Well, we are entering the third day of a national lockdown. Here in New Zealand, we have been instructed to not work, stay home, and to avoid contact with all people outside our respective bubbles. My bubble consists of my mother and me; although we don't live in the same house, I divide my time between my apartment (in which I live alone) and her apartment. In fact, my life is very little different today than it was last week, although I miss going to my weekly pub quiz and it seems that my mother and I won't be visiting Piha any time soon. According to the Herald, some eight hours ago (as I write this), New Zealand had 451 Covid-19 cases (I don't know if this number includes those who have recovered or not). Almost all of these cases are linked with international travel. We have no recorded fatalities yet and only two people in intensive care. Jacinda and the rest of the Cabinet made the decision to act early, to nip the disease in the bud before it had time to effloresce. Looking at Italy, Spain, and now Great Britain, one has to conclude that it was the best choice to make.
If people read this blog at all, you probably want something different from what the rest of the media report. It is unlikely that you're reading this now to get my opinion on the Coronavirus; I have nothing new or interesting to say about it anyway. The topics I come back to are narrative theory, homosexuality, schizophrenia, politics, physics, epistemology, and ontology. In the previous post, I presented a partial argument for the existence of God. The gist of that argument was that, if Truth exists, an omniscient knower must exist. I can't be sure if this is a good argument or not (I am not sold on the idea of all-powerful, all-loving creator) but it is an argument worth pursuing.
The fundamental issue is epistemological. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, what we know and what we can and can't know. The definition of knowledge generally credited to Plato (although having considered it he rejected it) is that knowledge is true, justified belief. However this definition of knowledge runs into a couple of problems. The philosopher Edmund Gettier showed that it was possible to have a true, justified belief and for this belief not to amount to knowledge, because the justification is unsound and the belief only true accidentally. (For an account of the Gettier problem, see the article in Wikipedia.) Philosophers have sought to save the TJB definition of knowledge by saying that it requires some additional fourth condition but have had difficulty specifying what this fourth condition should be. I wonder if perhaps, instead of narrowing the definition of knowledge by introducing a fourth condition, we should instead broaden it by dropping the justification condition. Knowledge is simply true belief and requires no justification; consequently, even if a belief is only true accidentally, it still counts as knowledge. On his show Bill Maher has a recurring segment called, "I don't know it for a fact but I know that it's true." Perhaps what we know we simply know to be true even if we lack rational proofs. I know that I have two arms and two legs and require no justification for this true belief.
The reader may chastise me for suggesting that, perhaps, knowledge can be unjustified. Obviously people lack the sixth sense necessary to distinguish between true propositions and false propositions. I have some family acquaintances, way over to the right of even the ACT party, who think the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by an international banking conspiracy, including (inevitably) the Rothschilds. If we discard the justification condition, aren't we licensing people to believe anything they want? The reason why dropping the justification condition is less pernicious than you might think is that people already believe whatever they want anyway and always find reasons for their beliefs. (This is known as 'casuistry'.) Climate change deniers could just say, "I refuse to believe in global warming because I know it can't be happening!" but, in practice, they seek to justify their beliefs by saying, for instance, that meteorological scientists find it easier to get grants if they manipulate or massage their results. If a person wants to believe something, he or she will always find reasons. (Just for the record, again, I myself do really believe in anthropogenic climate change.)
Pragmatist philosophers, people like C.S. Peirce, William James, and Richard Rorty, approach the problem of knowledge in a different way. Rorty, for instance, does not think that we should drop the justification condition. Rather, he thinks we should drop the truth condition. Rorty thinks that knowledge can be adequately defined as simply 'justified belief'. However, if we dig into his work a little more, we find that Rorty has not wholly abandoned the notion of truth. For the pragmatists, Truth is a destination we are endlessly approaching, the outcome of a process. For Rorty, this process is a dialectic, a dialogue, conversation. For Pierce, "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief". The pragmatists remind me of Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who thought that mankind was evolving towards unity with God, with Christ. The Truth exists but it exists sometime in the future.
The aspect of the problem that concerns me here is the first condition, that knowledge is true justified belief. The default position, the traditional position, with respect to Truth is that a proposition (or a belief) is true if it corresponds with a fact in the real world, with a state of affairs. "P" is true if and only if P. I have written a number of posts arguing that the correspondence principle fails to capture the essence of Truth. Consider the statement, "Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective who lives on Baker Street." I would argue, in opposition to logical positivists such as Bertrand Russell, that this proposition is true, even though the proposition does not correspond to any fact in the world. Likewise we can say that Napoleon Bonaparte lost the battle of Waterloo even though it is no longer possible to point to the battle of Waterloo and say, "This is Napoleon losing!" I might say, "Sasquatch is an apocryphal hominid who inhabits the north-west of the United Sates" and this is true even though, again, it does not correspond to any fact in the world (at least as far as I myself know). The particular world view I am endorsing is a kind of quasi-phenomenological perspective on truth and existence, a world view I most clearly expressed in the post "Fictional Objects". Existence is a property objects can either have or not have (a la Alexius Meinong); likewise truth is a property that statements can either have or not have. Existence and truth are properties we bestow on respectively objects and statements.
If we accept the correspondence principle, we might be forced to conclude that some kind of relationship, some kind of similarity or congruence, exists between beliefs (which we typically express in language) and material facts. But this is problematic. The material world is something entirely different from linguistic propositions. How can we connect a belief, which we might encapsulate verbally in a proposition, with some arrangement of things in the world? It is simpler to compare and contrast beliefs because they are made of the same stuff (thought stuff). Suppose my friend Sally and I are having a conversation and she says, "I believe that the coronavirus has massively and terribly affected the world economy" and I say, "I agree." Our beliefs are, at least superficially, in concordance (although she and I may differ subtly in how we understand the effects of the Coronavirus on the world's economy). If she says, however, "It will all be over in a month," I will be forced to say, "I don't believe that." Our two beliefs differ – one of us is wrong and one of us is right. Sally can't point to anything in the world that will substantiate her claim that it will all be over in a month but neither can I point to anything to prove that she is wrong. The correspondence principle is of no help. But it is a simple matter to say where our beliefs align and where they differ.
The kind of reasoning I am using could lead to the Postmodern conclusion that all truth is relative. If we can no longer point to the real world to justify our assertions, doesn't that mean that there is no such thing as truth at all? The charge of relativism (especially moral relativism) is often levelled at Postmodern philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault. It seems to me, however, that it is important to try to preserve some notion of Truth, but without recourse to the correspondence principle. This is where God comes in. The Truth exists and the Truth is simply the sum total set of all true beliefs. These beliefs must exist in some mind (all knowledge exists in the mind of a knower). Therefore, if the Truth exists, an omniscient knower must exist who knows the whole Truth. My beliefs are true when they correspond to the beliefs of this omniscient knower. I realise I am repeating myself (I made the same argument in the immediately preceding post) but the argument is so interesting and important that it bears repeating.
At this point, I wish to set aside my unusual and provocative argument for the existence of God. As so often happens when I write this blog, ideas have occurred to me that weren't present when I began writing the post. I wrote a series of posts about modal logic in which I came to a completely different notion of modality than that originally presented by Kripke. Since yesterday, when I started this post, I have thought some about the Gettier problem, and have arrived at the obvious solution to it. I don't want to toot my own horn but I think I must be a genius because, although the solution is obvious, it doesn't seem to be one that people have considered before.
I'll cut and paste Gettier's argument from Wikipedia:
"Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would, in the end, be selected and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails: (e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
"Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
"But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in his pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job."
The argument in a nutshell is this. Smith has a a true, justified belief that the man who will get the job has ten cents in his pocket but his justification for it is false, so it can't count as knowledge. The obvious solution to this form of the Gettier problem is this: for a belief to count as knowledge, not only must it be true and justified, the justification for it must also be true and justified. Suppose I know p and my justification for believing p is another belief q. I must also know q – that is, q must also be true and justified. For a belief to count as knowledge, not only must it be true, the justifications for it must also count as knowledge and must, themselves, also be true and be justified. The reader may say: doesn't this lead to an infinite regress? Yes, it either leads to an infinite regress or something circular – unless we suppose, as I argued earlier in this post, that knowledge can be unjustified. I would like to suggest that there are fundamental axioms or premises on which the whole edifice of our knowledge is built, beliefs that are so fundamental that even though we know them, they can't be justified. Examples include direct experience of the world. I don't fully understand Godel's Incompleteness Theorem but I wonder if this solution resembles Godel's theorem in some way.
I'll finish this post by mentioning Covid-19 again. Since I began writing this post, last night, New Zealand has had its first death. Hopefully we won't have any others.
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