Re: more epistemic perversity

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

la lojbab la markl spuda di'e
>I do not have much problem with what you are saying, though what
>I am maintaining doesn't quite fit "sympathetic" either.  Rather,
>when I state that And "knows" somethingby his epistemologies that
>are either opaque or unconvincing to me, I am merely recognizing
>my own lack of omniscience and the relativity of truth and
>knowledge in some te djuno.

But people who use the word "know" in a more normal way can also
recognize the relativity of truth and knowledge and lack of omniscience.
You seem to be saying that in normal English it can't be done,
but that's obviously not the case.

>The other  weakness of Jorge's version is the perfectly human
>capability to entertain contradictary concepts at once.

Entertain? How is that capability a weakness of my version?
Of course people can entertain contradictory concepts at once.
Sometimes people even believe contradictory things at once,
especially when the contradiction is not immediately obvious.
What's the problem?

>There
>is nothing stoppoing a human being from knowing X by one
>epistemology and knowing NOT X by some other epistemology.

Saying it in the abstract like that, using X, almost makes it
sound true. It is true in some sense: if you interpret X differently
both times, but then that's just playing with words. Of course,
you could say it and believe it, if you also believe that X and
not X are both true. Then there is presupposition of truth in both
cases.

>Clearly in such a case "believe" is no more useful that "know",
>and I doubt that "opine"/jinvi is either.

Why not? I would have said that they're the obvious choice, as in
"John thinks that A is your only child, but he also knows
that you have two children, he doesn't seem to realize the
inconsistency of his beliefs".  That sentence makes more sense
to me that one replacing "thinks" by "knows".

>The way we commonly
>resolve this is for one of the two knowledges to be expressed with
>"know" and the other with "really believe" or similar such wording,
>with the "knowledge" label going to that truth which is more
>conventional.

But if you agree that both "knowledges" are true, then you accept
that there is presupposition of truth in both cases. The problem
would arise if you thought that one of them was false.

>But in a system of relativism with regard to truth, and in a language
>with no culture to establish "conventional wisdom", it is not
>appropriate for the language to prescrine that one of the contradictory
>knowledges in "known" while the other is merely "believed".

Of course it isn't the language that makes such a prescription.
It is merely logic that says that you can't have both X and not X
be true. (One brand of logic, at any rate.) But if you believe that
both X and not X are true, then there would be nothing strange
in claiming that someone knows that X and someone else knows
that not X.

>It may be that some people are so wedded to the concept of "the real world"
>about which there are truths that are nonrelative, and that all other
>so=called "truths" are merely beliefs or wishful thinking or ideals, that
>they cannot entertain the relative universe of that Chinese philsopher who
>did not know whether he was dream that he was a butterfly or whether he
>was a butterfly fdreaming he was a Chinese philosopher.

Well, maybe you should divorce yourself from that concept of  "the real
world", it seems awfully restrictive.

BTW, it seems that the Chinese philosopher himself didn't realize that
he could be both a man dreaming that he is a butterfly and a butterfly
dreaming that it is a man at the same time. That might have helped
him dispel his existential conundrum.

In any case, the use of {djuno} there would be perfectly acceptable.
Quoth the philosopher:

    mi na djuno le du'u mi toldi je senva le du'u mi remna kei
                                 gi'ikau remna je senva le du'u mi toldi
   "I don't know whether I am a man dreaming that I'm a butterfly
              or a butterfly dreaming that I'm a man, or both, or neither."

co'o mi'e xorxes