geoff

Vorkosigan wrote:

To me what prevents us from lapsing into complete skepticism, Geoff, is that knowledge is social. We exist in networks of intersubjectivity. the "reasonableness" of an idea to others is an important check on our logic and evidence. Ultimately "certainty" is both social and provisional.

I enthusiastically agree! Have you read Polanyi? I think "his" idea of tacit knowledge is helpful. By the way, in an "Existence of God(s)" forum you mentioned someone by the name of Griere or something like that. What's his background?

geoff

An additional thought re: the social aspects of knowledge: It seems to me that if knowledge is conditioned at least in some way by the communities in which we primarily function, then the debate over whose beliefs are more in keeping with reality will, at least, entail discussion re: paradigms (a la Thomas Kuhn). Given that that's a non-technical way of putting it, how would you assess it? Thanks.

owleye

One possible inadequacy is that the belief could be grounded on poor assumptions. For example it could be that I believe the leaves are green in the summer because leaves are always green in the summer, not because I have some special insight that necessarily relates the greenness of leaves with summer. If you don't like this example, consider my belief that it is sunny because I believe it is Thursday and Thursdays are always sunny. It could very well be sunny, but I could be quite mistaken about it being Thursday or about Thursdays always being sunny.

owleye

Vorkosigan

I am not sure tacit knowledge is really applies. Polanyi's concept of "tacit" knowledge, as I recall (probably wrongly) is knowledge known about a device or process which is not encoded in formal descriptions of that thing. I was thinking more along the lines of Longino's Science as Social Knowledge.

Giere wrote
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226292061/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">Explaining Science : A Cognitive Approach(Science and Its Conceptual Foundations)</a>

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Don't tell me: this is your homework for this week. I don't believe in paradigms (a word Kuhn used to describe several different ideas). Kuhn is a seminal figure in the history of science, but frankly I think that his approach dead-ended in the hard program of Bloor et al. It's the cognitive stuff that has real promise.

There is no question that knowledge is conditioned by "culture" but by the same token, nothing in that statement rules out the deliberate creation of a community whose culture and values favors the advancement of reliable and useful knowledge about the world out there. Like science, for example.

Vorkosigan

Wyrdsmyth

Yeah, I really like this sentiment: "We exist in networks of intersubjectivity." That's a good phrase.

See, if we're after a definition of knowledge in the classical sense of "true, justified belief," I think maybe what Plato was addressing was how we can have objective knowledge, or knowledge about the objective world (and not just opinions of it). And that was what his parable of the shadows in the cave was all about: Certain people wake up, break the chains of their subjectivity, and see the world for WHAT IT REALLY IS. They see it in all its IS-NESS. In other words, they've broken through the subject/object barrier, but in some obscure way that Plato doesn't or can't fully explain...

But I think what Vorkosigan says makes eminently more sense than what Plato says. We never do, in fact, get unmediated contact with the objective world. We presuppose it. We assume it's there. We assume (and often hope) that our sense-perceptions give us a more or less accurate correspondence to what's around us physically. But we can't really know that for sure. And likewise, we assume our mental constructs (like our theories and so forth) also roughly correspond to the world around us, both physically and in somewhat more abstract ways, too. That is is what I was talking about earlier, with my example of Newton's laws. And we like to bounce our impressions off of each other, to try to 'verify' them. To try to be objective as possible -- you know, I might be color blind, and maybe that car really isn't black but a very dark shade of brown (and here I was saying the proposition 'that car is black' was true! But my friends have better eyes than me, and corrected my error). If we stop kidding ourselves, we know we're not getting at complete objectivity in the Platonic sense, but only intersubjectivity.

So, we have very little of what you might call absolute certainty. A proposition like 2+2+4 is something we know, inasmuch only in that we know what the symbols 2, 4, + and = mean, and the relationship they have when assembled in certain ways. Mathematical propositions might be among the only absolutely certain knowledge we can have. But the proposition "2+2=4" can't be justified by something outside of itself, other than than the basic axioms of math, which really amount to a breaking down of all those symbols.

[ May 22, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

hinduwoman

Nitpicking:
'justified' and 'true' are the same thing in this context: the beliefs are based on evidence and hence are justified/true, why use them both?

[ May 24, 2002: Message edited by: hinduwoman ]</p>

tronvillain

You use them both because you can hold a true belief without being justified in doing so or you can hold a justified false belief.