In a message dated 9/26/2001 7:38:38 AM Central Daylight Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:
For example, if John believes that there is no king of France and if But if John has never thought it, then John does NOT believe it. Epistemology has always, since before Plato and Akshapada down to the modern Hintikkoids and all-Wright-niks, been plagued by perfectionism, the notion that a person believes the logical consequences of whatever he believes. Without this view there would be practically no epistemology as such, only empirical psychology, which consistently refutes the perfectionist thesis. With this thesis, epistemology ahs been a millennia-long attempt to dodge psychological evidence. "The psychological tests are no good" though it turns out to be impossible to find one that is good, since every improvement comes back with the same result: consequences of things clearly shown to be believed are not learned, agreed to, etc., etc. in ways significantly different from the way totally new information is, and people accept -- or alreeady hold -- views incompatible with those they already hold with no more difficulty than for totally unrelated information. Well, then, "nobody really knows anything," in which case, since it is crucial to the argument, nobody really believes anyhting either -- but no one holds that. "Well, real people are emotional, etc., and this is about the knowledge of a perfectly rational human being" that is, it is a constructed theory without any practical application -- so why the big fuss -- and why the counterexamples from "real life"? This deontic dipsydoodle isn't even impressive in ethics, where being impressive doesn't take much, why accept it in epistemology, which is supposed to be more scientific? "It is about God's knowledge" except that the God they mean doesn't know anything by inference but all by direct awareness. And so on. The one good thing to be said for perfectionism in epistemology is that, if it were true, we would have to do away with our present educational system, but there are better reasons for that, ones that actually are true. So, then, why bring this muck into Lojban, the "culturally neutral" language? There is no extensional sense of "know," if perfectionism -- or even a hint of it -- is required. The best that can be said about consequences of beliefs is, perhaps, that -- if the inference is simple enough, like the no king - Bill not king case -- the believer OUGHT TO believe the rest, maybe even can be held responsible in certain cases for believing and culpable for not believing. But it can't even be held that he will learn or recognize the inferrable claim more easily than some other claim. He may, of course, swat his head and say "Oh, I knew that" when it is called to his attention. But he is just misspeaking at that point -- possibly out of 2500 years of atrocious epistemology. |