From: John Cowan Message-Id: <199801030303.WAA21774@locke.ccil.org> Subject: Re: Knowledge and Belief To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 22:03:11 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <199801022304.SAA15157@locke.ccil.org> from "Rob Zook" at Jan 2, 98 04:43:56 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1822 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Jan 2 22:03:13 1998 X-From-Space-Address: cowan Rob Zook wrote: > 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. For this purpose, I take "true" and "false" to be absolute, not relative to the believer/knower. > 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. Correct. I was saying that "justified true belief" is INSUFFICIENT for "knowledge", not that it is not necessary. Not all justified true beliefs count as knowledge. > >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. Yes, but they were mistaken, although relying on what seemed like a reliable source. They were justified in believing what was printed in the newspapers, but in this case it happened to be false. The armistice did not come until 11/11/18. > >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. But on being better informed, they would say "Well, we thought we knew the war was over, but really, we didn't know" --- because the grounds of belief didn't support the statement no matter how true it might have been. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.