Re: Knowledge and Belief

[Rob Zook <rzook@INFORMIX.COM>]

At 03:06 PM 1/21/98 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Rob Zook wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>In theory that may be so.  But when I repudiate earlier claims of
>truth, I am not normally adjusting my truth model, simply
>my belief structure.  I do not say: "'Bantha is a cat' used to be
>true (by my truth model), but now that I hear Bantha bark and
>howl, I have changed my truth model so that the statement is
>false."  I simply repudiate my previous belief that Bantha is a cat
>and keep the same truth model.  Otherwise we are in the position
>of saying that the Sun used to orbit the earth, but now does not,
>a position that lojbab rightly rejects.  (We *can* create such
>time-dependent metaphysicses, but they are decidedly abnormal.)

I'm not sure were talking about the same thing when I say system
and you say truth model. However, neither of them equal actuality
only approximate it. People at a certain time knew the Sun circled the
earth, and unconsciously adjusted their incoming information to fit
that model.

So for them, the sun _did_ circle the earth. Whether or not the Sun
actually an observer from our time would agree, seems irrelavent because
we cannot prove it now one way or another. Admittedly, it makes things
much more consistant with current understanding of psychology to think
that the Earth really did circle the Sun, and they just make a mistake.



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