Collapsing the Belief/Knowledge Distinction
post by Jeremias (jeremias-sur) · 2024-09-11T21:24:30.447Z · LW · GW · 8 commentsContents
8 comments
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 end up on some irrational inferred assumption or faith ("it's obvious" or "it's intuitive")[1]. Therefore, whatever beliefs we hold are rested on beliefs we already had and we are led to an anti-foundationalist epistemology.
As such, whatever objective reality there is out there, we have no access to it, so long as "objective reality" implies a place "before" or "outside" belief. Such a place, it is implied, requires a perceiver without an presuppositions--a type of empty observer. If "no perspective" and "no belief" are required to objectively view this objective reality, then there can be no perspectives and no beliefs about it.
There is no way to dig oneself out of belief. We only believe in things we believe to be true, and only call things true if we really believe them.
There is no distinction between beliefs and knowledge.
- ^
This also collapses the religion/science, rational/irrational distinctions.
8 comments
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comment by cubefox · 2024-09-16T06:41:23.727Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Philosophers hold that knowledge implies belief, justification, and truth. For example, it makes sense to say "I believe that X, but if X is false I don't know that X." Likewise, if someone believes something out of wishful thinking, we would say it isn't knowledge, even if it was true, because it lacked justification.
Replies from: jeremias-sur↑ comment by Jeremias (jeremias-sur) · 2024-09-16T13:51:22.294Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
↑ comment by cubefox · 2024-09-16T14:17:07.674Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The concept of truth can be used in hypothetical reasoning. Say you believe X. Now assume hypothetically that X is false. Then you would, in that hypothetical scenario, still believe X. But you would no longer know X. That's a semantic description of what the word "believe", "truth" and "know" mean.
Belief is internal (whether you believe something only depends on your state of mind) but truth is external (whether something is true does not just depend on your state of mind). Since knowledge partly depends on truth, knowledge is also (partly) external.
Philosophers debate whether justification is internal or external, but it is clear that justification doesn't reduce to the belief of being justified.
You can imagine two people with exactly the same state of mind. Alice and Bob. Both believe they are sitting in front of a cup of coffee. But the Bob only hallucinates the coffee. Alice doesn't. So both believe there is a cup of coffee in from of themselves, and both are (arguably) equally justified in their belief. But only Alice knows there is a coffee in front of her. Bob doesn't. That's a semantic observation of how we use those words. We imagine a thought experiment like that, and we observe that we would apply the word "knows" to Alice but not to Bob.
Replies from: jeremias-sur↑ comment by Jeremias (jeremias-sur) · 2024-09-16T16:02:12.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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 and Bob are both justified through their perception of the cup of coffee, and Alice's perception is "knowledge" because it coheres with reality. Understood. However, both believe that they're correct because of their justification. Alice may try to touch the cup and have the tactile perception that is there, and she may feel even more justified for her belief--but all she is doing is confirming her belief in her visual perception with her belief of tactile perception. If Bob were to have an equally convincing hallucination of visual and tactile perception of the cup of coffee, he would be equally justified in believing it was there, given that Alice and Bob both have beliefs of trust for their perceptions.
All this is to say that verification of beliefs can only occur within already held beliefs. One's successful attempts to verify a belief via other beliefs may have them consider their beliefs to be knowledge and truth but, given the nature of that conclusion, the distinction is illusory/pragmatically useless for the perceiver.
Knowledge implies a way to verify beliefs outside beliefs. Given the arguments laid above, there is no such way.
Replies from: cubefox↑ comment by cubefox · 2024-09-16T20:54:53.484Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Knowledge implies a way to verify beliefs outside beliefs. Given the arguments laid above, there is no such way.
Truth is not the same as "verification". Verification is an internal concept. It's about what information you have in your mind. But truth is external. So you may call it "not useful" because any agent can only act on the information he has, on his internal state. But truth (or more broadly, the external world) is a sort of limit, a vanishing point, of justification. Degree of justification seems be about how likely something is true, and with more and more evidence, that probability goes toward 0 or 1.
Replies from: jeremias-sur↑ comment by Jeremias (jeremias-sur) · 2024-09-17T00:54:31.843Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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 only have a belief that coheres with another belief already held.
A quick and dirty way to illustrate this point:
- A: We can't know that the stone that's there truly is there in reality.
- B: But if I throw it at you and you feel pain, doesn't that prove it's real?
- A: The pain is just another perception—still within my mind—not proof of the stone's external existence.
The external world outside of our perceptions cannot be touched by any internal mechanism (belief, perception, justification, verification, etc.) precisely because it is outside. As such, we have no conceivable access to it. Whatever limits there are, they are not found in the external world and only ever found in our internal world--after all, how can you find (refer, perceive, believe, etc.) anything that in its definition is incapable of being found? We can't nor could we ever. Therefore, the distinction between truth/knowledge (and internal/external) that is commonly used is unnecessary at best and illusory at worst.
comment by Gordon Seidoh Worley (gworley) · 2024-09-12T16:22:11.888Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You don't make clear what distinction between belief and knowledge you are arguing against, so I can't evaluate your claim that there's no distinction between them.
Replies from: jeremias-sur↑ comment by Jeremias (jeremias-sur) · 2024-09-12T17:40:47.293Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.