TL;DR: After re-examining my earlier stance on collapsing the belief/knowledge distinction, I've come to realize through Wittgenstein's "meaning as use" that these terms hold distinct meanings based on their contextual applications in language. Embracing this understanding, I now see that preserving the distinction is essential for meaningful communication and continued...
There is no distinction between belief and knowledge. Why? Because whatever we think is knowledge is only, and can ever be, what we believe to be true. If we do not believe in it, we do not think it is true. How do we get to truth? By virtue of...
TL;DR: After re-examining my earlier stance on collapsing the belief/knowledge distinction, I've come to realize through Wittgenstein's "meaning as use" that these terms hold distinct meanings based on their contextual applications in language. Embracing this understanding, I now see that preserving the distinction is essential for meaningful communication and continued dialogue.
Nine days ago, I made a post about how, when observed closely, the distinction between belief and knowledge is pragmatically useless at best and incoherent as worst. The reasoning was that what we call “knowledge” is only what we believe to be true—if we do not have a belief, we do not consider it to be “knowledge” or “truth”.
The user cubefox made... (read 982 more words →)
There is no distinction between belief and knowledge.
Why?
Because whatever we think is knowledge is only, and can ever be, what we believe to be true. If we do not believe in it, we do not think it is true.
How do we get to truth? By virtue of our previously held beliefs. As such, beliefs imply one another.
Lets take a question that is often ignored due to it being supposedly anti-science or irrationalist: "How do you know the Earth is round?"
The answer, of course, would rely upon an appeal to textbooks, to which rests on the appeal to expertise, which rests on an appeal of trust, and so on. Ultimately, this exercise would... (read more)
You're right--definitions are hard but here we go:
Belief: A mental state that an individual holds to be true, typically in the form "X is Y."
Knowledge: When a belief accurately corresponds to objective reality. In other words, a belief that is correct.
I agree that the truth/verification distinction holds and didn't mean to imply the contrary.
Also, truth being a vanishing point or limit of justification reinvokes the false distinction between belief/knowledge (truth) that I began with.
The main claim is that the external world provides no such limit. Justification for belief does not (and cannot) rely on coherence with the external world because we are only ever inside the "world" of the internal--that is, we are stuck inside our beliefs and perceptions and never get beyond them into the external world. As such, we have no way to somehow compare our justified beliefs with the external world precisely because we have no access to it--we... (read more)
The semantic distinction between uses of the words belief and knowledge certainly occurs, however, because it is (even partly) external, it ceases to be a useful distinction.
Moreover, for the holder of the belief, justification does reduce to the belief of being justified. After all, one cannot both hold "I think X-belief is justified" and "I don't believe in X-belief". One believes in things that are justified (for them) and the beliefs one believes to be justified are the ones they believe are "true".
The orthodox use of "knowledge" implies access to "the world beyond" of the observer. If no access exists (as I claim), then what is considered "knowledge" is actually (merely) belief.
Alice... (read more)
If the distinction between belief/knowledge is collapsed, then "truth" is merely justified belief. That is, "truth" is just beliefs which we believe to be justified, however that justification doesn't say anything about the world "out there", or imply that we have access to that world.
In other words, the distinction implies that coherence between belief is what determines our naming of certain statements as "true" and not coherence with the truth/reality.
It’s important to realize that the ideal value model depends on the situation you are in. A common mistake in both tech and life is to use a value model that made sense in a different product or society, but doesn’t make sense in this one. In essence, you have a value model that did well at solving the problems you used to have, but not at solving the problems you have right now.
Tensions: It seems unintuitively true that everything can described as good or bad ("I'm not impulsive, I'm spontaneous!"). However, if we favor vectors over rigid categories of good/bad, we are falling into the same problem. I believe the issue... (read more)
Emotions represent swift, comprehensive assessments that enable an organism to promptly evaluate the importance of stimuli in relation to its survival and overall well-being.
It seems to me that the ability of emotions to evaluate/categorize stimuli is descriptively correct, but there is a large gap between that and a prescription. Emotions surely do act as shortcut heuristics to detail with the excess of detail, however this can lead to as many mistakes as there are successes. Moreover, AI already is capable of coming up with statements or decisions despite the immense quantity of data at its disposal.
Said another way, if "emotion" can be reduced to "decision making before sufficient detail is understood", well... (read more)