Re: Knowledge and Belief

[Rob Zook <rzook@INFORMIX.COM>]

At 11:23 PM 1/1/98 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>la .aclin. cusku di'e
>
>> Right. As it's 'justified true belief', you _know_ that the catcher knows
>> that the pitch happened.
>
>Well, no.  "Justified true belief" is not knowledge: there exist Gettier
>counterexamples.  Essentially, if the truth and the justification are
>utterly independent, the result does not count as knowledge.

Gettier counterexamples? Could you elaborate on this a bit? Some belief
may be false for another, but people do not generally accept beliefs
which they find false. So saying the truth value can seem independant
of the justification seems misleading, at best.

I believe that we define knowledge as a true belief, because people
do not generally accept false beliefs. Someone may accept a belief which
I find false, but that does not make it false in any absolute sense that
the other must acknowledge.


>The crew of a yacht left Boston on 7 November 1918 with the justified
>false belief that the Great War was over, based on newspaper reports.

False according to what? It certainly seemed true to them.


>They arrived in Bermuda on 12 November, by which time the false belief
>had become true.  But they had *learned* nothing in the interim, so
>their belief was still not knowledge.

But for them, the truth value never changed.


Rob Z.
--------------------------------------------------------
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx