Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!lll-lcc!pyramid!thirdi!sarge
From: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: the nature of knowledge
Message-ID: <52@thirdi.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Jul-87 01:26:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: thirdi.52
Posted: Tue Jul  7 01:26:42 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jul-87 06:36:02 EDT
References: <3587e521.44e6@apollo.uucp> <680@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
Reply-To: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Distribution: world
Organization: Institute for Research in Metapsychology
Lines: 181
Keywords: knowledge belief certainty idea prediction
Summary: Prediction only ONE criterion for belief or knowledge.

In article <112@snark.UUCP> eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>In article <48@thirdi.UUCP>, sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes:
>> At any particular moment, from the viewpoint of an individual, knowledge and
>> belief (meaning not a weak opinion but a firmly-held conviction) are one and
>> the same thing.  If I believe something (such as the truth of *this*
>> philosophical position), I say "I *know* it's true."  In other words, it is
>> knowledge, to me.  If you agree with my belief, you also call it knowledge,
>> because then it is a belief of *yours* and therefore knowledge for you.  If
>> you don't agree or aren't sure, you call it a "belief" of *mine*.  It isn't,
>> then, a belief of *yours*, in the sense of belief I gave above.  That, in my
>> view, is what knowledge actually is.
>
>This is a correct *psychological* view of the relation of 'belief' and
>'knowledge' to the believing mind, but it sidesteps the real issue, which
>is the degree of confirmation of beliefs and how confirmation happens.
> ....
>	1. Your terminology doesn't solve any problems. "What are the
>	   proper criteria for forming beliefs?" is not formally superior
>	   to "What strategies lead to valid knowledge?", though I agree
>	   that the connotations and emphases are different.
>

You are right that it is a psychological approach (or I would say, a
METApsychological approach to these issues).  But, for practical purposes, you
will never see knowledge in the absence of the individual knower.  Whatever is
known is known by *someone*.  Therefore it does not seem to me to make sense to
look at the issue of knowledge in the absence of a knower and his viewpoint.
It is hard to conceive of what such knowledge would be like, if it existed.

You are right, however, in stating that I have not dealt with what the correct
criteria are for fixing belief, and you are also right that the question of
what strategies lead to valid knowledge (for a knower, of course) is the same
as the question of what the correct criteria are for forming beliefs.  I did
not mean to sidestep this important issue.  I simply didn't want to be too
awfully long-winded.  [I now see that I was anyway....] Perhaps we can get
into that as the discussion progresses.  Proper criteria (whatever they may
turn out to be) can be derived, I believe (or know?!), from an observation of
the criteria that are, in fact, universally used in forming beliefs.  If such
criteria didn't exist, people would find it almost impossible to reach
agreements, and that would be a real *drag*.

>Also, it is quite possible for two people to have a shared 'belief'
>that is not defined as 'knowledge' between them. Have you ever discussed
>theology with a couple of Unitarians (for example)? 
>

I wouldn't call this a "shared belief".  I'd call it "shared openmindedness"!

>	   belief = weakly confirmed or not yet predictively checked
>	   knowledge = strongly confirmed, successfully used for prediction
>

I think, in one usage of "belief", it means a weak conviction as opposed to a
strong one.  I don't mean it that way.  I sometimes mean it to denote a very
strong conviction.  At other times, I mean it to denote a conviction that can
range from complete disbelief, through various ranges of milder disbelief,
through various stages of stronger belief to complete conviction.  In the same
way, we can "know things, positively and negatively, with varying degrees of
certainty.  From an individual viewpoint, truth varies from complete falsity
through various degrees of improbability, various degreees of probability, to
complete truth.  "A belief" also can mean "an idea" or "an hypothesis", apart
from whether it is believed by an individual or not, and I'm afraid I do
sometimes use it in that way, though I shouldn't.  So you could say that an
idea is a belief before it is believed :-).  Admittedly, this usage is
confusing, but I hope you understand what I mean from the context.   If usage
continues to be a problem, perhaps we'll have to agree on a convention in the
usage of different words to cover these different meanings.

I would agree that prediction is *one* of the criteria for acceptance of an
idea, but not the only one.  One tends to accept ideas that have
predictive value (i.e. that help us to predict things) over those which do
not.  For this reason, we tend to accept an explanation of how things happen
like Newton's Laws of Motion over an explanation like "God makes everything
happen", because, while both fit the facts equally well (actually, the
explanation about God fits the facts slightly better. because no conceivable
fact could contradict it...), the former explanation has greater predictive
value because God knows what God is going to do next (engineering is easier
than theurgy or divination)!

However, one does not, I think, form one's beliefs on the basis of one's
predictions.  One forms them, if anything, on the basis of present and past
experience, not predicted future experience.  Now maybe one forms beliefs on
the basis of the observation of a constant pattern of past experience.  The
ball bounced the last fifteen times so if I drop in now, I believe it will
bounce again.  That is a belief about the future, a prediction (as many, but
not all, beliefs are), but it is itself  based, not on prediction, but on a
past consistency of pattern over time (another criterion people have for
accepting beliefs).  One shouldn't confuse methods of *checking* beliefs with
methods of *forming* them or confuse what you can *do* with a belief with the
way in which you acquired it.  If, when you had an belief, you always had to
wait for it to be predictively checked before you could know it, you would
never know anything.  Every time you thought something was true on the basis
of past experience, you would still have to wait for the outcome of a further
test before it would be knowledge.  Ad infinitum, because the future test
becomes a past experience, and now you need *another* future test before it is
knowledge, etc..

Actually, it sounds as though what you are really saying that all statements
are, in some sense, statements about the future -- i.e. that all knowledge can
be reduced (or expanded) to predictions.  On the face of it, that seems
counter-intuitive.  I know certain things about the past, and, generally, in
so knowing I am not even *thinking* about what I could do, in the future, to
*prove* what I said.  Some items of knowledge, in fact, seem *completely*
unprovable.  Any evidence for many (perhaps *most*) statements about the past
has long since disappeared, remaining subjectively only in the memory of an
individual.  In such a case, I think you *might* say that the statement that
such a thing happened is equivalent to a statement to the effect that if you
tried to remember it, yo would remember it in the wame way....  But this seems
an unnecessary gyration.  Seems to me it would be just as valid (or invalid)
to say that all statements about the future (all predictions) are really
statements about the past evidence that we sifted through to formulate them.
I'd rather take a statement at its face value.

>Translating 'x is true' or 'x is a valid belief' into 'x predicts future
>consequences y' and then testing y in some way isn't just a pragmatically
>good thing, it is the *only* test of 'truth' that doesn't degenerate into
>circularity or babble.

I cannot fight this assertion because it is tautologous.  Any test you could
make of a belief would *have* to come after you *had* the idea.  Therefore it
would, trivially, be in the future -- a prediction.  But, again, this is
different from the criteria you used to *formulate* the belief.

If you say that the predictive value of an idea (or a belief) is the *only*
criterion for its acceptance, then I would say that is contrary to my
observation, on the face of it.  If you say that that *ought* to be the basis
of belief, then I would say, "Why?" (and your answer would have to speak to my
current methods of fixing belief, otherwise I wouldn't believe you.)

>You later state that you think that one's method for evaluating beliefs
>should vary, depending on context. This I completely disagree with, because
>it takes you right back to a subjectivist "truth is what I *choose* to believe"
>frame.

I didn't say (I don't think) that the method for coming to believe something
*should* vary from context to context (although perhaps it should).  I said
that it *does* so vary.  It is useless, in a sense, to *prescribe* the way in
which people should fix beliefs.  If people could arbitrarily change their
criteria for belief, then you would indeed have the situation of people
choosing to believe whatever they want, a situation you find objectionable, as
do I (perhaps for different reasons).  But I think certain criteria are
unalterable.

And I have no problem with a individual-centered criterion for truth, since I,
for one, do, in fact, have to decide what's true.  I don't think that this
"subjective" focus leads to "Truth is what I choose to believe", however.  I
think there's a big difference between having subjective criteria for truth
and being arbitrary about how truth (or belief) is assigned.  There are at
least two major kinds of constraints on what one *can* believe:

1.  Experience -- the totality of all observed and remembered facts and our
current beliefs about them (in other words, one's current belief structure).

2.  The various universal criteria that are held in common amongst different
individuals, such as a tendency towards logical consistency, towards aesthetics
and pleasure, away from pain, and towards favoring beliefs that have heuristic
value (heuristic assumptions that tend to lead toward further and deeper
knowledge).

Within these constraints, there is considerable lattitude, which accounts for
the differences in people's beliefs, as these constraints account for the
similarities.

Sorry if I waxed a bit long-winded.  I'd have to be even *more* long-winded if
I had to give a thorough account of the criteria for belief and why I think
they are what they are.

I *do* so enjoy being disagreed with by intelligent people.  When there's a
disagreement, provided communicaton continues, at least one person is bound to
learn something (probably both).  The challenge of meeting your arguments has
definitely made it necessary for me to rethink my position.  It's actually a
drag being *agreed* with all the time, don't you think?
-- 
"From his own viewpoint, no one ever has false beliefs; he only *had* false
beliefs."

Sarge Gerbode
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!sa tha