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ChristianKl comments on In defense of philosophy - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: casebash 22 December 2015 01:53AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 25 December 2015 01:07:24PM 0 points [-]

How did that realisation change the way you interact with knowledge? As you claim your epistemology is improved, what kind of mistakes did you do in the past that you don't do anymore?

justified true belief held sway for an incredibly long time

What does that mean? Philosophers proclaimed for a long time that knowledge is about justified true belief? I think over my life I have been exposed to many different ways of dealing with knowledge and I don't think one of them was knowledge is primarily justified true belief.

Comment author: casebash 26 December 2015 11:11:59AM 1 point [-]

Justified true belief held sway over philosophers, but it is also what most people would come up if you asked them and they thought about it for enough. People understand that knowledge is about having particular beliefs, that these beliefs have to be true and that people have beliefs that are true, but which they don't actually know to be true (justified element). I bought this definition until I was exposed to the Gettier problem.

Comment author: ChristianKl 26 December 2015 12:01:20PM *  0 points [-]

but it is also what most people would come up if you asked them and they thought about it for enough

There an easy way to check whether that might be true. Look at the producers of dictionaries. Webster:
information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or education
awareness of something : the state of being aware of something

Maybe the guys at that dictionary are an expection. Let's look at the Cambridge dictionary:
understanding of or ​information about a ​subject that you get by ​experience or ​study, either ​known by one ​person or by ​people ​generally:
the ​state of ​knowing about or being ​familiar with something

Studying philosophy mislead you. Neither of those definitions speaks about justification or truth.

Comment author: casebash 27 December 2015 12:16:46AM 1 point [-]

They aren't really defining it just using synonyms.

Comment author: ChristianKl 27 December 2015 12:27:55AM *  0 points [-]

I don't think saying that knowledge is information that's due to experience of education is giving a synonym.

But even if someone defines a term via synonym they are still defining the term. It's worthwhile to note that different people interact with language differently.

At the moment where you accept the framing of the question as the only way to look at the issue, you miss a lot of real world usage of the concept in question by people who don't use the same framing as you do.