AKG wrote:
Why? You've asserted that your criteria for belief is necessarily worse than the community's.

There's no need for "epistemic solipsism." I gave an objective standard for determining a good justification standard.

Take a bunch of beliefs, and look at the reasons you have for those beliefs. Check if those beliefs are true, and if you do this enough, you can get a sense for which reasons tend to lead to truth, and which don't. You don't need a community for any of this. If someone tells you to look behind the couch because there's a present there for you, you might do so, and when you go back there, maybe he steals your shoes. If he does this enough times, you'll start to realized that believing that there is a present there is not a justified belief if the reason is, "because that person told me there is one there."

AKG wrote:
I think, as a solution to that particular problem, we should say that one only knows a conjunction to be true if he knows one of the conjuncts to be true. This does add another condition on to what is required for knowledge, and there's nothing wrong with this. It may be more economical to simply clarify the definition of the given terms, but that's not necessary, and it's not as though the given "clarification" helps at all.I've done much more than that, hopefully you haven't ignored everything I've said.

AKG wrote:
What's wrong with that? I said "conjunction" when I meant to say "disjunction." However, when it comes to actual conjunctions, P & Q, then yes, we need to know both P and Q if we are to say that we know P & Q, what's wrong with that? And for a disjunction, we must know one of the disjuncts. In light of your man/woman example, this needs further qualification. You don't need to know either of P or ~P to know P v ~P. P v ~P is a tautology. However, when P v Q is not a tautology, then to claim you know it, you must know one of the disjuncts.

It means that the mass of an object is the mass of that object regardless of anyone's opinion. Likewise, a reason tends to lead to truth regardless of opinion. Even if a community of people believe that some reason is a good reason, that doesn't make it so.

1) How does your redefinition even touch the Gettier problems?

3) A person may want to prove a mathematical theorem or scientific hypothesis to himself. He can justify a hypothesis (not yet a belief) to himself without a community, so how can you make your definition contingent on a community?

4) Why is there no difference by your definition between justifying a proposition and duping a community into believing it?

5) You've admitted that some criteria can be bad criteria, and you obviously believe in your own criteria, yet you'd still say that a proposition satisfying a bad criteria can be called justified and a proposition satisfying your own criteria can not be.

6) "Justified" can't possibly mean "what the community thinks is justified," since that's circular. Does defining X as "whatever the community thinks is X" tell us anything about X? What the community thinks is justified is just what the community thinks is justified, nothing more, nothing less. You can't possibly think "justified" is, by definition, what the community thinks is justified (unless you don't like thinking for yourself), you can only happen to agree with the community standard.

7) Why should we trust the community as though it is inherently wiser than any given individual? Why is it that, regardless of the community, it's size, the number of competent people in it, etc. you're necessarily dumber than average?

8) Why not believe anything and everything your community tells you is justified, since you believe them to be the standard of justification? Wasn't Galileo an idiot for believing that certain beliefs about the planets were unjusitifed even though the community said they were justified? If we really should believe that whatever the community says is justified is indeed, by definition, justified, then shouldn't Galileo have never questioned the justification of those certain beliefs? After all, no one would question a belief that they honestly believed was justified.

9) You say that if you're an idiot, you need a way to judge your reasoning aside from your own opinion, but you don't seem to grant that the opposite case is possible. Whereas you say that your criteria for justification may be off, and you say that you need to check with others, those others on the other hand need not check with you. It's possible that others' standards are better than yours (and hence you want to call their standard the standard) but if it turns out that your standard is better than theirs, then will you agree then that their standard is irrelevant and in fact your standard is the standard? You might say, "How do I know my standard is any good?" Well, the same way you can tell if their standard is any good.

10) If you see something odd, you'll ask around with others to check that you're not delusional, but if you see nothing odd and everyone around you is on acid and they all claim to see strange things, you'll take their word?

Would you say that you know that the Earth is round? Would you say that there's a possibility that there's a conspiracy, and it's really not, and everyone's out to trick you? You need not believe that this is at all probable, but is it at least possible? Now if you say that you know it, then you're saying that you think it's true. On the other hand, you have a shadow of a doubt in it's truth. That's a contradiction. So perhaps truth is not a condition for knowledge. Or perhaps we shouldn't call beliefs about the shape of the Earth "knowledge." Or perhaps we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is round, but I'd ask, how do we know that?

Personally, I think justified really should entail truth. For one, as opposed to your redefinition, this is much closer to conventional definition.

To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid (dictionary.com


Not just "reasonable" or "believable," but "right." To show something is right, it must be right. I can't show you that I can bench 250 if I can't bench 250; at best, I can make an illusion to dupe you into thinking I can. The only thing we lose by this is that there are a number of things we cannot technically call knowledge. But so what? Unless we are desperate to call as many things "knowledge" as we can, I don't see the problem. People will call false beliefs "knowledge." People will call unjustified beliefs "knowledge." People will call beliefs that they themselves doubt (although barely) "knowledge." We will simply have to fight the urge to call anything and everything "justified" and have to recognize that those beliefs which we'd like to call "justified" are, at best, only "very understandable" or "necessary given certain assumptions" but may not, in fact, be justified. Whether we claim we "know" things or not about certain properties of materials, it doesn't affect our ability to use those beliefs about material properties in designing bridges.

AKG wrote:
Yes, I agree my condition for disjunctions was wrong. But how would you solve this problem then? By stipulating that justification is only possible for true beliefs, this problem disappears. Since you don't want to do this, how do you solve the problem?

There's a difference between the reasons a community identifies as good, and those that are good. Justified beliefs are those beliefs based on good reason. Beliefs justified according to a community are beliefs justified according to reasons that the community identifies as good. If the community does not identify these reasons correctly, then some beliefs which are justified according to a community may in fact not be justified, and so some beliefs which the community labels "justified" would be labelled incorrectly. It takes people to both judge justification and measure mass. But in both situations, people can be wrong, so "justified," just like "mass," is not something that is true of a belief just because a community thinks so.

I did, it doesn't deal with the Gettier problems. I don't see what it does really. I'll repeat:

Suppose Bill is justified in believing P according to the community. He's then justified (according to the community) in believing P v Q. Suppose P is false and Q is true. Then he has a justified, true belief that P v Q, but the community wouldn't call his belief knowledge.

Now either you claim that it is impossible for a community to call such a belief "justified" (why would it be impossible, can't the community believe that a false belief is justified, or do the people necessarily believe, like I do, that a belief can't be both justified and false?) or it is impossible for a community to deny that such a belief is "knowledge." However, I might say (if I were to adopt weaker conditions for justification) that he is justified (you're saying we can call false beliefs justified, so suppose I do that here), yet I wouldn't call it knowledge, and I doubt anyone would. If the community were like me, then we'd have a community saying that a JTB was not knowledge. I don't think there's any "changing of points of view" in this problem, but even if you think there is, we can state explicitly that the community's point of view is the point of view throughout, and the problem doesn't disappear. The problem isn't even touched.

How does this address the question? You're saying that we should consider "justified" that and only that which the community considers justified. But when we know we're right and the community is wrong, we should still call ourselves unjustified?

And, of course, JTB is not inherently social at all. Justified means "proven to be right." If I hypothesize (not believe, just hypothesize) that water purity affects its freezing temperature, then I can attempt to justify this (or it's negation) to myself.Why? Like I said, you don't just randomly believe anything and everything. Many things you consider first as hypotheses. Then you justify these things to yourself, and then you can say that you either believe it or don't. You can hold hypotheses up to a standard of justification so you can call them knowledge if they hold up to the standard. It seems that you're saying that if a person has his own standard, and justifies certain hypotheses to this standard, he can't call them knowledge afterwards, but if this person lives in a community that agrees to the exact same standard, that the belief is magically called knowledge (even though nothing has changed). In fact, if he lives in a community of idiots who have a bad standard, you would go so far as to say that he doesn't have knowledge. Although his standard is better than the community's, since the idiots don't agree with him, he can't call his beliefs knowledge.

We're talking about justifying a proposition. As you've defined "justified" the proposition doesn't have to be true or false.

We're isolating the "justified" condition from the "truth" or "believed" conditions here.And you don't find that strange? You naturally believe your own criteria to be the best (otherwise you would choose a better criteria), but you will admit that your own beliefs are unjustified if a number of idiots think it's not. Galileo should have admitted that his silly beliefs were unjustified, right? How can you believe a proposition to be true and be unjustified? You've said that any person who believes something also believes that his belief is justified (you use this to argue that justification is redundant if it's only subjective). So everything you believe, you must believe is justified. At the same time, some things you believe, you believe are unjustified because idiots disagree with you. So which is it?

I don't know, how many people in a community need to agree to make something a community standard?

Anyways, I would say that "tend to lead to truth," is a bad condition. It was my attempt at a compromise, but such a definition is bound to fail.

Most rational people can decide what can rationally be doubted, and what can't. If something can rationally be doubted, then the reasons for that belief can't be said to show you the truth. If they really did show you the truth, you wouldn't doubt.

Which reasons show us the truth? Well, I can make a decision in regards to this just as well as any "community" can, so it's not as though appealing to a community will be any sort of a qualitative improvement. In fact, it can be a hindrance, so the community can't be a necessary component of justification. The question, "what makes a reason a good reason," is, I believe, another topic.

I believe that certain logical truths cannot be doubted, it would be akin to denying definitions. I believe that we cannot doubt our experiences themselves, although we can doubt whether our experiences correspond to anything outside themselves (whether they accurately represent an external world or not). However, this is clearly a different topic. It suffices to say that there's no redundancy or circularity for a person to decide for himself which reasons are good.

Moreover, nothing is to be gained from consulting with the community, and in fact, shifting the burden to the community does not eliminate the circularity, it just relocates it. However a community (which is just a bunch of individuals) can decide which reasons are good, so can an individual.

Why should I trust another person? What if I can see something that others can't? Then consulting with them would not solidify justification, it may even hinder it. Of course, if they see something I can't, then I consult with them. But it is not as though I necessarily must to be justified.

I mentioned before that you're lucky to live in a community full of experts. What if someone lives in an isolated community where there aren't enough people like him? What about Galileo? What if everyone disagrees with your propositions, do you admit that they're then unjustified?

How so? The question is about whether you're justified or not. The acid trippers would say you're unjustified, and you would say you're justified. But you have no one else to consult with. So what do you do? Do you say that you are justified, and the acid trippers are wrong, or do you say, by virtue of the fact that there are more acid trippers than you, that they inherently have the right to determine what's justified and you'll just have to keep quiet?

JTB is a "bad" definition. The T should be superfluous, since the J should entail it. In the context of JTB, then yes, J shouldn't entail T, but this is only in the context of a bad definition. Initially, I tried to work within this context. I showed that a community-dependent idea of justification was necessarily flawed (within JTB or without) and tried to provide an alternative within this context. But the alternative also fails the Gettier problems. So if you want, I can show you that the community-dependent standard of justification fails regardless, but if you ask me for an alternative, I can't honestly give you one that I believe in where J doesn't entail T. The only consequence of this is that we will have to be more like skeptics, and will not be able to call as many things "justified" or "knowledge," but I see no problem with that - it may even be healthy.

If you want to discuss the issue only in the context of JTB, then don't ask me for an alternative definition of justification. All I can do is show that the community-based definition is wrong.