CONTENTS:
TERMINOLOGY
Types:
“Knowledge That” and “Knowledge How (to)”
Philosophers focus on the former.
Philosophical technical meaning of knowledge (approximately):
Justified true belief, where justification is some appropriate connection between the belief and truth
Folk meaning of knowledge:
Polysemous-
-Confident belief, that is not necessarily factive.
or
-Belief that “X is true”, independently of belief in X.
eg “I know I will die, but I don’t believe it”
This page henceforth refers only to the philosophical meaning.
Epistemology isnt in the business of revising the content of knowledge claims per se.
It is mostly responses to the skeptic and analyses of knowledge.
Sources of knowledge:
• Perception
• Testimony
• Memory
• Introspection
• Intuition
• Reason
Disambiguate:
• Justification, Evidence, Confirmation, Support
• Rationality
• Warrant
• Confidence / credibility
• Outright belief vs degree of belief
• Belief
• Acceptance
• Truth value
• Truth apt
• Truth condition
• Truth maker
• Truth
• Proposition
• Fact
• Reality
• Objective (meaning mind-independent)
• Objective (meaning universal)
• Worldview
• Reason
• Logic
• Deduction
• Induction
• Abduction (Infererence to the Best Explanation)
• Analytic / Synthetic
• A priori / A posteriori (aka empirical — a term sometimes misused to mean contingent)
• Necessary / Contingent
• Epistemic: relating to knowledge, truth, belief, and justification
• Doxastic: relating to belief
• Alethic: relating to truths
• Ontic/Metaphysical: relating to what exists
• Psychological certainty: having the highest degree of justification subjectively
• Incorrigibility: unable to change one’s mind
• Indubitability: cant be doubted subjectively
• Infallibility: cant be false
• Inimitability: having the highest degree of justification objectively
• Indefeasibility: there exist no defeaters/disconfirmed propositions
Theories of truth:
• Correspondence
• Coherence
• Pragmatist
• Deflationary (eg Redundancy / Disquotationalism / Minimalism)
Adjacent concepts:
• Understanding: multi-context knowledge / empathy / language comprehension
• Wisdom: applying knowledge and judgement in the pursuit of (well-chosen) goals
Facts and Opinions:
There is a myth of a fact-opinion dichotomy for declarative statements.
Facts are (putatively) true propositions.
The term opinion is polysemous:
An opinion can mean a belief. For any given agent at any given time may or may not hold facts in their beliefs. In this sense, opinions can be facts.
The term opinion can also mean a taste, a preference, a judgement, an evaluation, a feeling, a prediction, a generalisation, a relative claim, a poorly epistemically-justified claim or a highly contested claim.
The specious fact/opinion distinction is related to the belief/reality, subjective/objective, descriptive/evaluative, and the thick/thin concept distinctions.
Relevance, soundness and implications are more important than the specious fact-opinion distinction.
Are the following facts or opinions?-
Genocide is wrong
9/11 was significant to US middle eastern policy
XYZ was a bad political leader
XYZ was an incompetent political leader
SKEPTICISM
This above all: what do we know and with what degree of certainty?
“We must know. We will know.”
Philosophical technical meaning of skepticism:
The impossibility of knowledge about a domain (Global or Local) because of regress (Agrippa’s trilemma), underdetermination/closure, or non-existence of an entity.
Folk meaning of skepticism:
uncertain degree of belief vs certain/dogmatic,
or a process of doubt,
or hesitant to accept and scrutinising of justification
Skepticism is different to agnosticism, which in its most general sense means ignorance / suspension of belief.
Is investigating skepticism a waste of time? No-
TLDR:
Skepticism matters because beliefs matter — and some beliefs are held because they are considered “knowledge” (i.e justified).
Longer:
Examining skepticism might lead one to give up the belief that one has knowledge or justified belief about the external world or any other domain.
Even if one cannot give up the belief that there is an external world, maybe one can give up the that one knows there is.
Or investigating skepticism might make us abandon or refine our very concept of knowledge.
These all matter.
“All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left.”
RATIONALITY
Two types:
Practical and Epistemic
“Reason” can mean cause, justification, logical inference, or efficient means to effect an end.
“Logic” can mean deductive logic or inductive logic.
The Why-Be-Rational? Challenge: whence does epistemic rationality derive normativity?
Epistemic responsibility: what extent of counterevidence-gathering and obligation to engage with dissenters?
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it?
If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
The voice in your head is more of a Press Officer than a Chief Scientist.
“Bias is whatever it is that makes you believe this version of events”
“Logic/Rationality is any systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence”
“Any opinion I dont believe is biased”
“Rationality is not for winning debates, it’s for deciding which side to join”
“Reason is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be” — Putnam
“The choice between competing theories is arbitrary, since there is no such thing as objective truth” — Popper
CONFIRMATION
Confirmation theory aims to codify how observations or evidence inductively supports (or counter-supports) hypotheses.
Confirmation relations involve at least a three-place relation, between some evidence E, a hypothesis H, and background knowledge K (which may be captured in a probability function P).
These relations may not be uniquely constrained.
Varieties of confirmation:
• Absolute: when evidence is sufficient for belief
• Incremental
Hempel’s conditions for Qualitative (incremental) confirmation:
- Entailment condition: If E implies H, then E confirms H.
- Special consequence condition: If E confirms H, and H implies H′, then E also confirms H′.
- Special consistency condition: If E confirms H, and H is incompatible with H′, then E does not confirm H′.
- Converse consequence condition: If E confirms H, and if H is implied by H′, then E also confirms H′.
Attractive conditions:
◆ Nicod’s condition: All universal generalizations of the form “All Fs are G” are confirmed by all statements of the form “a is both F and G.”
◆ Equivalence condition: If H is logically equivalent to H′, and E confirms H, then E also confirms H′.
There are various problems examined in the literature
Hume’s maxim:
“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavors to establish”
<drafting discussion >
ECREE
How should we interpret/unpack ECREE (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence)?
EC = implausible / unexpected …claims
EE = explanatorily simple / enumeratively-inductively well supported / unexpected …evidence
The terms seem problematically audience-relative and fuzzy/informal.
How can we formalise the colloquial wise practice that:
“Belief in an implausible claim requires evidence of diligent efforts to control for alternative explanations and these efforts should be proportionate to the implausibility” ?
Bayesian conditionalization only determines how to change degrees of beliefs, not how to set them nor when to believe something outright.
THE ETHICS OF BELIEF
► Evidentialism (Clifford)
vs
► Pragmatism (James)
Do we ultimately believe whatever’s useful/helpful?
Can we choose our beliefs? (Doxastic voluntarism)
Epistemic accuracy aims:
✓ seek truth
✓ avoid error
Hume said:
“A wise person apportions their beliefs to the evidence”
Me, for your consideration:
“A wise person apportions their beliefs to the costs and benefits, modulo ethical consequences” ?
OPEN-MINDEDNESS
What is the extent of one’s obligation for inquiry?
eg engaging with dissenters, comprehension-checking, and seeking counterevidence.
Prescribing continuous re-evaluation of all expertise is a fantasy.
How should we apportion novice inquiries into infinite domains of expertise that we rely on in the actual non-ideal case with finite time and effort available to us?
(Me) For your consideration:
“A wise person apportions their inquiry budget to the stakes”?
See also: The primary intellectual value
SCIENCE
Science is some composite of sources of knowledge and social networks of information exchange operating under norms, with the aim of learning about the natural world.
It faces problems of indirect realism, theory-ladenness and underdetermination.
Is the notion of a well-defined “Scientific Method” itself just a warm blanket in the dark?
No experiment is reproducible
Science is just math ideology
Science is the victory of patient insanity over intuition/common sense
Science advances one funeral at a time
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy
“It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and nature may shout INCONSISTENT”
Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What does the scientist have to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!
Both the naturalist and the theist can be stubbornly committed to their world views and not allow contrary evidence to overthrow. Naturalists are just as adept as theists at explaining away evidence that they find inconvenient…that’s a charge that goes both ways
FAKE NEWS and CONSPIRACY THEORIES
We have a misguided intuitive attraction to the norm of assertion
Diligent evaluation of testimony requires these considerations:
• Primary source / Citations
• Context / Omissions
• Details / Exaggeration
• Rebuttals
• Alternative hypotheses
• Assumptions
• Sound arguments
Strong heuristics:
• Credentials
• Past performance (“Track record”)
• Reliability incentive / cheap talk disincentive
• Independent verification / sources (“Cross-check”)
Weaker heuristics:
• Plausibility (your “Prior”)
• (Expert) consensus
• Cui bono / Purpose of author
• Self-consistency
• Professional source
• Articulacy ( / Rhetoric?)
What justifies these criteria for expertise?
The particulars of specialist knowledge matter, leading to the Novice-Expert problem
“Conspiracies are everywhere. And not just that — they are normal”
“For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert” — Clarke’s 4th Law(?)
“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD” — Gibson’s Law
“Dont believe everything that you read / hear / think”
“Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken”
“I love Rumours! Facts can be so misleading, but rumours, true or false are often revealing!” — Hans Landa
CUI BONO
Cui bono identifies motive/cause by considering its basest agenda
Variants:
-Cui est bono? “to whom is it a benefit?”
-Cui prodest? “whom does it profit?”
-Ad cuius bonum? “for whose good?”
-Proderat ergo ipse fecit / Hoc proderat ergo fecit hoc (?) “he benefited therefore he did it”
-Scooby-Doo fallacy
“Always consider the nature — origin, purpose, motives and intended audience — of sources”
“The lowest (most expedient) possible motive is the actual one”
Related: Dogwhistle smear/Association fallacy
We need a reckoning on the use of Cui bono vs Star-manning.
Is cui bono a reasonable, justified principle?
A crude cui bono inference could conflict with:
• Open-mindedness
• Inference to the best/simplest explanation
MISC QUOTATIONS
“There is no pre-established harmony between the pursuit of truth and the welfare of mankind.”
“Upon seeing the shadow of a pigeon, one must resist the urge to look up.”
“All knowledge requires a price”
“Beware the Vulcan greed for knowledge”
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
“Not everything that counts can be counted” (The McNamara Fallacy)
“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
“What a person knows at fifty which they didn’t know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.”
“Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment”
“Book learning cannot compensate for lack of judgment”
“Is imagination more important than knowledge?”
“We dont see things as they are; we see things as we are”
