Reformed Nihilist wrote:


My point is we can't judge knowlege 'community standards aside', or it just becomes belief. If this man explains his position in full, and we (the community) do not agree that his reason for believing is a good one (justified), then to us (remember, were the community, and we set the standards by which knowledge is judged), we have knowledge, and he has false belief. I am saying that justification comes from the attempt to divorce our beliefs from subjectivity, by appealing and accepting a community as judge.

I agree with much of what you have written. I am however somewhat confused by the subjective part..
The justification I use for accepting a belief’ is dependent on my presupposing the belief to be true; (so it is that many inclinations toward belief’ do not become belief’) that is, in accordance with presupposing belief’...given that my presupposing is representative of the community from which I hail.

Following Wittgenstein; It is only by belief first and doubt later that learning can take place.





I wasn't sure how to take this, so I think charity dictates 'playfull irony'?

I promise you my wisdom is nothing but toilet paper. I'm just trying to wipe the crap away, and be left with a shiny, clean issue.

Reformed Nihilist wrote:


Isn't saying you believe something equivalent to saying you presuppose it is true?

darkcrow wrote:
Not exactly
Example...this time I will quote Wittgenstein. "As children we learn facts; e.g., that every human being has a brain, and we take them on trust. I believe that there is an island, Australia, of such and such a shape, and so on and so on; I believe that I had great-grandparents, and that the people who gave themselves out as my parents really were my parents, etc. This belief may never have been expressed; even the thought that it was so, never thought."

So it is that when I say, "... dependent on my presupposing the belief to be true..." I am refering to those kinds of presupposing.

AKG wrote:
Suppose the argument remains the same, but the community's criteria change such that it is initially thought of as unjustified, but then later thought of as justified. If we are to accept your redefinition of "justified," then whether or not a belief is "justified" can change independent of the actual justifications. What's more important in determining whether something is justified is whether enough people believe that it's justified, not what the actual justifications are. To say something is "justified" tells us only what the community is willing to believe, it tells us nothing about the belief or the reasoning itself.

Why does it depend on a point of view at all?

Indeed, people and communities have their respective points of view, but is that all there is to it? The answers to some questions are entirely contingent on point of view. The value of things, the difficulty of tasks, etc. are such questions. The mass of an object (neglecting relativistic effects) is not. People might have different points of view about such things, but that doesn't mean that all we can say is what a person's point of view is. We can also say which points of view are wrong, and which are correct.

You're telling us that justification is of the former kind. That to say something is justified is really just to say that it is justified from a certain point of view.

I can see no reason as to why this is though.

People who believed that a flat-earth belief was justified were wrong,

such a belief is not justified.

To them, yes it was justified, but they'd be wrong. They're not just wrong according to us, they're wrong, plain and simple.

Suppose I liked chocolate as a child, but now don't. I would never say that I was wrong about whether chocolate tastes good. Back then it did, now I feel differently. As a child, a certain task may have been difficult for me, now it's not. I wasn't wrong back then, I was just different.

On the other hand, when we look back at previous standards of justification that we've scrapped (I'm talking about a person's own standards that he himself has scrapped in his lifetime), we don't say that those were just different standards, we say that those were wrong standards. Whereas we would never look back and say that we were wrong for liking chocoloate, we can and do look back and realize we were wrong for believing in X simply because Y told us; we realize that "because Y says so" is an incorrect standard for justification.

You mean it was believed that the world was flat. Unless you mean to say that we can know things that are false, in which case why call it knowledge at all?

jaoman wrote:
No so. We cannot prove knowledge directly, but its not the same as having no knowledge. Some fact have never changed. Physical shapes, for instance, for as long as any marking were made to the fact have been represented very similarly. Is it not than an external truth that we've always (supposing the existence of history, of course) percieved humans to have two arms and two legs?