Atheism, agnosticism and theism 2: What it is to have a belief 16 Jul 201122 Jun 2018 Previous posts in this series: One. We talk a lot about believing this or that, and about faith and the content of faith, but we are often a little bit vague on what that actually entails and why. Philosophers, however, have a range of senses of “belief”, often shared by psychologists and artificial life researchers. For my purposes, I shall call a belief a conceptual stance. In other words, a belief is a concept (something that can be expressed as a sentence in some well-ordered language) towards which the believer holds some doxastic attitude (that is, accepts or rejects, defends or attacks, justifies or defeats). Shorn of the technical language, a belief is a sentence in your head that you think is true or false or something like that. So a belief is a three-place predicate: any belief B is believed by a believer A, and has content C. In philosophy we call the content the intension of the belief. We can symbolise this as BA(C). Note that every belief has to be held by a believer. Beliefs do not float around unanchored in the world. This means that when we talk about “theism”, for example, we must restrict what we are talking about to an actual group of people, unless we are exploring a semantic possibility not as yet held by anyone. At some time, there was no monotheism, so it was at best a logical possibility only. Then somebody asserted it (Socrates?) and it became a belief held by actual believers. This will become important when we ask what options we are holding our own doxastic attitudes or stances towards. What a belief consists in is open to dispute. In the classic Belief, Truth and Knowledge by David Armstrong, he identifies several accounts, including the conscious occurrence view of Hume, the dispositional view of Ryle, among others. He settles, as do I, for a view sometimes called representationalism but which he describes as Frank Ramsey’s view as beliefs are maps by which we steer. I think we can be representationists in this sense even if we also think to have a belief is to have a disposition to act in a particular way (by, for example, giving assent when presented with an idea), so representationalism is more general than the particular story one tells about what goes on in heads and actions. But the map metaphor can be somewhat misleading. It suggests that our representation is “similar” pictorially to the way the world is as it is being believed. Instead, I would rather use what I call the graph theory of belief. A belief is a coordinate in a graph, a location in a space set up by the contrasts and issues of a certain time and place and group of interlocutors. Let me give an example. Suppose I say that we have to choose between capitalism (open markets) and communism (closed and centrally controlled markets). That sets up the contrast. If I choose capitalism, which is to say I think capitalism is the best economic system, my belief in effect locates itself at that end of the spectrum: Now that spectrum is a one-dimensional graph, and it can either be discrete (two choices only) or continuous (some proportional mix of control versus free markets. These are the contrasts offered in a discourse. For this reason, this is sometimes also called contrastivism. A contrastivist thinks that any question only makes sense in terms of the contrast space in which it is posed, and that it presupposes a contrast (a notion in linguistics called presuppositionalism). Now suppose I map that belief against another contrast, say whether society should be democratic or authoritarian: You can see that there is now a field of possible coordinates/beliefs that a believer may hold. If each axis is discrete one might end up with a simple table of choices: However, if the field is continuous, the choices are harder to identify and label, and may end up as clusters rather than exact separate views. And that’s with only two contrasts. Typically such conceptual topics with have many contrasts, leading to an n-space, in which the number of axes/contrasts are higher than we can display simply as a graph. I mentally picture a graphic equaliser on a sound system, where each contrast is a distinct range that we can vary independently of the others. The “coordinate” or belief here is the shape of the “envelope”. If that doesn’t help you, consult your local mathematician. A joke I heard told of Paul Erdos, but which probably was not originally about him, was when a mathematician was asked how to visualise a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. “That’s easy,” he replied. “I just visualise a cube, and then I add a dimension.” This explains why mathematicians are never invited to philosophy conferences. So a semantic space is the “territory” in which beliefs are “located”. It can be a rather complex domain, but in this series I shall restrict myself to three dimensions, because I am constitutionally incapable of adding that extra dimension, and because it happens we only need three right now. We might, for example, visualise the question of theism as a sequence of discrete integers, giving the number of deities from zero [atheism] to infinity. Obviously on that contrast, atheism and monotheism are most closely related than monotheism is, say, to Hinduism. That won’t do, so there must be more in play, but it illustrates the technique. With this apparatus in play one more point needs to be made now. It is this: knowledge is a species of belief. Philosophers agree on very little but one thing there is (almost?) universal agreement on, it is this: knowledge is some kind of belief. Of course what kind is highly debated. Most agree that knowledge needs to be true belief. We can then get into a debate about what truth is, but not now. Another oft-made claim is that the believer, in order to say they know something, must be justified in believing it. It’s not enough to luck onto a belief that happens to be true; you also need reasons. However, this is still not enough, and epistemologists argue at length why and how to fix it. I shan’t because it doesn’t matter for our purposes. I will therefore use the following symbolism: If A knows that P, then the claim A makes is KA(P). Roughly, “I, A, know that my belief P is true”. We can substitute quite complex formulae for P, and will later. I’m going to use a simple version of symbolic logic known as QL, or quantified logic. Those who do not know this, or find it off-putting, can “bleep” over it and read the ordinary language translation I will put alongside it. It’s there so the professionals can see what I am doing (and disagree with me). So, next we will consider one of these contrast spaces: claims of knowledge regarding gods. The next post in this series: Three Epistemology Metaphysics Philosophy Religion
Religion The Church’s abuse of Irish children 23 May 2009 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RplWGisGoXY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1] That’s one country. How about all the others? I have heard so many stories… Read More
Epistemology What is philosophy? 13 Sep 201122 Jun 2018 “Were all men philosophers, the business of life could not be executed, and neither society, nor even the species, could long exist.” William Smellie, 1791 From time to time, scientists with whom I engage (I know a lot of scientists, they being my study organisms) ask me what philosophy is…. Read More
Good content here. Although I don’t really dabble in the systematic dissecting of what belief and faith actually are, there are some good things to take away here: 1) like the fact that monotheism has a beginning, though arguably only in it’s theoretical construct and praxis, and not actually it’s substance (for God existed before a human could think about Him in a monotheistic way). 2) You break down knowledge well (following Plato and others) – belief, justification, and truth. Especially that if you “luck onto belief…that happens to be true,” that isn’t enough. Although I stay away from the political labels, you did well with yours. Carry on! – Kile
A joke I heard told of Paul Erdos, but which probably was not originally about him, was when a mathematician was asked how to visualise a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. “That’s easy,” he replied. “I just visualise a cube, and then I add a dimension.” Yes, that sounds about right. I’m saying that as a mathematician. Visualizing an infinite dimensional Hilbert space is a bit more tricky, but we don’t let that stop us. With this apparatus in play one more point needs to be made now. It is this: knowledge is a species of belief. Philosophers agree on very little but one thing there is (almost?) universal agreement on, it is this: knowledge is some kind of belief. And that is where I see philosophy as going completely off-track. Let me put it this way. Going back to an earlier time, say when I was in high school, I had a belief “Jesus rose from the dead.” At that time, I knew that f=ma, and I believed that Mt. Everest was around 29,000 feet in height. My relation to f=ma was very different from my relation to “Jesus rose from the dead” or “Mt. Everest is around 29,000 ft in height.” I tend to think that “knowledge” is the term used for my relation to f=ma while “belief” is the term I would use for my relation to the other two statements that I mentioned. I have never done an opinion poll on this. But, based on what I read in online discussions, I think it likely that many physical scientists and mathematicians might be making a similar distinction between “knowledge” and “belief.” I am not trying to divert this thread into a discussion of knowledge. I am mainly alerting you to the possibility that some of the readers of this blog may not share your view of the relation of belief and knowledge. Donning my mathematician’s cap, I’ll say just a little more. We mathematicians deal a lot in dualities. For example, in geometry there is a duality between lines and points. Any two distinct points determine a line (the line joining them, and then extended infinitely in both directions), and any two non-parallel lines determine a point (the point where they intersect). With that notion of duality, I see a duality between knowledge and belief. Note that I do not assume others look at that relation as a duality. My ideas of a duality come from my attempts to understand human cognition.
That sounds like the complaint by creationists that scientists are just giving us theories. If you reply that a theory is what a conjecture wants to be when it grows up in science, you are told this is hairsplitting. The fact is, folk usage is of very little guide or use here. In fact, theologians themselves made a crucial distinction of fides (faith) back in the 14th century between assensus (acceptance of propositions) and fiduccia (trust or confidence). If we do not call knowledge a species of belief, what do we call it? It involves accepting ideas or propositions, and having confidence in them.
If we do not call knowledge a species of belief, what do we call it? It involves accepting ideas or propositions, and having confidence in them. Certainly, knowledge involves accepting propositions. That’s why I suggested a duality (in the mathematical sense of “duality”) between belief and knowledge. I have posted something about this on my blog. See Knowledge and belief. Incidentally, I appreciate the discussion here, particularly the comments by Brandon.
Isn’t duality in mathematics a bit stronger than mere pairing? Usually it implies the existence of a mapping that takes all the items of one kind to items of the other, and vice versa (e.g. a figure of distinguished lines and points can be mapped projectively to a figure of points and lines). Do you mean that knowledge and belief are dual in that sense?
I would say “Mt. Everest is around 29,000 ft in height” is a good example of knowledge because the outliers ‘Mt Everest’ ‘ft’ ‘height’ must already be known (understood) in order for the statement to make sense (conditional not on belief but sense). I do not think that knowledge is a specie of belief. Actually such a belief does not make sense! (the irony) But we should remember that knowledge is domain-specific.
I, for one, would flatly deny that knowledge is a kind of belief; and would point out that virtually no one accepted such a view (and several notable people are committed by their accounts to denying it) before the twentieth century. But judging from the interpretation you give of the symbolism I suspect you’re right that precise details of the underlying account wouldn’t matter. Still looking promising!
This is a common misinterpretation of both, but it is certainly a misinterpretation. In the case of Hume it requires conflating probability with knowledge — probability is a kind of belief for Hume, knowledge is not. He looks like he holds the view you are suggesting only because his skepticism means that knowledge has relatively little actual place in his epistemology. An alternative way of putting it is that Hume thinks there are two kinds of knowledge in the loose and wobbly sense it is usually used in our contemporary epistemology (loose and wobbly because it shoves together things that anyone in the early modern period would have considered): one is a kind of belief, and this is probability, about which we may be mistaken, but for which experience is so strong that we can’t help but assume it until experience says otherwise; but the other is a particular kind of perception, and this is what Hume himself thinks of as knowledge, and it is understood in a sense that makes it very different from a belief. The standard view of knowledge in the early modern period is that it is a perception of relations, and this is always in the early modern period understood as contrasting with belief, not being of the same kind as it, and this plays an ineliminable role in how they approach the whole subject. This account is found in both rationalists and empiricists; most of the differences in early modern epistemology can be accounted for in terms of different accounts of this perception. I discussed the Lockean case briefly on my blog a few years back. Given that Locke explicitly distinguishes knowledge from belief, and that his account of knowledge is that it is a kind of perception rather than a kind of belief, there’s no way to fit Locke in a JTB tradition without equivocating on what counts as belief . As to your response to Neil, that gets into other matters, of course, but I think its false to think that knowledge has much to do with confidence at all, except occasionally as a cause of it. Even Cartesian certainty wasn’t confidence but an inability to doubt under conditions of clear and distinct perception, which seems a very different thing.
Since we dragged the mathematicians along to provide metaphors (spaces of beliefs), allow me to critique your metaphor: The sort of spaces your pictures are implicitly suggesting are (similar to) Euclidian ones, which are a very special case of spaces. For one thing, you will probably accidentally create unwanted notions of “closeness” (are Fascism and Communism “close”? You might also create too much space—certain potential quarters of belief are either empty or variation in them amounts to distinctions without differences. Part of the problem is that Euclidian spaces are too structured. Perhaps the more general concept of topological space, where fewer rules need to apply might suit the job better.
Yes, these are Euclidean, which is what social research measures are. If you can offer a good reason why you think that a contrast space might not be Euclidean, I’d be very interested to hear it. It would need to be more than “it might be that way” of course. Otherwise this falls out of simply giving a metrical analysis of anything. That of course does not pre-empt the possibility that there might be surfaces within that space that constrain the dynamics. I think (and will argue) that certain positions form attractors leaving other positions (including agnosticism) less stable because they are on saddle points. These surfaces have their own explanations, probably in terms of social dynamics, psychological dispositions, and historical contingency, in ways I cannot express.
Secondly, the idea of “surfaces within the space that constrain” is an approximation of the idea of a topological space. Many, though not all, topological spaces can be represented as surfaces in a large enough Euclidean space. Firstly, I think your own example of the “number of deities” is a good example of something that can be represented as a scalar quantity, but doesn’t really scale like one. In actual practice, the concept of zero and non-zero number of deities is very distinct, one and two fairly separated, two and three a bit isolated, but after that, there’s little distinction to believers between say, 5 or 50 (or so it seems, historically). Moreover, certain beliefs make it sort of impossible to even have a well defined answer to that question. For instance, a committed agnostic cannot reasonably answer how many deities it is that they don’t have confidence in, the question is rather nonsensical. It’s like asking how many unicorns don’t exist. So although you could be, say a somewhat agnostic monotheist, you couldn’t really be a completely agnostic monotheist. Zerothly, the fact that the only good tool to measure it might be in scalar dimensions, as you suggest, doesn’t mean the actual space of beliefs is shaped like that, just that you have no other way to probe it.
Sorry for the long post, I did not take the time to shorten it. Also, I don’t wish to besmirch the idea, merely to suggest additional mathematical metaphors for use.
I also note his wikipedia entry suggests he at least dabbled in mathematics, for what that’s worth and got hammered by his friend Regiomontanus, a real mathematician, for his troubles!
I had intended to discuss some of these issues in the conclusion post. Also, this is, after all, a blog, not a published paper (yet). I like the notion of a state space for this, if we can apply empirical means to determine what the surfaces are (and to what degree they are actually surfaces and not just regions of attraction). But I think we might find some regions are uninhabited not because they are precluded but because they are unstable, or simply cause too much dissonance. Completely agnostic monotheism has a historical antecedent: Nicholas of Cusa who wrote On Learned Ignorance back in the 15th century. He was a Catholic cardinal.
Interesting. What sort of form did his agnostic monotheism take? (I also note his wikipedia entry suggests he at least dabbled in mathematics, for what that’s worth).
Hold the phone. Cusanus was hardly a “complete agnostic.” He expressed no skepticism of the actual existence of God, but rather of our ability as finite beings to comprehend God’s nature. (Nor was this part of his doctrine original to him). The existence of God was a logical necessity for Cusanus, just as for Plato, and for Anselm. Furthermore, any given epistemic attitude will not be the sole determinant of a doxastic stance. People who assert a lack of certainty about God’s existence, and who live as materialists, we call agnostic. People who assert a lack of certainty and live as theists, we call mystics or apophates. (Or in a case like Kierkegaard, Christian existentialists). Conflating these two types of skepticism would be a mistake. Cusanus is hugely important in the development of modern epistemology, but we shouldn’t for that reason attribute to him a “cognitive dissonance” that he would not have recognized. There are historical reasons why the doctrines of the German mystics did not prevail within Catholicism. We shouldn’t be too quick to presume that the intellectual fallout of that history was inevitable, simply because we are its products. There is no good evidence that it was its untenability that led to its relative marginalization.
Before day one, in the King James version of the Bible’s account of Genesis — or really, if there are no other potential believers — if there is only God in existence, was there monotheism? I ask this on a hypothetical basis. My brother say’s “no,” because God cannot have faith in himself, just as you cannot “believe in” the Milkman; you know he exists, and He knows He exists.
At some time, there was no monotheism, so it was at best a logical possibility only. Then somebody asserted it (Socrates?) and it became a belief held by actual believers. Actually, the “J” strand in Genesis is probably earlier: I would date it to the tenth (or maybe ninth) century, early in Soloman’s reign. Of course, the whole process of taking an existing set of “creation” myths and replacing “Elohim” (meaning “gods” or perhaps “the gods” at that time) with “JHWH” may well have been an exercise in sarcasm, or even a joke. And what about Akhenaten? Even if you aclcept James et al.‘s downdating of the 18th dynasty, it would still have been earlier than Socrates.
With cases like Akhenaten (as with JHVH, Marduk, & Mazda Ahura) it can be hard to tell whether monotheism indicates the sole existence of one god, or simply his supremacy. I think the concept of one unitary god first originates with Greek pre-Socratic philosophy, and maybe in parallel in Vedic philosophy. But it definitely pre-dates Socrates.
The Rig Veda (1200-900 BC) includes aspects of monotheism, monism and polytheism. However, as an early inspiration for the later Upanishad concept of “advaita”, early Vedas describe an absolute unitary reality/Being (“Sat”) that encompasses all existence. Vedic philosophers considered multiple Gods to be illusory “saguna” manifestations of the underlying infinite Brahma. In their most abstract forms, these concepts were [perhaps] far more sophisticated than many of their western counterparts. “To what is One, sages give many a title.” Rig Veda Note: There is some interesting studies on how the emerging concept of “zero” influenced other metaphysical speculations.
This seems like a noble enterprise, but I have some reservations about starting off with “I shall call a belief a conceptual stance. ” I read this as limiting belief to matters of knowledge. If this is what you intend, or I have misunderstood, fair enough. Aristotle suggested that the art of rhetoric (i.e. persuading people) required skills in Ethos, Pathos and Logos. My suspicion is that belief (particularly religious belief) is built from all three strands. While many atheists and some agnostics seem to have the upper hand in the Logos area when debating religious belief, they don’t seem to be making much headway in the other two areas. My concern is that if you address what it is to have a belief in purely philosophical terms, this is only addressing part of the ‘meaning’ of belief.
Of course, knowledge is a species of belief. Why? Well, because even the most reproducible, useful in prediction, and intuitively logical scientific knowledge cannot be expected to be “true” forever. We simply do not know how the universe will behave tomorrow as long as we do not know the essential truth, or the so-call universal equation, which describes and defines all other definitions based on observation and deduction. But there is even more, since we do not know either what the Nothing (from which the universe reportedly is supposed to originate) is and how it influences the current universe and its fate. However, I see the discussion just remaining semantic without actually hitting the main question: Which believes do classify as knowledge and which do not. In fact, reason itself (and for that matter, particularly, the power of deduction) is relative and in constant development. Yet I would say that any belief for which the current state of the human knowledge cannot find supporting evidence or indeed finds strong counter-evidence should not be labeled as knowledge. Then there are still plenty of believes which cannot be refuted but are based on weak evidence. These are the controversial ones. Actually, I do not give much for evidence (not even predicted evidence), as evidence can be faked, dependent on several conditions, and ultimately dependent on the universal variable time. Reason is therefore left with no other tools than language itself and the accumulation of knowledge. The more we “know”, the highest the probability that our thoughts would become standard knowledge through strong argumentations.
Of course, knowledge is a species of belief. Why? Well, because even the most reproducible, useful in prediction, and intuitively logical scientific knowledge cannot be expected to be “true” forever. We simply do not know how the universe will behave tomorrow as long as we do not know the essential truth, or the so-called universal equation, which describes and defines all other definitions based on observation and deduction. But there is even more, since we do not know either what the Nothing (from which the universe reportedly is supposed to originate) is and how it influences the current universe and its fate. However, I see the discussion just remaining semantic without actually hitting the main question: Which believes do classify as knowledge and which do not. It’s easy to invoke reason and say that knowledge comes either from reason (rational thinking, scientific methods) or, less likely, from a belief which happened to be true without being derived from a rational insight. But what is reason indeed? In fact, reason itself (and for that matter, particularly, the power of deduction) is relative and in constant development. Yet I would say that any belief for which the current state of the human knowledge cannot find supporting evidence or indeed finds strong counter-evidence should not be labeled as knowledge. Then there are still plenty of believes which cannot be refuted but are based on weak evidence. These are the controversial ones. Actually, I do not give much for evidence (not even predicted evidence), as evidence can be faked, dependent on several conditions, and ultimately dependent on the universal variable time. Reason is therefore left with no other tools than language itself and the accumulation of knowledge. The more we “know”, the highest the probability that our thoughts would become standard knowledge through strong argumentations.
I’m going to quote from this book in the next post, but not this passage, which is relevant here. It’s from Quine and Ullian’s The Web of Belief, p13: The flight to “I don’t know” compounds the perversity of idiom, for knowing is quite a special kind of believing: you can believe without knowing. Believing something does not count as knowing it unless what is believed is in fact true. And even if what is believed is true, believing it does not count as knowing unless the believer has firm grounds for belief. Now I don’t quote this as an appeal to authority, although Quine is perhaps the greatest American philosopher of the mid-twentieth century. But it goes to my claim that to believe is to have mental content that one asserts is true, and to know is to be both correct about that assertion and to have good reasons for it. Hence, knowledge is a species of belief. I disagree with the comment by Trasdental that knowledge now will change. If it is false now, then it isn’t knowledge, no matter how much we think it is. It is belief because believing is what you do when you have mental content that you think is true, and that is also true of knowing – you at least have to think the content represents the world. Nothing that is knowledge does not have content that is true (including knowing how – you represent what you can do to yourself). Hence, to know is to have a belief.
believing is what you do when you have mental content that you think is true I get the overall reasoning (and I think it’s enough for a classification ex suppositione, without worrying too much about whether it is the True Account of Knowledge), but this is implausible; if ‘think’ here means ‘believe’, then the account requires an infinite regress: you cannot believe something without believing it to be true, and believing it to be true that it is true, and believing it to be true that it is true that it is true. But, whatever one’s ultimate account of truth, these are all different mental contents, and it follows that everyone has infinite beliefs or no beliefs at all. If ‘thinking’ is here something different than belief, then that opens another can of worms, of course, since the question would be why there couldn’t be among the non-belief kinds of thinking one to which knowledge is better assimilated. One could alternatively mean by this that believing just is the explicit asserting-true of a mental content, and that handles the infinite regress problem, but it has the problem of being too broad: we can assert as true things we know are false, in lying and play-pretending.
To believe is to have mental content that one asserts is true, and to know is to be both correct about that assertion and to have good reasons for it. Hence, knowledge is a species of belief…. If [a belief] is false now, then it isn’t knowledge, no matter how much we think it is. Knowledge is a species of belief only in the trivial sense that we can’t “know” what we disbelieve. I call this trivial because it excludes from knowledge half of its essential nature, which is not merely empirical (confirmation of facts about the world) but also rational (articulation and multiplication of facts about the world–which I take to be Brandon’s point about Locke.) I think this becomes clearer when we consider the role of invention or creation in the aggregation of knowledge. In science or philosophy this might be the use of metaphor to introduce new concepts. (mass, valence, the gene–or “grue”). In art, the invention is freer to roam, but it is still delineated. In your quote, Quine and Ullian seem to be discussing a fairly limited sense of “to know,” synonymous with “to be certain.” (Later in the book they break things apart a little more). But certainty is just one aspect of knowledge, and not always the most important one. I “know” there are no such things as (to use Quine’s example from “The Two Dogmas”) Homeric gods, but I also know a great deal “about” the Homeric gods. What is the role of belief in all of this? If it is just that I believe other people told certain stories, then technically my knowledge implies a belief in the fact that these stories were actually told, but it’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to consult or invoke this belief. The question gets even more trivial when we ask what Homer believed he wrote about the Homeric gods (or what Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid, et al, believed they wrote). Such belief has little to no bearing on the meaning or value of these stories–or on the structure of their content. Quine himself wrote that physical objects and Homeric gods are different only in degree, not in kind–that each originate as “cultural posits.” It is only secondarily that we determine the value of these cultural posits, which is to say, what our investment in them should be. In the case of scientific knowledge, that value is in its role “as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” But this role need not be at the exclusion of any others. From this I would say the case is stronger for belief being a species of knowledge (knowledge precedes belief) not the other way around. I would also argue that belief itself is not binary, but exists along a continuum. We are more or less committed to various beliefs, according to our wont.
Brandon’s comments and blog post really got me thinking. Locke was really on to something, or perhaps he was merely articulating feelings that were much more prevalent, even taken for granted at the time. The idea that knowledge is a perceptual judgement of a choice between contrasting possibilities is intriguing because it suggests that knowledge need not have an object of fixation, as we assume belief must, in order to be effective. What if “knowledge” was exactly that – the truth of incomplete context that is literally a bridge being built to “knowledge belief”.
John S. Wilkins wrote: “I disagree with the comment by Trasdental that knowledge now will change. If it is false now, then it isn’t knowledge, no matter how much we think it is” Yes, it is a fact that all what we thought was knowledge, is now false or assumed to be true, not known to be true. It doesn’t matter “how much we think”, assuming something is true is inaccurate for the cause of knowledge. That leaves you with no knowledge at all. Therefore, you may tray to adapt the meaning of the ancient word -knowledge- to the current state of knowledge, i.e., all knowledge has become dubiously true. The original signification was, in fact, closer to this: “Believing something does not count as knowing it unless what is believed is in fact true”. In a strict view, the word knowledge designate a hypothetical absolute, which hasn’t been reached. Therefore, I would rather use a new word to designate the true knowledge or the complete truth, making possible the usage of the word “knowledge” for the “truth of incomplete context” mentioned above.
Another way to solve the inconsistency of the word -knowledge- would be to adapt the wording -truth- to reality, or to make truth dependent on perception. If knowledge is deemed to be “true”, then what is “true” indeed?
If it is false now, then it isn’t knowledge, no matter how much we think it is” Oh, I wish I’d come down here before commenting on the cartoon. Where do you draw the line between knowing and believing? Is that line known to be valid or only believed to be known as a matter of contingency? Can knowledge which is held contingently still be considered to be knowledge?
The interesting thing is that this discussion is actually not only relevant within the philosophy (We actually believe we know nothing). For instance, changing the connotation of knowledge should/would have a radical effect in education. I was taught (about) knowledge, and I learned it as if it was mere truth. I de facto believed it all in the same way others believe in gods and creation myths. However, after dealing with some deal of knowledge I came to realize that doubt is more useful in gaining knowledge than knowledge itself (but both are needed). Maybe learning should be layered with a reasonable amount of doubt, to speed up the global process.
Knowledge is a species of belief only in the trivial sense that we can’t “know” what we disbelieve. I call this trivial because it excludes from knowledge half of its essential nature, which is not merely empirical (confirmation of facts about the world) but also rational (articulation and multiplication of facts about the world–which I take to be Brandon’s point about Locke.) Chris Schoen I’d question how trivial that is. We don’t have absolute and complete knowledge of any aspect of the universe, our knowledge is inevitably incomplete, the extent of that incompleteness unknown to us. How deep does this “confirmation of facts about the world” and the “rational (articulation and multiplication of facts about the world…)” have to be in order for it to go from belief to knowledge? Even arriving at the point where you consider your empirical evidence to be sufficiently complete so as to enable you to classify your ideas as knowledge instead of belief is based in a rather great act of belief, considering the possible extent of what you don’t know. I used to think there was a real distinction between what was known and what was believed but I don’t believe that anymore. You can make an heroic effort to get to the point where you are justified in calling what you do “knowing” but not taking into account that you don’t have more than contingent “knowledge” and that anything you “know” is subject to being overturned certainly doesn’t make your “knowledge” more secure, though it might make your assertion of it more aggressive and insistent, your resistance to challenge less flexible to considering the substance of the challenge, which is the only, actual, substance of organized “skepticism”. Sometimes the opponents of organized “skepticism” are far more open to skeptical consideration of their beliefs than the “skeptics”. “Skeptics” seem to be pretty well stuck in the 18th century.
Anthony, I don’t think you are construing me correctly. I wouldn’t disagree with you that under a definition that considered knowledge a species of belief it would be a difficult move to justify the exalted status of knowledge over belief, since the method of justification must always be contingent upon a belief in its soundness. I am arguing that knowledge is not a species of belief, that it is rather a different, separate, way to look at apprehension. Belief focuses on the aspect of dedication to a proposition, the degree to which we cleave to it. Knowledge focuses on the articulation of a proposition. How it fits in (or doesn’t) with other stories about the world. In this sense knowledge can exist entirely separately from belief. We need merely to be able to coherently describe a set of facts to know them. This is what novelists do, and no one would say novelists don’t know what’s going on in their own books, but neither would they say a novelist believed in her creation’s veridical truth. If a novelist believes in anything at all about her novel, it is that she wrote what she says she wrote. But such a belief has no real bearing on anything, It is trivial, compared to the knowledge itself, which is much greater than a justified true belief that she actually wrote the book.
But all of the actions you use to characterize thinking as “knowing” requires accepting less than certain ideas as part of the process. The real distinction isn’t between two ways of thinking isn’t if it’s believed or known, it’s in how reliable you take the ideas and thinking to be. You can try to test and try to achieve higher degrees of reliability, science is a formal attempt to achieve higher degrees of reliability in regard to things which can be observed, measured and analyzed and to place that action within a social context where other people can accept your conclusions or to find problems with them. You can produce ideas that are the best available ways of thinking about some of those things within the contemporary context you happen to be in, as physics did. But as that context changes those ideas and even some of the most basic assumptions they are based on and assumptions they produce will either be modified or abandoned. The people who believed in the assumptions that the most rigorous science of their day certainly felt justified in thinking they knew what those ideas held. We might have other ideas about those things that we are justified in thinking we know, though as time goes on those ideas have a good chance of undergoing basic change. The category of “knowledge”, like all other ideas, are not fixed for all time, it is dependent on the agreement of what that means for our time, without even unanimous agreement today. It’s a lot less satisfying in some ways than the assumption of certainty, giving up that assumption on the basis of new information can be really upsetting, as Bertrand Russell apparently was when Eddington pointed out some of the necessary conclusions coming from quantum physics. Russell was quite glum about it, whereas Eddington and other scientists and even philosophers took it in stride. While it would seem to be better to be right than to be certain, the best available to us might be that it’s better to not presume we’re even able to know we’re right than it is to wrongly assume we can be certain of even that.
Anthony, I don’t see how any of this engages my point. I don’t disagree with what you say here, inasmuch as you are making an essentially Kuhnian argument. My comment is that there is an aspect of knowledge (call it a generative aspect, for now) which is divorced entirely from matters of certainty and confirmation, and that this aspect plays an important role in what we “know.” Because of this, I think it is inaccurate to call knowledge “a species of belief,” since this would leave no room for the creation and articulation of logical and symbolic forms. I am not trying to make a point here about the epistemic superiority of knowledge over belief.