belief

Originally posted by karoly aczel
"life in danger" -what do you mean by that? old age?

You don't seem to have very good reasoning skills. Perhaps you should find
another hobby besides chess.

Originally posted by RJHinds
You don't seem to have very good reasoning skills. Perhaps you should find
another hobby besides chess.

UNBELIEVABLE- I asked those questions in all sincerity.

BTW I do have another hobby- telling christians (and other theists) of how wrong they are 🙂

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
Quoting this passage in its undeveloped state only highlights your ignorance of the concepts in view. One must expand their view of the topic to include the surrounding verses as well as the under girding principles in place. You recoil at a rape and lose sight of the value of life.

Pity, that.

What?

I mean seriously What????


Are you trying to say that I have taken it out of context?
then do please tell me what context could possibly justify this. [hint: there is none]
I am all ears.

incidentally
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/dt/22.html

redacting all the things wrong with the bible.


I do indeed recoil at rape, I also recoil at the notion that a father (or husband) owns his daughter/wife
such that the rapist has to pay compensation to the father for taking the daughters virginity thus making
here worthless for selling of to a 'suitable' husband.

I do value life, I have no idea how you can try to justify these verses and claim the same.

Originally posted by Dasa
If you quote one of your science journals to establish your beliefs why can I not use the Vedas to establish mine.

Remembering your books are subjected to speculation and fabrication - and mine are not.

The Vedas appeal to reason and logic and they do not support the falsities of the Bible and Koran.

But if you like I can discuss with you and not menti ...[text shortened]...
Only condition is that you must also embrace common sense, logic, rational and honesty as well.

I already do. (although I steer clear of 'common sense' due to the fact that all available
evidence suggests that it is either not very common, or not very sensible)

The difference between science journals and holy books is that what is claimed in
journals is [largely] backed up by experiment and reason, and is tested with
rigour to tell if it is true.

The contents of holy books are not. They claim themselves to be true.

I will happily debate you on specific positions based on logic and reason alone
you may even find specific issues where we agree.
But I will be agreeing because the argument for that issue is sound, not because
someone or something tells me it is so.

Originally posted by VoidSpirit
it astounds me how little christians know about their own bible.

apparently very few have actually read it (ie cover to cover while actually paying
attention)

They mostly hear carefully selected passages read and interpreted by their
pastor/preacher/vicar/ect.

And yes it does astound me.

Originally posted by karoly aczel
UNBELIEVABLE- I asked those questions in all sincerity.

BTW I do have another hobby- telling christians (and other theists) of how wrong they are 🙂

Use your head and maybe you can determine the meaning. It isn't hard.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
[b]non-belief however doesn't need a justification.
If you want me to believe something (anything) then you need to present a reason for me to do so.
Absent such a reason the default start position should be non-belief.
Really.
Let's start with you, for instance.

Funny how such poppycock parades itself as wisdom when, in reality, it's really just bad information.

You doubt yourself, do you?[/b]

I think therefore I am.

There I just justified my existence so I believe it.


It is not poppycock to only believe things with justification.

I don't know what you mean when you say 'bad information'

have a look at this blog post that covers the topic, and perhaps explains it clearer than I.

http://atheistexperience.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-get-email-brains-evidence-and-burden.html

Originally posted by RJHinds
Use your head and maybe you can determine the meaning. It isn't hard.

the meaning of what?

Originally posted by karoly aczel
the meaning of what?

forget it.

Originally posted by LemonJello
This is a nice example, particularly since the credence level for each Pn can be brought basically arbitrarily close to 1.

I would bite the bullet by denying that our justifiably held beliefs are closed under entailment. I am fine with the state of affairs that one can justifiably believe Pn for all n even though there is no epistemic certainty ther me m. Do you have a similar troublesome example where all the various propositions are known?

I think that's right. It's the agglomerative principle that needs to be rejected. It's just like the 'Author's Preface Paradox'. But what a strange implication. We have sufficient reason to believe each of a set of propositions but not to believe their conjunction. The interesting question, I think, is just what sort of revised agglomerative principle we'll need. Since we need something like first-order logic's conjunction introduction in order to engage in basic inference patterns.

The closure principle I had in mind was Gettier's original for justified belief and deduction (For all P, if S justifiably believes P, and derives Q from P, and believes Q on the basis of this derivation, and Q is in fact entailed by P, then S is justified in believing Q [or something like that; formulations differ]).

A troubling case for closure for knowledge? Here's one I played around with in a seminar years ago (I can't remember if it is mine or if it's from a paper somewhere, but I call it "The Complex Proof Paradox" ): Suppose I know the following propositions:

P1...Pn: (Some very large set of propositions)
F: (I am fallible when I infer conclusions that are entailed only by the conjunction of very large sets of propositions)

Now suppose I deductively infer C from ((P1 & P2 &...Pn) & F), a very large set of propositions, and believe C on the basis of this inference, and C is in fact entailed by ((P1 & P2 &...Pn) & F).

Even though I know ((P1 & P2 &...Pn) & F), and I derive C from ((P1 & P2 &...Pn) & F), and believe C on the basis of this derivation, and in fact (((P1 & P2 &...Pn) & F) > C), I may not be able to know C.

Originally posted by twhitehead
No, it won't.

If there are a billion tickets, for instance, then the probability of P1 being true is .999999999. The fallibilist claims we can know propositions that are uncertain. Here, P1...Pn each meet a very high threshold (it can be arbitrarily high, if you increase the number of tickets) for being likely true. Each would be a candidate for bilism surely? But I wouldn't say 'closure is false', I would say 'closure is fallible'.

You're not paying attention. As the number of tickets increases, the probability of any particular proposition P1...Pn will increase. The number of tickets can be arbitrarily high, so the probability of any particular proposition P1...Pn can be made arbitrarily high as well. No, my application of an epistemic closure principle here is not faulty. The lottery paradox is called a paradox precisely because of the apparent conflict between fallibilism and this epistemic closure principle. You can revise the notion of fallibilism, or revise your agglomerative principle (in essence to come up with some other principle than closure for justified beliefs under deduction). You can say whatever you want, but what's going on here is that you simply aren't getting the concepts in play. And 'Fallibilism' is the view according to which we can know propositions without being certain of them. It is a theoretical component of an account of epistemic justification. It is not the banal claim that we can infer to falshoods (which everybody, even infallibilists, admit).

Originally posted by bbarr
"Infallibilism" is a view about the conditions for the justification of a belief; basically, that a belief is justified only if it is epistemically certain. On this view, certainty is required for knowledge. Your claim is simply that sometimes people know with certainty. But that view is compatible with fallibilism (e.g., You are epistemically certain that there is any uncertainty, that's fine. But then you're an infallibilist. Deal with it.

Yes, again I know what it means, I have read the definition and understood it.
I am evidently not conveying what I mean to you adequately enough, but please stop assuming it is because I
don't actually know what it is I am talking about.

I will try again.

I believe there are different kinds of knowledge.
I believe that different kinds of knowledge can have different standards of justification.
There are some things for which I believe you should use an infallibilist approach.
Your lottery example being a case in point.

Assuming for the basis of this thought experiment, the lottery is perfectly random and not corrupted or rigged in some way.
I can know everything about the probability of any given ticket winning.
I KNOW that there is a possibility that any given ticket might win, and exactly what the probability is.
So I don't think a fallibilist approach is justified, as I can and do know everything about the system (from a probabilistic standpoint)
I can't claim to know that a given ticket wont win.
So for the lottery ticket I am an infallibilist.

However if you were talking about my house keys.
I have a place where I (almost always) put my keys when I come in, I remember putting them there when I last came in,
they are not currently in my pocket, and I saw the leather pouch they live in [to stop them digging in or wearing a hole in my pocket]
as I walked past a few minutes ago.
There is the possibility that someone might have moved them in the last few minutes, or that I hallucinated seeing them, or that someone
has taken them out of the pouch, and left it there, but the chance is pretty remote. (although I can't calculate it)
I am comfortable claiming that I Know where I put my keys and where they currently are, while still admitting the possibility of being wrong.
So for my house keys I am a fallibilist.


Do you have any issues with this apart from me not staying with one consistent definition for all types of knowledge?
And even then I would be interested in your view on why it is bad (if you should think that)

Originally posted by googlefudge
Yes, again I know what it means, I have read the definition and understood it.
I am evidently not conveying what I mean to you adequately enough, but please stop assuming it is because I
don't actually know what it is I am talking about.

I will try again.

I believe there are different kinds of knowledge.
I believe that different kinds of knowl ...[text shortened]... And even then I would be interested in your view on why it is bad (if you should think that)

No, you don't. If you believe that different types of knowledge admit of different standards of justification, then you're an epistemic pluralist (different types of knowledge) and a contextualist (different standards of justification). Infallibilism is not an approach, it is a theory about what epistemic justification requires (certainty). If you claim that some our our beliefs have to be certain in order to count as knowledge, but others don't, then by definition you are not an infallibilist. This is just what the terms here mean.

Regarding the lottery: It strikes me as bizarre that you would deny you could know that some particular ticket wouldn't win. If the chances of winning is 1/1,000,000,000 (much lower than the chances you've misremembered where you put your keys), and yet you know where you left your keys, then why wouldn't you also know your ticket wouldn't win (assuming, of course, that it is true that your ticket won't win; truth being an external condition on knowledge)? What you're saying here is that in the context of lotteries you require certainty, but in the context of key location you don't require certainty. So, you're a contextualist. But, then, what is the essential difference between these two contexts such that you advocate a different standard of justification? It can't have anything to do with the actual probabilities, since, by hypothesis, you can construct a lottery such that the chance of any particular ticket winning is less than the chance that you've misremembered where you put your keys.

Originally posted by bbarr
But in a previous post you claimed you were part infallibilist. Did you just not know what that term meant?

Anyway, there are problems with fallibilist conceptions of knowledge. Here is one:

Suppose that it is 99.99999% probable that P, and I believe P because I have access to the reasons that indicate P's probability. Presumably, that would on when conjoined to the epistemic closure principle. So, which would you like to give up?

This is an interesting discussion I've been reading (and I'm backtracking to this post) but...

Supposing a person identifies themselves as a fallibilist and works on the principle he knows P in isolation from Q, and knows Q in isolation from P (with the same degree of doubt below a threshold of suspicion in both cases), is he really forced into having the same degree of "knowledge" when conjoining them? What if he also knows (in a fallibilist sense) that his "certainty" about P_1 & P_2 & ... & P_n is more difficult to sustain as n grows large in a relative sense?Reveal Hidden Content

I'm having trouble seeing where the acceptance of contradiction is necessary here.

Originally posted by bbarr
No, you don't. If you believe that different types of knowledge admit of different standards of justification, then you're an epistemic pluralist (different types of knowledge) and a contextualist (different standards of justification). Infallibilism is not an approach, it is a theory about what epistemic justification requires (certainty). If you claim that ...[text shortened]... winning is less than the chance that you've misremembered where you put your keys.

I think we may have to agree to differ about the terminology... However that is the less relevant or interesting part of the discussion.
so...


The two cases, knowing where my keys is, and knowing my lottery ticket wont win, are not contextually the same.
(for starters you have the logical paradox of buying a ticket you know wont win, If I know my ticket wont win I wont
buy it, so I wont have the ticket to know it wont win.)


It may be less likely that the lottery ticket will win than my not knowing where my keys are, but that isn't the deciding factor.

It is less likely that I will be hit on the head by a meteorite tomorrow (or falling space debris :-) ) than it is that I don't currently know
where my keys are. But I wont claim to 'know' I wont be hit on the head by a meteorite tomorrow, and I do claim to know where my keys
are... I passed them again a few minutes ago and the pouch was still there...

There are differences abounding between the two things, that have nothing to do with the relative probabilities of the events.
There are contextual caveats to knowledge.
If I tell you I know where my keys are I am implying a certainty to which I believe that my keys are in a certain location.
and you could well think it not unreasonable for my to believe I know where my keys are (particularly if I state my evidence).

If I tell you I know that I wont be hit by an engine falling off a 747 flying overhead tomorrow then you would be wondering
why Reveal Hidden Content I claim knowledge that that specific unlikely event wont happen to me as opposed to any other, and
how I justify this. Because if the justification is that it is unlikely (beyond some unlikeness threshold) I could simply claim to know
that all unlikely events beyond that threshold wont happen to me tomorrow.
Which is your lottery paradox.

The sum of all unlikely events that could happen to me tomorrow include some that will happen.
And so claiming to know that nothing in that set will happen is evidently fallacious.

however I have a set of specific reasons for believing I know where my keys are strong enough (without being totally infallible) that I
do claim that as knowledge.

However that claim of knowledge is not as strong as my claim to know the numerical probability of any given ticket winning the lottery.
That knowledge (given my having read the rules of the lottery and it being fair and unrigged) can be held with certainty (up to the point of
claiming evil demons and reality not actually existing, but even then I can say with certainty that a lottery set up with those rules would have a
win probability per ticket of x) and is infallible.

So there exists a spectrum of beliefs that are held with varying strengths of justification, over a certain level you can claim things as knowledge
but even then there is a spectrum of knowledge up to absolute certainty.

note: I don't think you can have an unjustified belief, you have to have some reason for believing something. However the justification
might not be objectively very good or strong.
My problem is with decisions made on the basis of badly justified beliefs (such as religion)
Which gets me back to the statement that kicked this off that...

"The only sensible position is to believe things for which there is evidence [and/or reasonable logical justification]."


I don't believe you can operate without belief, or know anything without also believing it.
i just think those beliefs should be rationally and evidentially justified.