Epistemology On knowledge and consistency 10 Mar 2010 Well, the cat and the pigeons are having a field day, although it is open yet to interpretation which are the cats and which the pigeons. Josh Rosenau’s post, which I approvingly cited and riffed off, has led to a number of critical blog posts in the ongoing accommodationism war…. Read More
Philosophy My Absent Career 5: Two Davids 9 Dec 20221 Jan 2023 Sometime around 1994, I was finishing my computing diploma and got access to a unix terminal. Typing various commands assigned to us, I mistyped something and instead typed rn and what came up was the mother of all chat boards, which I later found out was called USENET, but which… Read More
Humor Me in Spanish 5 Jun 2010 I just love seeing my ideas in another language, not because I speak or read them (I am Australian. We don’t even speak English well. We’re submonoglots), but because it always looks so much more intelligent in French or, as in this case, Spanish. Eduardo Robredo Zugasti has noticed my… Read More
Don’t know Gettier. But let me guess: Et hoc principium nominat Philosophus, in III DE anima, intellectum possibilem. ?
It is possible The Philosopher always said it first (he’s like the Ernst Mayr of philosophy). However, I fail to see the connection here with what Thomas says here…
I supposed that the problem is how do we know that we know, e.g. reflexion. Here the intelllectus possibilis was proposed by Aristotle and Scholastics. It is also the place where reflexion should take place, the following interesting quotation also from De anima: Species enim intelligibilis est quo intellectus intelligit, non id quod intelligit, nisi per reflexionem, in quantum intelligit se intelligere et id quod quo intelligit.
Well, perhaps you can help me out with a confusion I’ve got myself into. ISTM that in “justified true belief”, the word “true” implies either access to ideal and infallible knowledge (which, not being God, we can’t ever have), or is just a synonym (and therefore redundant) for a very high level of justification. We can approach certainty asymptotically, but never quite get there. On this account, “true” doesn’t belong in the definition, and we declare we have “knowledge” when justification passes a certain threshold (say, when we’ve seen whatever it is up close with our own eyes, and everyone present agrees about it). Am I misunderstanding something about the way epistemologists use the terms?
It’s a very long time since I did any formal epistemology but I’ll have an ignorant crack at it. I gather that what makes something knowledge, under the JTB view, is that it is true, not that we know or could warrantably think it is true. So if it is true but we are not justified in thinking it is true, is isn’t known, and if we are justified in thinking it is true but it isn’t, it isn’t known. Pragmatists like me do not have this problem, as it only occurs under a correspondence theory of truth. We think that knowing just is being justified in a claim through experience; so your point is fine by us. We also think that truth is a property of pragmatic interactions between cognisers and the world. But don’t believe me – as I say it’s been a while. Try here instead.
Thank you; it’s helpful to know that what seems to be the “standard” JTB view is not universally enforced by the Philosophy Cartel.
I am an official member of the Philosophy Cartel and I endorse this message. (Except for the pragmatism bit, anyhow.) The JTB theory hasn’t been standard since shortly after Gettier’s example, in which Jones has JTB, but lacks knowledge. Now, one of the few things you can get philosophers to agree on is that JTB != knowledge.