola wrote:I wonder what the relation to cause and action is supposed to be there, but never mind, surely we can relate the hard concept of truth with other concepts (and not just those four). But, we're talking about knowledge, not truth. And it is the unnecessary and impractical conflation of these two what I argue against.
The truth-condition of knowledge is essential to the very concept of knowledge; it is indispensable and not sensibly dubitable. But what is dubitable and negotiable is the infallibility (or indefeasibility) condition of justification, according to which you're never justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless your evidence for p entails the truth of p, i.e. eliminates the possibility that p is false.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Cuthbert:
But you can presume even false statements to be true. And in those cases you don't have knowledge. So presumption of truth is not enough even for truth, let alone for knowledge.
Where does the concept of knowledge as infallible certainty function in our lives? Our knowledge of the world is what hangs together with and is guided by an extensive collection of things we hold to be true and consider known. Knowledge is the state of the art of our understanding. As our understanding progresses bits and pieces and sometimes large chunks of things we take to be known are rejected. Knowledge is provisional and subject to change. If we are to reserve the term knowledge for what is true rather than what we presume to true then what is known and how is it determined to be true?
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Fooloso4 wrote:Knowledge is provisional and subject to change. If we are to reserve the term knowledge for what is true rather than what we presume to true then what is known and how is it determined to be true?
If you subtract the truth-condition, then knowledge reduces to justified belief. But…

"As closely associated as knowledge and justified belief are, there is a major difference. If I know that something is so, then it is true, whereas I can justifiedly believe something false. If a normally reliable friend tricked me into believing something false, say that he lost my car keys, I could still justifiedly believe he lost them. We must not assume, then, that everything we learn about justified belief applies to knowledge."

(Audi, Robert. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. p. 4)

The truth-condition of knowledge is indispensable in principle because…

"The word has a demand for truth built into its meaning, just as 'vixen' has a demand for female nature built into its meaning."

(Armstrong, D. M. Belief, Truth and Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. p. 138)
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Fcacciola »

Consul wrote:If the truth-condition were abandoned...
The intention of the truth-condition better not be abandoned. But the expectation of it is a different story.
Consul wrote:...the distinction between knowledge and belief would collapse.
As it turns out, most (if not any) distinction is much more of an attribution than something on itself. That is, we make a distinction much more than we find or discover one.

I think the distinction between knowledge and belief is just like any other distinction: attributed, not observed or discovered.

Granted, we want--even need--to distinguish the truth, so in the attribution of knowledge we intend to separate true from false belief, but, at the end of the day, the distinction is just something we make, not something we find. There are of course exceptions, such as certain a-priory syntetic propositions, etc... but specially in the field of empirical propositions, we don't really discover that a belief is true, we just decide it is.

You might argue that we do really discover the truth of propositions if we apply, for example, the scientific method. But that just not the case, and even Science itself never did, nor ever will, claim to produce true propositions, only provisionally usefull models.
Consul wrote:there is no such mental state as false knowledge.
If you mean by that the mental state of certainty, which of course, would never be of uncertainty, then I agree.

But then I can be in a mental state to claim that "I know that am a unicorn", which is false, yet, it is to me, knowledge, except that is actually a mere belief.

This shows precisely what I said before: we mentally, decisively, attribute our beliefs, the ones we decide to be true, as knowledge, yet, that "truth property" is not a real objective property but a subjective and personal attribution.

From the subjective point of view of said attribution, it is indeed correct to say that "what we know is true", but then the property "true" here is nothing but a personal subjective attribution, and not an actual objetive property of the thing that is believed.

On the other hand, we managed to construct methods (such as science, but not just that) to *share* that attribution so is not just personal. That, precisely, is what I refer to as the "certification" process in the "Dependable Certified Belief" account for knowledge that I'm proposing.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

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Fcacciola wrote:Hi people,

I've been reading a lot on the so-called JTB account of knowledge (that knowledge is (i) a belief, (ii) which happens to be true and (iii) which we're justified in believing so).
What do JTB stand for? Is it a household abbreviation that everyone should be familiar with?

JTB... Jewish Tabernacle Brotherhood.
JTB... Jungian Television Broadcasting.

Jetsome Trubadours' Borrows.

Jolly Travesty Belignified.

Jethro Tull's "Benefit".

Jutland's Tropical Bullsh.

Japanese Tomatoes Burst.

Just Till Banlgadesh.

Jeeps Totalled Botswana.

Jehova Trumps Belgrade.

ETC.

Which is it?
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Fcacciola »

Consul wrote:There is a logical difference between [](Kp –> p) ("It is necessary that if p is known, then p") and Kp –> []p ("If p is known, then it is necessary that p"). The former doesn't entail the latter, so the truth-condition of knowledge doesn't imply that only necessary truths are known or knowable.
But it implies that what we know is necessarily true, that's what I meant with logically necessary (the second relation).

So, instead of restricting the applicability of the adjetive knowledge, I propose (as so many others) to relax the truth requirement.

Well, we would lose the very concept of knowledge if we did so.
Not really. What we loose is the conflation between truth and knowledge. It just so happen that you consider truth and knowledge to be one and the same (well, is not just you, I know, since yours is a well known argument with plenty of adherents, but I find it pretty unhelpful)

You're confusing truth and justification.
No I'm not.
But let's notice that the justification for attributing a belief as knowledge better supports the decision that P is true (whether based on semantic substitution, logical inference, discovery, or just stubbornness) . So justification is obviously related to the truth of a belief.
To say you cannot ever know that p unless p is true is not to say you cannot ever be justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless p is true.
Correct. And it is valid to say that what you know is true, if you choose to define knowledge that way (as you do). But I argue that this definition is not very useful, because that "is true" in there is only true to, or rather within, the one holding the knowledge. Is just word-play, and is unrelated to any independent external actual truth, which is what knowledge is supposed to refer to.
Of course, now the question is whether or not epistemic justification requires infallibility.
Unless we restrict to certain areas of synthetic propositions, of course it doesn't. I don't agree that's even a reasonable question.
What you can "relax" is not the truth-condition of knowledge but the infallibility-condition of justification (of beliefs or knowledge-claims).
I can relax both, and I do.
(A belief or knowledge-claim is infallibly justified iff the justifying evidence e for a proposition p believed or claimed to be known logically entails the truth of p, such that it is logically impossible that e & ~p.)
Correct.
On the other hand, actually having such an "e" for "p" is purely idealistic in the area of empirical knowledge. Which is why there are no infallible justifications in (natural) science, and is explicitly inconclusive.


No, again, "false knowledge" is really nothing but false belief or false knowledge-belief.


Notice that, knowledge is a type of belief, so, from the point of view of category theory (or set theory if you prefer), of course any false knowledge is in turn false belief, just like red cats are in turn red animals.

But, why would that relationship imply there cannot be false knowledge?
Well, I'll answer that for you: because knowledge is that what we say is true.
But then I'd respond: then stop doing that, it renders the problem of truth to a silly word game in which "I know I am a unicorn" is perfectly legit knowledge and is, by definition, also true.

OK, you'd say: that's not really knowledge because that is false, and you cannot know what is not true.
But then, I happen to think that a unicorn is a two-legged mammal that builds computers and the internet to discuss about knowledge, so in fact that item of knowledge is, on itself, legit and also true.
Then you say, OK, is just that we need to add the condition of "no false premises" (... here we go back to Gettier]
But then, premises are in turn just knowledge, so, how do we meet the condition of "no false premises (with no false premises (with no false premises (with no false premises(....."?

That's all very logical and valid (I never said it was wrong), but good luck stopping the recursion.
I propose a much more practical view of knowledge, in which is not the same as truth (because in any case it never is, is just the same as what we decide to be true, which isn't The Truth)

(actually, though I am myself proposing all these, I found out, as I mentioned before, that I'm not remotely alone and "Fallabilism" is the name for my views here)
You cannot acceptably say "I falsely knew that p"


Of course I can. That's a perfectly valid expression for the recognition that I thought something was true (so I knew it) but then I knew better (so I had a false knowledge)
but only "I falsely believed (to know) that p".


That's only a better expression (and the only correct one in your opinion) if "we can only know what is true", which, in fact, should be written "what we make it to be true" because what something IS, is outside of our determination (except in the cases of synthetic propositions)

but them again, I argue against that definition of knowledge, so, I'm perfectly fine with "false knowledge".

The truth-condition of knowledge is essential to the very concept of knowledge; it is indispensable and not sensibly dubitable.
According to those, like you, who want that to be essential, indispensable and not sensibly dubitable.
I beg to differ.
But what is dubitable and negotiable is the infallibility (or indefeasibility) condition of justification, according to which you're never justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless your evidence for p entails the truth of p, i.e. eliminates the possibility that p is false.
Effectively, it is valid (I'll say again that I never said this definition was wrong) to state that there is nothing logically wrong with demanding that what we know is always true, and

<<you're never justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless your evidence for p entails the truth of p, i.e. eliminates the possibility that p is false>>

except that this is pure idealism. Outside synthetic propositions, when did anyone, ever, had evidence that eliminated the possibility that p is false?

Suppose you want to show me with actual concrete examples that your view holds, wouldn't you end up stating there is no knowledge in, say physics, or at least, half of it is not knowledge?

(or do you think we do in physics have evidence that eliminates the possibility of p is false for each and every bit of physics regarded as knowledege????)

-- Updated February 23rd, 2017, 1:29 pm to add the following --
-1- wrote:What do JTB stand for? Is it a household abbreviation that everyone should be familiar with?
So sorry.. in the literature is usually spelled just like that, so I forgot to clarify:

JTB stands for "Justified True Belief"

This is a tripartite theory of (or better, account of) knowledge from the time of Plato and considered valid ever since, until Edmund Gettier challenged it formally (though others did the same, from time to time, before him, but not as formally as he did). See the link to the Gettier paper that Consul posted here.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Consul »

Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:If the truth-condition were abandoned...
The intention of the truth-condition better not be abandoned. But the expectation of it is a different story.
Sorry, I can't follow you here.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:...the distinction between knowledge and belief would collapse.
As it turns out, most (if not any) distinction is much more of an attribution than something on itself. That is, we make a distinction much more than we find or discover one.
I think the distinction between knowledge and belief is just like any other distinction: attributed, not observed or discovered.
Granted, we want--even need--to distinguish the truth, so in the attribution of knowledge we intend to separate true from false belief, but, at the end of the day, the distinction is just something we make, not something we find. There are of course exceptions, such as certain a-priory syntetic propositions, etc... but specially in the field of empirical propositions, we don't really discover that a belief is true, we just decide it is.
You might argue that we do really discover the truth of propositions if we apply, for example, the scientific method. But that just not the case, and even Science itself never did, nor ever will, claim to produce true propositions, only provisionally usefull models.
Being a scientific realist, I disagree.

Yes, we make definitions of and (semantic) distinctions between concepts such as <belief> and <knowledge>, and that knowledge is at least true belief is not an empirical discovery like water being H2O.
To empirically "discover that a belief is true" is to discover empirical evidence which confirms its truth and thus justifies the belief. However, the confirmational relationship between evidence E and a belief or a hypothesis H is complicated when the conditional probability of H given E is <1, i.e. when the truth of H is not logically entailed by E, in which case it is possible that E & ~H.

"Confirmation: The relation between evidence and theory in virtue of which the evidence supports the theory. There are three conceptions of confirmation: qualitative confirmation, namely, evidence e confirms or supports hypothesis H; comparative confirmation, namely, evidence e confirms hypothesis H more strongly than it confirms hypothesis H'; and, finally, quantitative confirmation, namely, the degree of confirmation of hypothesis H by evidence e is r, where r is a real number. Current theories of confirmation rely heavily on probabilistic relations between the evidence and the theory."

"Confirmation, absolute vs. relative: A piece of evidence e absolutely confirms some hypothesis H if the probability of H given e (i.e., prob(H/e)) is greater than a fixed number r, where r should be between 1/2 and 1. Accordingly, e is evidence for H only if e is not evidence for the negation of H. This requirement is meant to capture the view that evidence should provide a good reason to believe. Relative confirmation, in contrast, is incremental confirmation: a piece of evidence e confirms some hypothesis H if the probability of H given e (i.e., prob(H/e)) is greater than the probability of H in the absence of e (i.e., prob(H/–e)). Accordingly, relative confirmation is a relation of positive relevance, namely, that a piece of evidence confirms a theory if it increases its probability, no matter by how little."

(Psillos, Stathis. Philosophy of Science A–Z. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. p. 44)

On the basis of the available evidence scientists attribute truth-values or probabilities to propositions, and so they decide whether or not a corresponding belief is justified to such a degree that it may be called knowledge. But the point remains that no matter how high its degree of evidential confirmation or justification is, no belief is knowledge unless it is true. Of course, the only way to find out whether a belief is true and is knowledge is to consult the evidence for it.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:there is no such mental state as false knowledge.
If you mean by that the mental state of certainty, which of course, would never be of uncertainty, then I agree.
If "false knowledge" meant "mistaken certainty", then there would be states of false knowledge; but it doesn't, so there aren't states of false knowledge. A knowledge-belief can be false, but knowledge can't.

The state of knowledge is not the same as the state of (subjective) certainty. Knowledge-claims entail (subjective) certainty. The statement "I (claim to) know that p but I am not certain that p" sounds incoherent, doesn't it? (But there's nothing wrong with saying "I believe that p but I am not certain that p": belief does not entail certainty.)
Fcacciola wrote:But then I can be in a mental state to claim that "I know that am a unicorn", which is false, yet, it is to me, knowledge, except that is actually a mere belief.
When I say "I know that p", it doesn't follow that I really know that p, since it is possible that I falsely believe to know or am mistakenly certain that p.
Fcacciola wrote:This shows precisely what I said before: we mentally, decisively, attribute our beliefs, the ones we decide to be true, as knowledge, yet, that "truth property" is not a real objective property but a subjective and personal attribution.
From the subjective point of view of said attribution, it is indeed correct to say that "what we know is true", but then the property "true" here is nothing but a personal subjective attribution, and not an actual objetive property of the thing that is believed.
On the other hand, we managed to construct methods (such as science, but not just that) to *share* that attribution so is not just personal. That, precisely, is what I refer to as the "certification" process in the "Dependable Certified Belief" account for knowledge that I'm proposing.
Intersubjective methods or criteria for ascertaining or verifying truths are one thing. My point is that truth is not the same as ascertainedness or verifiedness, and that there is a difference between the (inter)subjective attribution of truth to a proposition or a belief and the (objective) possession of truth by it. That is, a proposition's or belief's being true is a matter of objective fact, and it is irreducibly different from its being taken or regarded as true, from its being thought, believed, assumed, or considered to be true. Frege is right:

"Mr B. Erdmann equates truth with general validity, grounding the latter on general certainty regarding the object judged, and this in turn on general consensus amongst those judging. And so, in the end, truth is reduced to being taken to be true by individuals. In opposition to this, I can only say: being true is different from being taken to be true, be it by one, be it by many, be it by all, and is in no way reducible to it. It is not contradiction that something is true that is universally held to be false."
(pp. xv-xvi)

"Can the sense of the word 'true' be subjected to a more damaging corruption than by the attempt to incorporate a relation to the judging subject!"
(p. xvi)

(Frege, Gottlob. Basic Laws of Arithmetics, Vol. 1. 1893. In Basic Laws of Arithmetics, Vols. 1&2, translated and edited by Philip A. Ebert and Marcus Rosenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Cuthbert »

Fooloso4 wrote:Cuthbert:
But you can presume even false statements to be true. And in those cases you don't have knowledge. So presumption of truth is not enough even for truth, let alone for knowledge.
Where does the concept of knowledge as infallible certainty function in our lives? Our knowledge of the world is what hangs together with and is guided by an extensive collection of things we hold to be true and consider known. Knowledge is the state of the art of our understanding. As our understanding progresses bits and pieces and sometimes large chunks of things we take to be known are rejected. Knowledge is provisional and subject to change. If we are to reserve the term knowledge for what is true rather than what we presume to true then what is known and how is it determined to be true?
See Consul's post #22 for the answer to that. Knowledge entails truth, because 'Jim knows it's ten o'clock' and 'It's half past nine' entails a contradiction. However justification does not entail infallibility - Jim consulted his watch and his watch is ok, but watches sometimes are wrong.
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Re: Is "Truth" really a valid requirement for Knowledge?

Post by Consul »

Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:There is a logical difference between [](Kp –> p) ("It is necessary that if p is known, then p") and Kp –> []p ("If p is known, then it is necessary that p"). The former doesn't entail the latter, so the truth-condition of knowledge doesn't imply that only necessary truths are known or knowable.
But it implies that what we know is necessarily true, that's what I meant with logically necessary (the second relation).
No, the truth-condition of knowledge does not imply that what we know is necessarily true. There is knowledge of non-necessary/contingent truths.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:Well, we would lose the very concept of knowledge if we did so.
Not really. What we loose is the conflation between truth and knowledge. It just so happen that you consider truth and knowledge to be one and the same (well, is not just you, I know, since yours is a well known argument with plenty of adherents, but I find it pretty unhelpful)
No, I do not "consider truth and knowledge to be one and the same," because they are not. To say that a proposition's being known entails or includes its being true is not to say that its being known is the same as its being true. The concept of an unknown or even unknowable truth is perfectly consistent. A proposition can be true without being known, but it cannot be known without being true.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:You're confusing truth and justification.
No I'm not. But let's notice that the justification for attributing a belief as knowledge better supports the decision that P is true (whether based on semantic substitution, logical inference, discovery, or just stubbornness) . So justification is obviously related to the truth of a belief.
Being justified in believing that p doesn't depend on p's being true. You can be justified (by virtue of your evidence) in believing a false proposition.

"The distinction between the things I am justified in believing and the things I am not justified in believing need not coincide with the distinction between those of my beliefs that are true and those of my beliefs that are false. In other words, it is quite possible that some of the things I am not justified in believing are true. Possibly my senses are deceiving me, but even if they are, I am not justified in believing they are not. And obviously, many of the things I am not justified in believing are true. I cannot now say, of course, which of my justified beliefs are false. Perhaps there was a time when people were justified in believing the false proposition that all swans are white. This means that they were not justified in believing the true proposition that some swans are not white.

We may say, of the relation between epistemic justification and truth, what John Maynard Keynes said about the relation between probability and truth: 'there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability. That a scientific investigation pursued on account of its probability will generally lead to truth, rather than falsehood, is at best only probable.' [A Treatise on Probability, 1952, p. 322]

Yet there is a positive relation between the epistemically justified and the true. For one thing, I am justified in believing a given proposition, if and only if, I am justified in believing that that proposition is true. There is still another point about the relation between epistemic justification and truth, but this point is somewhat more difficult to formulate. For the present, we may put it by saying that, if I want to believe what is true and not to believe what is false, then the most reasonable thing for me to do is to believe what is justified and not to believe what is not justified."


(Chisholm, Roderick M. The Foundations of Knowing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. pp. 3-4)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:To say you cannot ever know that p unless p is true is not to say you cannot ever be justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless p is true.
Correct. And it is valid to say that what you know is true, if you choose to define knowledge that way (as you do). But I argue that this definition is not very useful, because that "is true" in there is only true to, or rather within, the one holding the knowledge. Is just word-play, and is unrelated to any independent external actual truth, which is what knowledge is supposed to refer to.
?—(Propositional) Knowledge is knowledge of truths (true propositions/statements), and "a true statement is a statement that is true to the facts." (Donald Davidson, "True to the Facts", 1969) So knowledge is always related to and grounded in reality.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:Of course, now the question is whether or not epistemic justification requires infallibility.
Unless we restrict to certain areas of synthetic propositions, of course it doesn't. I don't agree that's even a reasonable question.
It is, especially as it is not easy to understand how fallibly justified true belief could really be knowledge. There is an intuitively plausible sense of "to know" in which knowledge excludes possible error.

"If you are a contented fallibilist, I implore you to be honest, be naive, hear it afresh. 'He knows, yet he has not eliminated all possibilities of error.' Even if you've numbed your ears, doesn't this overt, explicit fallibilism still sound wrong?"

(Lewis, David. "Elusive Knowledge." 1996. Reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 418-445. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp. 419-20)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:What you can "relax" is not the truth-condition of knowledge but the infallibility-condition of justification (of beliefs or knowledge-claims).
I can relax both, and I do.
Isn't it bleeding obvious that you can't know what ain't so?

"'S knows that p only if p is true' gives a non-optional condition for knowledge: it is totally eccentric to say that though p is false still N knows that p."

(Nathan, N. M. L. The Price of Doubt. London: Routledge, 2001. p. 17)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:(A belief or knowledge-claim is infallibly justified iff the justifying evidence e for a proposition p believed or claimed to be known logically entails the truth of p, such that it is logically impossible that e & ~p.)
Correct. On the other hand, actually having such an "e" for "p" is purely idealistic in the area of empirical knowledge. Which is why there are no infallible justifications in (natural) science, and is explicitly inconclusive.
From the point of view of infallibilism (I'm not saying it's my point of view), this means that there is no scientific knowledge. However, it seems absurd to deny the existence of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the concept of fallible knowledge is very problematic.

"We know a lot. I know what food penguins eat. I know that phones used to ring, but nowadays squeal, when someone calls up. I know that Essendon won the 1993 Grand Final. I know that here is a hand, and here is another.

We have all sorts of everyday knowledge, and we have it in abundance. To doubt that would be absurd. At any rate, to doubt it in any serious and lasting way would be absurd; and even philosophical and temporary doubt, under the influence of argument, is more than a little peculiar. It is a Moorean fact that we know a lot. It is one of those things that we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary.

Besides knowing a lot that is everyday and trite, I myself think that we know a lot that is interesting and esoteric and controversial. We know a lot about things unseen: tiny particles and pervasive fields, not to mention one another's underwear. Sometimes we even know what an author meant by his writings. But on these questions, let us agree to disagree peacefully with the champions of 'post-knowledgeism'. The most trite and ordinary parts of our knowledge will be problem enough.

For no sooner do we engage in epistemology – the systematic philosophical examination of knowledge – than we meet a compelling argument that we know next to nothing. The sceptical argument is nothing new or fancy. It is just this: it seems as if knowledge must be by definition infallible. If you claim that S knows that P, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-P, it certainly seems as if you have granted that S does not after all know that P. To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory.

Blind Freddy can see where this will lead. Let your paranoid fantasies rip – CIA plots, hallucinogens in the tap water, conspiracies to deceive, old Nick himself – and soon you find that uneliminated possibilities of error are everywhere. Those possibilities of error are far-fetched, of course, but possibilities all the same. They bite into even our most everyday knowledge. We never have infallible knowledge.

Never – well, hardly ever. Some say we have infallible knowledge of a few simple, axiomatic necessary truths; and of our own present experience. They say that I simply cannot be wrong that a part of a part of something is itself a part of that thing; or that it seems to me now (as I sit here at the keyboard) exactly as if I am hearing clicking noises on top of a steady whirring. Some say so. Others deny it. No matter; let it be granted, at least for the sake of the argument. It is not nearly enough. If we have only that much infallible knowledge, yet knowledge is by definition infallible, then we have very little knowledge indeed – not the abundant everyday knowledge we thought we had. That is still absurd.

So we know a lot; knowledge must be infallible; yet we have fallible knowledge or none (or next to none). We are caught between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism. Both are mad!"


(Lewis, David. "Elusive Knowledge." 1996. Reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 418-445. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp. 418-19)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:No, again, "false knowledge" is really nothing but false belief or false knowledge-belief.
Notice that, knowledge is a type of belief, so, from the point of view of category theory (or set theory if you prefer), of course any false knowledge is in turn false belief, just like red cats are in turn red animals.

But, why would that relationship imply there cannot be false knowledge?
Well, I'll answer that for you: because knowledge is that what we say is true.
But then I'd respond: then stop doing that, it renders the problem of truth to a silly word game in which "I know I am a unicorn" is perfectly legit knowledge and is, by definition, also true.

OK, you'd say: that's not really knowledge because that is false, and you cannot know what is not true.
But then, I happen to think that a unicorn is a two-legged mammal that builds computers and the internet to discuss about knowledge, so in fact that item of knowledge is, on itself, legit and also true.
Then you say, OK, is just that we need to add the condition of "no false premises" (... here we go back to Gettier]
But then, premises are in turn just knowledge, so, how do we meet the condition of "no false premises (with no false premises (with no false premises (with no false premises(....."?

That's all very logical and valid (I never said it was wrong), but good luck stopping the recursion.
I propose a much more practical view of knowledge, in which is not the same as truth (because in any case it never is, is just the same as what we decide to be true, which isn't The Truth)
* Again, no one is saying that knowledge is the same as truth. That's a misinterpretation of the axiom if p is known then p (is true).

* There cannot be false knowledge simply because it would be false true belief, and no belief can be both false and true.

* It is not the case that "knowledge is that what we say is true," since there is a clear difference between being true and being said to be true.
Fcacciola wrote:(actually, though I am myself proposing all these, I found out, as I mentioned before, that I'm not remotely alone and "Fallabilism" is the name for my views here)
Note that fallibilism keeps the truth-condition of knowledge!

"S knows P iff
(a) S believes P,
(b) S's belief in P is fallibly justified,
(c) P is true,
(d) (b) ensures that (a)-and-(c) are not jointly an accident.

In a nutshell, propositional knowledge consists in believing true propositions on the basis of fallible evidence which ensures that one has not accidentally believed the truth."


(Sturgeon, Scott. "Knowledge." In Philosophy: A Guide through the Subject, edited by A. C. Grayling, 10-26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. p. 17)

"The fallbilist view is that one can know the truth of a proposition on the basis of grounds that do not necessitate its truth."

"The slogan 'If you know p, then you can't be wrong' has been taken to raise particular problems for fallibilism (Austin, 1961). However, this slogan is susceptible to multiple interpretations. If we interpret it as 'Necessarily, if one knows that p, then p is true', then it simply states that knowledge requires truth, which fallibilism does not deny [my emph.]. If we interpret it as asserting that when one knows that p there is a tight causal, nomological, or counterfactual connection between one's belief state and the truth, then fallibilism need not deny it. If we interpret it as asserting that whenever one knows that p there must be something about one's belief state that entails or necessitates the truth of one's belief, then of course fallibilism denies it. But, so interpreted, the slogan is hardly a truism."

"Fallibilism licenses one to assert 'I know that p' when one's epistemic position regarding p does not entail or necessitate p's truth."


("Fallibilism." In A Companion to Epistemology, edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup, 2nd ed., 370-375. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. p. 372)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:You cannot acceptably say "I falsely knew that p"
Of course I can. That's a perfectly valid expression for the recognition that I thought something was true (so I knew it) but then I knew better (so I had a false knowledge)
If it's "a perfectly valid expression," why doesn't anybody use it? Well, because it's not!
The expressions "I falsely thought/believed that…" and "I was falsely/wrongly certain that…" are perfectly acceptable, but "I falsely knew that…" surely isn't.
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:…but only "I falsely believed (to know) that p".
That's only a better expression (and the only correct one in your opinion) if "we can only know what is true", which, in fact, should be written "what we make it to be true" because what something IS, is outside of our determination (except in the cases of synthetic propositions) but them again, I argue against that definition of knowledge, so, I'm perfectly fine with "false knowledge".
You shouldn't be, because any definition of "knowledge" which doesn't include the truth-condition is inadequate. For it just doesn't make any logico-rational sense to utter statements of the form "Kxp & ~p" ("x knows that p and it is not the case that p").

"It is clear that knowledge is a sub-class of true beliefs: every case of knowledge is a case of true belief, but not vice versa."

(Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. 1948. Reprint, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. p. 139)
Fcacciola wrote:
Consul wrote:But what is dubitable and negotiable is the infallibility (or indefeasibility) condition of justification, according to which you're never justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless your evidence for p entails the truth of p, i.e. eliminates the possibility that p is false.
Effectively, it is valid (I'll say again that I never said this definition was wrong) to state that there is nothing logically wrong with demanding that what we know is always true, and

<<you're never justified in believing or claiming to know that p unless your evidence for p entails the truth of p, i.e. eliminates the possibility that p is false>>

except that this is pure idealism. Outside synthetic propositions, when did anyone, ever, had evidence that eliminated the possibility that p is false?

Suppose you want to show me with actual concrete examples that your view holds, wouldn't you end up stating there is no knowledge in, say physics, or at least, half of it is not knowledge?

(or do you think we do in physics have evidence that eliminates the possibility of p is false for each and every bit of physics regarded as knowledege????)
Note that I've been defending the truth-condition rather than then infallibility-condition, and that to reject the latter is not necessarily to reject the former!

Strictly speaking, infallibilism means skepticism or nihilism about scientific knowledge (outside logic and mathematics), which consequence is hardly palatable indeed.

Speaking of "relaxing" the truth-condition, I just happened to recall Ilkka Niiniluoto's (he's Finnish) "strongly fallibilistic" theory that substitutes a weaker truthlikeness-condition for the truth-condition (the latter of which is affirmed by "weak fallibilism"). However, the very concept of truthlikeness is pretty problematic.

"According to the classical definition of propositional knowledge,

(1) X knows that h iff
(a) X believes that h
(b) h is true
(c) X has justification for h.

An infallibilist interprets condition (c) in the strong sense where justification implies certainty:

(c1) X is certain that h.

Here (c1) not only says that X is subjectively certain, or fully convinced, that h, but that in some objective sense X is absolutely certain about the truth of h, i.e. X is in a situation where he cannot be wrong about h.
……
The weak fallibilist thus retains conditions (a) and (b), but replaces (c1) by something like

(c2) h is more probable or more acceptable than its rivals on the available evidence.
……
While the weak fallibilist retains the condition (1)(b), or at least allows that many uncertain conjectures are in fact true or at least possibly true (.), a strong fallibilist recognizes that even the best claims of science are normally inexact, approximate, or idealized, i.e. they are not true in a strict sense. Therefore, (b) should be replaced by a condition that requires h to be truthlike or approximately true (.). Then the first condition can also be changed, since the strong fallibilist does not believe that even his best hypotheses are strictly true. Thus, the strong fallibilist suggests that the classical definition (1) is replaced by

(2) X knows that h iff
(a') X believes that h is truthlike
(b') h is truthlike
(c') X has reason to claim that h is more truthlike than its rivals on available evidence.

Condition (c') guarantees here that X cannot at the same time know two mutually contradictory hypotheses.
……
To summarize, realism in epistemology should employ the fallibilist conceptions of probable, conjectural, and truthlike knowledge—and thereby avoid the Scylla of infallibilism and the Charybdis of scepticism."


(Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 80-85)

-- Updated February 24th, 2017, 10:57 am to add the following --

"In its two main variants, fallibilism claims that scientific theories are either uncertain-but-probably-true or false-but-truthlike hypotheses."

(Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 13)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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