You're expounding a pefectly consistent point of view, that knowledge (as you understand it) is impossible, but it does nothing. If you choose to define knowledge as that which we cannot be wrong about then, surprise suprise, you'll discover that we don't know anything.
Please explain what you mean by 'it does nothing'?
Epistemology springs into existence, for the purpose of denying this "
perfectly consistent point of view"
OF COURSE knowledge is 'that which we cannot be wrong about'! If we could be wrong about it, it *obviously* wouldn't be knowledge
You aren't 'choosing' to define it this way, how
else could it possibly be defined?
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge:
Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief". There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.
the sentence '
I know a fact which could be wrong' is a logical contradiction-in-terms
Conclusion - I don't know any facts
I don't even know if i don't know any facts
and so on ad infinitum.......
But here's the thing: You don't really believe that. You don't believe that you don't know anything. You're not just pretending to know things so that people don't think you're a nutter. Furthermore, everyone else thinks they know things. We argue about whether we are right or wrong about things. We make decisions based on how much we know and what we know. And people with a robust and well-justified set of beliefs tend to achieve things that those without cannot.
I can believe
anything, but anything i believe could turn out to be wrong, it is impossible for me to know if any belief is true or false. Therefore I dont really know anything,
how could you or I possibly know if any particular belief is true or false?
Ok, let's accept it though. Let's act AS IF we accept that we can't know anything. What, then, shall we call the firm belief that I have of my birthday? Let's call it *knowledge, and then we can have a new section of the library devoted to *epistemology in which we study how we can have *knowledge about things.
Nobody can act AS IF they accept that they don't know anything! Epistemology, that section in the library, exists
just in order to deny that we can't know anything, or can you tell me another reason it exists?
This *knowledge can be analysed thus:
I *know proposition 'P' if and only if:
- P is true
- I have sufficient reason to believe P (the exact nature of this reason being the subject of most epistemology books)
BUT you can never know if 'P is true', your first condition for *knowledge', is true or false
This has the rather exciting consequence that, if I have a good reason to believe that my birthday is on May the Fourth, then:
if my birthday IS on May the Fourth, I *know when my birthday is
but
if my birthday IS NOT on May the Fourth I don't *know, I am mistaken.
In other words, whether or not I *know something is dependent on how the world is, and is partly a matter of luck. I can see why this upsets people, but there it is.
right but this concept of '*knowledge', is just the same as the concept of 'belief'
And belief is not knowledge, belief is belief, so why would you want to come up with a separate word for it? Whether you call it '*knowledge', or 'knowledge2', or 'that special, magical type of knowledge which is not really knowledge and is the same belief'?????
You believe what your parents told you about the date you were born, you see it on your birth certificate etc, but there are any number of situations you could imagine, where this might turn out to be wrong, use your imagination, maybe something your parents never told you, is that you were born at 5 minutes past midnight on May 4th, so really you were born on May 5th, maybe you were adopted with forged certificates, who knows?
why dont you just call it belief, and any belief can be wrong
To go back to knowledge for a minute (i.e. knowledge as complete certainty). Let's be clear about how impossible it is. It's isn't just that no one happens to know anything, or that we haven't yet worked out how to know things, it's that it is conceptually nonsensical to talk of anyone ever knowing anything. For belief to be absolutely certain, for belief B to be logically equivalent to fact F, would entail them being one and the same thing, the subject and object would be identical. But, conversely, the idea of knowledge entails the idea of a subject and an object, a knower and a fact. So this idea of knowledge is empty because it is self-contradictory.
I agree, as i said earlier, you can believe anything, but you cant know anything
any particular belief, can be either true or false
