Subject: Re: [lojban] Random lojban questions/annoyances.

From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Mar 2001 22:16:50 -0000

>User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
>From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
>Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 15:39:24 -0500
>
>On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 03:27:30PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> Robin Lee Powell scripsit:
>> 
>> > And I would say that he _knew_ that, but he was worng, and hopefully now
>> > knows better. In fact, the phrase 'he knows better' is in contradiction
>> > with your point of view on knowledge.
>> 
>> Not at all.
>> 
>> Consider:
>> 
>> John says the earth is flat.
>> How absurd! He knows better than that.
>> 
>> entails that John knows (whatever he says) that the Earth is not flat, which
>> entails, indeed, that the Earth is not flat. 
>
>No, it entails that as far as we know, the Earth is not flat. Knowledge
>is changing all the time.
>
>> Would you say "Aristotle knew that the Earth was the center of the
>> universe"? 
>
>Absolutely. He did know exactly that. We now 'know' that he is wrong,
>but maybe _we're_ wrong, hard as that may be to believe, or maybe the
>universe has changed.
>
>> I would instead say that Aristotle *believed* etc. but that we know it
>> is not.
>
>I consider belief and knowledge to be equivalent, because 'the truth' is
>too elusive and always changing for us to ever be _SURE_ something is
>true.
>
>I can _know_, with absolute certainty, that the sky is purple. I sure
>most people would say that my knowlede is wrong. But if you point a
>colorimiter at the sky, it will in fact come up purple rather than blue.
>
>Who _knows_ in that case, and who merely believes? Whichever you pick,
>you are making a basically arbitrary choice from the perspective of what
>_you_ believe to be true. Knowledge is _WAY_ too fuzzy to talk about
>absolute truth.
>
>> (It is not sufficient, for a belief to count as knowledge, that it be true,
>> but it is necessary.)
>
>Wow. I am _SO_ not with you on this.

I wouldn't have seen this if it didn't have some weird headers so it didn't
get thrown into my lojban mailbox. And I wouldn't be answering if I
weren't surprised this was still being discussed. I thought this was done
to death ages ago.

To me, saying knowledge==belief contradicts most people's intuition and
introduces an unwanted redundancy into the gismu. I'd say that something
known must be true, but of course we don't know what is true at any given
moment. The best description I've heard is that saying "A knows X" means
*two* things: (1) A believes X, AND (2) I, the speaker, also believe X and
assert it to be true. So maybe it does mean that X must be true, since if
I claim that John knows the sky is purple and it turns out it isn't, then
John (and I) were both mistaken, and he (and I) only *believed* it was.
There's nothing terribly bizarre about this, just an entailment of an
additional assertion (and Lojban is all about assertions). Just about all
examples of "know" in English conform very well to this definition, and the
ones that don't are pretty plainly literary license:

John knows you're going (you are, or at least I think so too)

As opposed to "John thought/believed you were going, but in fact you
weren't." We would never say "knew" in this sentence.

Everyone knew the world was flat. (Ironic, or exaggerated: they thought
they knew it, they believed it... but we "know" better--we believe and at
the same time assert that their believe was false).

And so on. I think practically every case I've ever seen fits, or can be
*reasonably* explained as literary stretching (yes, reasonably, since
obviously you can claim anything is if you want to stretch farther).

~mark