Re: Knowledge and Belief

[Rob Zook <rzook@INFORMIX.COM>]

At 12:42 PM 1/21/98 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>la pycyn cusku di'e
>
>> "Knowledge=justified true belief" or "a knows that p = p
>> and a believes that p on the basis of adequate evidence" are nice
>> philosophical definitions but, as usual, useless where the rubber
>> meets the road.  The "true" drops out, since the only truths we can
>> apply in these judgments are the ones we know, and applying them gets
>> us into an infinite regress and thus no decisions.
>
>That is so in the moment of speaking, but "truth" is still important
>retrospectively.  If we repudiate the claim of truth later on, we also
>repudiate the claim of knowledge --- which is not true of claims of
>belief and the like.

But if you look at a past system, you cannot affect the truth value
of that system from the inside. The inside of the system is no longer
accessible. So you cannot help but take a more inclusive view, which
may include a copy of the previous system with a different truth value
but that makes it obvous that your view cannot be compared the to old
system on the same basis.


Rob Z.
--------------------------------------------------------
Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection
to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only
asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to
correct some faults in the first.
-- Ben Franklin