This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Justified true belief, on the subject of Uncategorized.

True story (not mine; someone else's): My friend, N, and I walk through the philosophy dept and finally find our professor sitting in an office. N looks around and says "Wow! You sure have a lot of books."

Without even a second's pause the professor says "That's an excellent example of why justified, true belief is not knowledge. You obviously believe I have a lot of books. And you are justified in thinking so since I'm a college professor. And it is indeed true that I have a lot of books. However, this is not my office."

Only people who have read any philosophy will find this funny. :-)

None
Nick

I’m sure you used this as a sig on Usenet some years ago. :)Anyway, it’s still bloody funny. ;)

Nicholas Wolverson

Perfect.

Mark

Bwahahahahahahaha.

soph

Stuck on an essay on JTB but this cheered me up!

Amanda

also stuck on an essay on jtb but I am now stuck on an essay on jtb and smiling. Thanks

james

Question is... was he really justified in believing it was the professors room? He made an assumption without being sure.

Phillimon

How do you justify assumptions? You are making the jtb essay easier for me.

Geoff

What IS PhIlos///pht/////?????y.

Sidey

I have knowledge that my knowledge is inknowedgeable due to my lack of knowlede.This by the way in knowledge.

Clouseau

Does your dog bite? No. That’s not my dog.

jo

Thats only funny because its lame

The-Ribboned-One

The only thing you can truly know is doubt, therefore it doesn’t matter whether N was justified, believed in what he said or thought it was true the only thing N can KNOW is that they can doubt, doubt being a thought, they know they can THINK, therfore knowing they have somekind of mind…even if it is a pea in a glass of lemonade…Sorry, pretty irrelevant but i’m really stuck into Descartes at the moment, i keep writing profound things on bathroom walls…not that i know thats what i’m doing. I’ll be quiet now.

hollie thorman is da best

Knowledge as justified true believe does not always work. I could make a ludicrous false claim that I know my brother eats live chickens and does a voodoo dance at midnight. I could say I know this because I strongly believe it to be true; I am justified in believing it because friends of mine have told me they saw him do it, and it is true because my brother has mental disorders. This would most definitely count as justified true believe, but what’s to say it is not false knowledge? My friends could be lying and it is in fact me with the mental disorder and not my brother.

okey wintessy

yes, ite true that justified true belief cannot be knowledge,as many knowledge guessings can be justifed, yet they are not true .

lalala

pfffff

fruity killer no one iller

do 1

macsnafu

The problem with Justified True Belief hinges on what one means by “justified“. In the weak sense of the word, the student is indeed justified in believing that the professor has a lot of books; that is, he has good reasons for believing so. In the strong sense of the word, however, he cannot be justified in his belief unless he confirmed that the books he was looking at actually belonged to the professor he was talking to. The Gettier problem hinges on mistakes or coincidences based upon the weak sense of justification. A person has reason to believe something is true, but not good proof or evidence that it is.

macsnafu

I came up with another problem with Justified True Belief. We cannot know if a belief is true independently of our justification for it. Thus, JTB becomes simply Justified Belief, where the justification is, as I mentioned in the previous post, sufficiently strong for believing it to be true.

While this may seem insufficient for certainty, I think it may be necessary to consider probablity or degrees of certainty when it comes to knowledge, even though it may be difficult to quantify such probability. Such an idea could also tie into some theory of coherentism. That is, that more pieces of evidence, more justification, increases the likelihood or probability of a belief being true.
macsnafu

I came up with another problem with Justified True Belief. We cannot know if a belief is true independently of our justification for it. Thus, JTB becomes simply Justified Belief, where the justification is, as I mentioned in the previous post, sufficiently strong for believing it to be true.

While this may seem insufficient for certainty, I think it may be necessary to consider probablity or degrees of certainty when it comes to knowledge, even though it may be difficult to quantify such probability. Such an idea could also tie into some theory of coherentism. That is, that more pieces of evidence, more justification, increases the likelihood or probability of a belief being true.
fuck I.B

I have a friend who is an actor, and he has a fiancé. Walking past a church one day I see him emerge from the church with a bride, and many guests throwing confetti over them. I believe that he has got married without inviting me, my justification being the scene in front of me. This is also true; he has got married without inviting me. However unbeknownst to me he got married in secret the previous weekend, and the scene in front of me is the set for a film he is making. So although I am justified and correct in believing that he has got married without inviting me, Gettier would argue, I cannot be said at that moment to have knowledge of that as my assumption as to what I am seeing is incorrect.
(in the example above that I was seeing a genuine wedding), the assumptions in Gettier counter examples are false, but through chance or invalid reasoning support a true belief.

macsnafu

Nice example with the wedding. You have some justification for believing your friend got married, but not sufficient justification. Your belief isn't correct because it's based on seeing the fake wedding, not seeing the real wedding or finding out about it in the newspapers or some other evidence.

So again, knowledge depends greatly on the strength or probability of our justification, and cannot be made separate or independent of our justification for it.

This raises the question as to whether or not any belief can be known with absolute certainty. While I think it can, I also think that much of what we "know" is simply justified to a high degree of probability (90%, 95%, 99%), but not certainty.

smellilie

Great pearls of wisdom for my essay!

Was also wondering_even if all knowledge has to be JTB it doesn't imply all JTB has to be knowledge,? x

oTTo

hey, i were actually stuck on more material for my JTB essay, found this and it made me smile, aswell as providing me with abit of humour for my tutor whilst she marks the essay lol nice one

Bart

When you are working with probabilities of a believe being true, and true knownledge being a probability of 1, that true knowledge doesn't exist since that wouldn't be a probability then. It will always be an approximation of true truth. There is always an alternative truth conceivable for anything, however far-fetched it may be.

Weezy

Your idea of true truth imples that there is such a thing as false truth. To me that doesnt make sense, is the description of true truth not just a tortollogy? (sorry about the spelling!)

JTB

So, JTB is not knowledge? then justify JTB?

stephanie

cute example!! (((: but im still stuck on my JTB essay.. hehx..

liz

u htink this is crap i have to write 100 word on this for a final

macsnafu

When you are working with probabilities of a believe being true, and true knownledge being a probability of 1, that true knowledge doesn’t exist since that wouldn’t be a probability then. It will always be an approximation of true truth. There is always an alternative truth conceivable for anything, however far-fetched it may be.

Two points. One, sure there may be a far-fetched alternative, but its likelihood of being true may be so small as to be insignificant (at least to normal humans living a normal life). Will the sun rise tomorrow? Well, there's this ever-so-slight chance that it'll go nova, or that super-powerful aliens will come along and snuff out its energies, or somesuch. But really! Are such absurd possibilities significant enough that you and I should worry about them? Second, some things are true by definition. 2 + 2 = 4. Call them tautologies, or synthetic propositions or whatever. Since they are true by definition, then knowledge of them is, in fact, a probability of 1.

macsnafu

Sorry, I meant "analytic" not synthetic propositions. I always mix the two up...

;-)

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