Okay, but I think we have then clarified that we are talking about your personal vision for how people should use the word knowledge. “Something cannot rightly be called knowledge…” is your opinion, not a reference to some kind of external consensus or standard. Because experts in multiple academic disciplines don’t share your opinion on this. That was all I was wanting to establish. I don’t agree with your opinion. I think you would be better off arguing “You can’t know something is objectively true unless…” instead of continuing this misguided attempt to narrow the definition of knowledge to only what is empirically verifiable.
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@Christy
(Can I just say at this point that I was not expecting to have this spun off into its own thread by the staff. If I was to have started a thread on this, I would have chosen a time in my life when I could have done some more preparation. 
)
Philosophy is a not science, and so I am not breaking some law of the universe, but simply being somewhat antithetical about the utility of definitions as they transfer from the formal space of professional philosophers to general usage. The same tension exists with the word ‘Theory’ in science and its colloquial use.
I merely posit that problems with usage of the word knowledge do not merely come from a general lack of epistemological training and awareness in the population (or in the forum), but that even in philosophy itself, there is no single word assigned to mean that which we know and can demonstrate to be so. It always comes with a qualifier such as ‘empirical’ knowledge. This means that in formal discourse, the word knowledge itself is meaningless unless is comes with a qualifier such as those you have listed - propositional knowledge, semantic knowledge and so on.
When the average person uses the word knowledge it is so loose as to result in constant miscommunication. When talking about religion in particular, I have seen nothing but chaos as people talk past each other.
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Removed for more thought.
It is the alteration of a word from the way everyone uses it which is self defeating. When we find a meaning more useful in a different context then we add on a modifier. In this case “scientific knowledge” or “objective knowledge.” Otherwise it is you who are failing to communicate anything meaningful. Now I quite agree that the traditional meaning (as justified true belief) is very problematic, for the simple reason that nobody believes things which they think are unjustified or untrue. That definition is more about hot air and bluster insisting that what you have is knowledge and what the other guy has is not. It is that sort of empty rhetoric I would dispense with by going with the phenomenal definition according to how people use the word: the beliefs people live by. It is knowledge because they live by it. And the cultural imperialist who measures all by the standard of his own epistemological arrogance who is a blight the world is better off without.
Your strawman here is quite appalling. People do not call their suspicions, hunches, or hypotheses by the word “knowledge.” So when we cut the bull, you are just plastering these words on the beliefs others to deny them equality with your own. The only lack of doubt you can accurately speak of is your own. We have already observed that lack of doubt has nothing to do with science for science has no need of sycophants. That is more the thing for religion, ideology, and politics.
SO to pull the grain of truth out of the muddied waters you have made with your words: There is an epistemological superiority in that which can be demonstrated, as in the findings of science, which are founded upon written procedures anyone can follow to get the same results no matter what they believe. That superiority is a basis for a reasonable expectation that others should agree. It is not about certainty or lack of doubt but about what is reasonable given the accumulated evidence.
But by the SAME STANDARD the lack of evidence and demonstration for a belief provides you NO reasonable expectation that others should agree with your claim that it cannot be knowledge. Quite the contrary, I make the claim that it is demonstrable that people can know things for which there is no evidence or proof whatsoever. Would you like me to demonstrate this… Are you really not able to construct a demonstration of this yourself? It is easy because people do it all the time by destroying evidence.
Which nobody does… this is empty rhetoric for supporting your own preference for throwing everything in the same “knowledge” basket and a “not-knowledge” basket, which is not helpful at all.
The critical problem here is that science is not and cannot be life itself. Science requires objective observation. Life requires subjective participation. Requiring everyone to be a scientist is quite absurd and restricting the word “knowledge” to scientists alone is also absurd. Too often what this really amounts to is people with a pretense equating their way of thinking in life to science which is nothing but narcissistic self deception. Science is really only applicable to a narrow aspect of life where things are measurable and testable.
So three baskets are more helpful: “objective knowledge” for that which is demonstrable, “subjective knowledge” for that which people know (such as by personal experience) which is not demonstrable, and “not-knowledge” for suspicions, hunches, guesses, and other beliefs which we would not stake our life on.
This sounds to me like an excuse to make your own beliefs the judge of other people.
LOL Very few words in any language are singular and precise… especially those for abstractions. Fortunately we have a way of dealing with this. We state our definitions in order to make our meaning more clear.
Do you consider Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (TSR)–in part or whole–to be empirical knowledge or non-empirical knowledge?
A person can know what his favorite color is. A person can know what he remembers.
But this question of yours raises some interesting questions about you. Do you make your own range of experiences the measure of all human experiences? If it something you have never experienced, do you claim therefore that this is not a human experience. It is demonstrable that this is unreasonable.
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I don’t know what Peter’s thoughts on this are, but there is a ton of empirical evidence for relativity.
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Heh, heh, … so sez you and the majority. Would you be so kind as to point me to the empirical evidence for “length contraction”?
LIGO is a good example. Gravity waves shorten and lengthen the legs of the detectors which changes the interference pattern in the experiment.
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So, in your (or mainstream science’s) opinion, does the LIGO evidence confirm Einstein’s “length contraction” or Lorentzian/Neo-Lorentzian "length contraction?
If the former, then Lorentzian/Neo-Lorentzian “length contraction” is false. If the latter, then Einstein’s “length contraction” is false. Both cannot be true.
Well as far as I know, Special Relativity has been verified scientifically and the evidence is very strong. So yes, I would say that this is knowledge as I am trying to define it, or empirical knowledge as is generally described.
This is to say that while we cannot be certain of anything, and certainty is anathema in science, if we are confident in our ideas or models of reality and they continue to comport with reality when tested rigorously, then we can use the term knowledge safely enough in my view.
Why do you ask specifically about SR?
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Perhaps you could tell us what the difference is between the two?
Also, muons are another good example of time and length contraction.
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Because (a) SR and Lorentzian/Neo-Lorentzian Relativity are two different theories both of which cannot be true, and (b) if one is true, my money is on the latter, which puts me in the minority and makes me what mainstream relativists call “a crank/crackpot”).
The subject matter of my inquiry addresses your initial question.
What? No bait on the hook for my effort? LOL!
Give me a chance to think, not about whether to answer, but about how I want to answer. I’ll be back soon, but just not immediately.
I. Introduction.
A.1. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity = TSR = STR = SR.
A.2. Lorentz Ether Theory = LET > Neo-Lorentzian Relativity = NLR.
B.1. LET assumed “a motionless aether” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory. NLR assumes “a preferred” (a.k.a. privileged) reference frame, which plays the role of LET’s motionless aether.
B.2. SR denies Absolute Simultaneity; NLR affirms Absolute Simultaneity.
B.3. Both SR and NLR affirm time dilation and length contraction; however, although time dilation appears similar in both theories; length contraction does not.
B.4. “Because the same mathematical formalism occurs in both, it is not possible to distinguish between [NLR] and SR by experiment.”
II. The following duplicates a hypothetical SR scenario posted elsewhere in www.biologos.org previously.
(To be continued)
Hi @mitchellmckain, I note that your comments are fairly energetic and shows that you have a lot of passion around this and that I may have struck a nerve with you. This is not my intention. I will do my best in my limited time to address some of your points.
I don’t think I have made the argument anywhere that if the tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it that it didn’t happen, which is what I think you have miss-construed here. I therefore agree with the examples you have provided in so far as the point being that not having evidence is not itself a basis for concluding much if anything about a proposition. An exception might be if proposition is expressed inside a presumptive framework. An example of this would be the absence of evidence for voter fraud does not mean there was no voter fraud, but it does mean that, if our proposition is that unless evidence is provided for voter fraud we will assume that absence of evidence is sufficient to assume that no crime has occurred (Presumption of innocence). We do not know if voter fraud occurred or not, but what we do know is that a burden of proof that there was has not been met. Thus we have knowledge arising out of an examination of reality within reasonable bounds. That knowledge is not whether or not there was voter fraud, but it is knowledge about whether or not we have met the terms of our framework for the inquiry.
This is what is known as practical knowledge. With practical knowledge, the validation of this knowledge is through the experience of doing and the mostly immediate feedback telling you that it is justified true belief. But of course there are many cases where people have habits and ways of doing things that are actually counter-productive in some way or actually seem to achieve success but not for the reason they think. So while the day to day tasks we perform, based on our know-how / past experience are justified beliefs, they are not always necessarily justified true beliefs. Eg. I can wear a bracelet that keeps dragons away; it works fine and I highly recommend it, but is that justified true belief?
People are free to call their beliefs knowledge, but if we care about what is actually true, then we are in danger of conferring a status of fact or certainty to things which could indeed be quite wrong. My argument is that without a word ( a single word without a qualifier) which we all agree is specifically reserved for those things that we can say are justified true belief (based on careful analysis, testing and evidence), then we are bound to tie ourselves up in confusion. One only has to read the entirety of the BioLogos forum and every other forum about religion to see that this problem is all-pervasive.
I completely agree. But I did not say that those who are not familiar with the tools of science were not capable of knowing things. We all know that objects fall to the earth, without the need for a theory of gravity or the means by which science has tested it. I don’t think I have made that argument Mitchell.
The last line seems to be a non-sequitur. I don’t think you have connected this together properly. At any rate, I am happy to talk about the concept of subjective knowledge.
Subjectively, I view myself now writing this line. This is my subjective experience. I need only make the claim to myself that my experience makes sense in the context only of the assumption that it is a real thing and internally self-consistent. If I were to view myself typing this only to discover I was actually doing something else like eating a potato the whole time, then I would know that either my apprehension of the present moment is flawed, or my recollection of writing is flawed. Either way, I could no longer claim to have justified true belief. If however, I look back at the end of this paragraph and discover that it has indeed been happening, I have, within the framework of rationale discourse, justification for believing my comprehension of reality in this case.
Note that this is potentially quite different from having a religious experience, of the kind that apparently leaves one with the sense of a tangible being whose presence you felt. You could use the argument above that your feelings and sense of the presence of God comported with a strong belief that God was right there with you. But this can never be knowledge that God exists, only that your internal processes are self-consistent. When I look above to the previous paragraph, I can see that my self-consistent framework comports with reality, thus a connection is demonstrable between my subjective internal experience and the world outside my head. With religious experiences, one has a profound experience and simply carries that forward in the way we conduct ourselves and view our future experiences, and we then see signs everywhere (confirmation bias) to confirm that experience to ourselves. This is not to say that God does or does not exist, merely to say that you could not rightly claim that such an experience is justified true belief that God exists, only that it is justified true belief that you had an experience that made you believe without external justification that God exists.
Obviously this is something you do not know, since you cannot demonstrate any such thing.
I do believe you are being somewhat obtuse here. I will move on.
I responded to this in my first reply. I hope you read that!
I addressed this already above. I am not accusing you of straw-manning me, but simply misconstruing what I said.
I think this is a straw man though. I don’t think it is a fair representation of what I said. I have acknowledged that there are practical and pragmatic dimensions to this discussion. You must have missed that.
Now to your second long post Mitchell…
The problem Mitchell is that people do not routinely use those qualifiers. I don’t know anything about you and the people you encounter on a daily basis, but I constantly see people use the word knowledge to mean that they have a high degree of certainty that their beliefs are true when they patently are not. Many of these people bristle at the suggestion that their cherished belief is not actually knowledge, but simply something sincerely and deeply felt so much that they cannot countenance the idea of it being false. People like this are actively and consciously upgrading their beliefs to the status of knowledge precisely because they know from experience that other people interpret the word knowledge or ‘know’ to be more substantive then mere belief. It is the very fact that many people do this that is evidence of one common usage of the word ‘knowledge’ to mean justified true belief and not merely subjective experience. Otherwise why the upgrade?
Yes it is a problem that people routinely believe that what they think is justified, but this only highlights my point. Without a framework of thinking around this and word reserved to only mean that which is justified (evidence and sound argument), then we have a society that operates on sincere misapprehensions as a matter of course.
Labeling me a cultural imperialist merely because I dare to question your belief that beliefs that people live by should carry the unqualified label of knowledge is just empty rhetoric and seems to me to be an emotional argument. Also, you have contradicted yourself since you claimed early that people place qualifiers along with the word knowledge, yet you have not done so here, and have confirmed that the people you speak of also do not. Look, I don’t want to be a smart**ass here and turn this into a nit-picking exercise, but my whole point is that how people use the word, varies everywhere, is imprecise, confusing and easily manipulated by people. It is problematic, and I really am surprised that you are fighting this hard to avoid acknowledging this.
Your strawman here is quite appalling. People do not call their suspicions, hunches, or hypotheses by the word “knowledge.” So when we cut the bull, you are just plastering these words on the beliefs others to deny them equality with your own. The only lack of doubt you can accurately speak of is your own. We have already observed that lack of doubt has nothing to do with science for science has no need of sycophants. That is more the thing for religion, ideology, and politics.
I don’t want to be rude here, but the phrase “You don’t get out much” springs to mind. Have you ever been to a spiritual / psychic / alternative medicine fair? if you haven’t then do so, and you will hear every kind of flimsy, ridiculous and absurd notion peddle as totally confirmed knowledge, based on subjective experience mixed in with a load of lies - many of which there people believe. Sure there are those who are far more careful with their usage of words and I do not mean to tar everyone with the same brush. I have been debating crackpots and cultist and conspiracists for years and I can say with great confidence that their usage of the word knowledge is not that far from what a lot of other ‘normal’ people use, including many Christians.
To say that I lack doubt is frankly just an assumption wrapped inside an insult. You are really the one making the assumption here, which is that I have no doubt. I have doubt running through my veins. I am scientifically trained, I am a skeptic and I come to my arguments about the usage of the word knowledge precisely because it is the lack of a sufficiently tight definition that often confounds our attempts to proper challenge people’s beliefs and find out what is true.
I don’t really think I have been that unclear, but ok. Again I have not claimed certainty as the goal or a criterion of my definition, so I am not sure what you are trying to achieve with this particular assault…
I am sorry Mitchell, maybe I am just a bit dense, but this made no sense to me at all.
I admit I was very loose with my language here. I got a bit carried away and you are right to challenge that. I guess should have said something like 'If we throw things into the knowledge basket that are not open to question or verification, especially those things which are in principle unverifiable or unfalsifiable, we rob ourselves of the language we need to course correct, and steer ourselves…etc".
I know you will object to that too, but at least it is not because it was sloppy wording!
Ok, so now I am guilty of narcissistic self-deception. You really do like to lay it on thick Mitchell! I seem to have angered you, but that was not my intention. I am merely saying that there are problems that come from imprecision in language (nothing new there) and the common usages of the word knowledge are especially problematic because we use that word to help sort out all the other imprecision in language. Can you not see the problem here?
Somehow Mitchell, you have taken great umbrage at what I have said, like I am some sort of arrogant elitists looking down at the plebs and tut-tutting. Or that I am undermining the notions that you and others might employ to support unjustified yet sincerely held religious beliefs, using an apparently different epistemology thus making myself an easy target. Why not try to not react to your fears and concerns and assumptions about me and see that I am not really being that threatening and I am only trying to highlight a difficulty with language that I think we should all be happy to shine a light on.
My point above regarding subjective knowledge is that what we are really talking about is a kind of meta-knowledge about ourselves, not about the subject of our observations per se. Thus I content that so called subjective knowledge is a misleading term at best.
More invective here Mtichell. I will let it go.
LOL Very few words in any language are singular and precise… especially those for abstractions. Fortunately we have a way of dealing with this. We state our definitions in order to make our meaning more clear.
It is this last comment that shows your contradictions most clearly. You say that I am imposing the standards of science on others, yet here you make the unqualified claim that people state their definitions in order to their meaning more clear, yet elsewhere you have said that they do not do this. This is all a bit of a mess Mitchell and I really don’t know how to respond other than to say that your arguments seem incoherent and emotionally driven. I don’t say that to wind you up further, but I simply cant make out a clear argument from what you have written. So, ironically, you have not made your meaning more clear.
Anyway, I hope we can come to a closer understanding at some stage.
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Hi Terry, if I was to follow you down this rabbit hole, I have a feeling that at the end of it we will simply say that at this point we don’t know for sure if SR is true and then we might adjust our confidence in at least part of it, in proportion to the increased level of uncertainty. That is science. It is rather a mystery to me what point you are attempting to prove here.
If a some point we belief X to be true because we have substantial evidence that X explains, and little if anything that contradicts X, we might say that we know that it is worthwhile to treat X as if it is true with a reasonable level of confidence, and that the details of X can be provisionally assigned the term ‘knowledge’, but that this is open to change when new counter-evidence appears. This is science. No problem there.
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By all means, Peter, don’t.
I don’t know who your “we” refers to, but I can tell you that it doesn’t include me. It’s clear to me that you and I will simply end up disagreeing more often than not.
You started this thread with two questions and, IMO, your OP contains rather strong language:
- 'Something cannot rightly be called knowledge unless it can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt."
- “If you are asserting belief as knowledge, despite … the fact that it has been demonstrated to be wrong then at best you are guilty of ignorance.”
- “If you have been shown that the counter-evidence exists but ignore it and deny it and do not bother to fact check your claims then this is a tacit lie.”
- “People who conduct themselves this way … actually do not know what you are saying is really true.”
- “I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, … or opposing the views of others without being sure of my ground.”
Being slightly familiar with SR and curious to discover how much you might know about it, I asked:
You’ve satisfied my curiosity. Thanks.
Now, as soon as I’ve satisfied T_aquaticus’ curiosity, I’ll butt out of this thread.
Exactly. Dictionaries justify their definitions based on usage. Recourse to dictionaries is legitimate for pedagogy and standardization, but language in the wild really only cares about - “do you get what I mean?”
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I saw a deer pass about 6 feet in front of me while I was biking alone on a trail 4 months ago. It jumped out from the hedge so close to me I had to slam on my breaks to avoid colliding with it.
That is a true fact. And I do indeed have “knowledge” of that fact.
And no, that fact can in no way be demonstrated to you or anyone else empirically or in some way beyond a reasonable doubt. But to claim that I or anyone else cannot be said to have “knowledge” of said event is absurd. Thus I respectfully suggest that your definition of “knowledge” is quite faulty.