• The Gettier problem
    What you are claiming is that the "knowledge" of a lottery ticket winner in "knowing" he held the winning ticket I equivalent to the knowledge a physicist ha regarding why a bridge will stay in place. I strongly disagree with that position.LD Saunders

    Yes, the lottery ticket winner only had a feeling he would win, he only believed he would win, nowhere did he know that he actually would.

    First of all knowledge doesn't need to be true for multiple reasons, for example the existence of the words "false knowledge"BlueBanana

    "False knowledge" is a misuse of the word knowledge. That is what you call a false belief.

    Belief, on the other hand, isn't enough to make something knowledge.BlueBanana
    I agree, it isn't enough, they also have to be true, which should be verified with some sort of proof.
  • The Gettier problem
    Except if we claim Gettier was incorrect and Smith does know that the person who gets the job has ten coins in their pocket.BlueBanana

    Umm... I really don't understand what you mean, how is that an exception?

    What is adequate justification?BlueBanana

    That's a good question.
  • The Gettier problem
    @BlueBanana

    "The president of the company told Smith that Jones will get the job." Seems like a good evidence, as the president of the company is a reliable source, however, "Jones will get the job" is an assertion about the future and so, it is indeterminate. The president of the company is a reliable source but he cannot predict the future. The mere fact that Jones didn't get the job proves that.

    "Smith counts the coins in Jones pocket and sees that he has ten coins. Smith comes to the belief that the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket." The problem here is that the person Smith is referring to is clearly Jones because he knows that Jones has ten coins but not that he also has ten coins. He mistakenly thought that a good way to differentiate himself from Jones is to say that, unlike him, Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Therefore, the underlying meaning of "the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket" is "Jones will get the job".

    Smith believed that "Jones will get the job" which turned out to be false and not "the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket" which turned out to be true, so it doesn't debunk the JTB theory.

    As for arguments for the JTB theory, well, knowledge is in itself a true belief, the thing is, how can we know that the belief is indeed true? We have to rely on some sort of proof, a justification, hence the true justified belief.
  • Is "Caesar is a prime number" true false or meaningless.
    In the old days people had phone numbers like MUrray Hill 5-9975.fishfry

    I didn't know that, thank you for sharing.

    In our contemporary AI society we are nothing but numbers, and not even individual numbers. We're datapoints in a huge "corpus" as they call a big pile of data. Data to be mined, sliced, diced, and statistically analyzed.fishfry

    Well, it's a question of simplicity. There are a lot of people who share the same name, and we don't want to confuse them, so it's just easier to use numbers that exist in an infinite amount. So I wouldn't say that
    In our contemporary AI society we are nothing but numbers,fishfry
    but rather "In our contemporary AI society we are represented by nothing but numbers". These numbers are linked to us but they're not us. They're basically substitutes for our names and while that isn't great, it's for simplicity's sake.
  • Is "Caesar is a prime number" true false or meaningless.
    However when one affirms or denies a claim of this nature one affirms it the opposite claim.jospehus

    If I say the negation of "Carmen is rich", that is "Carmen is not rich", do I affirm that "Carmen is poor"?

    Your claim would work where there are only two options, either x or y. If it isn't x it's y. But this isn't the case. What would be the opposite of "prime number" anyway? Or simply, what are "opposites"? (If anyone has a suggestion, It would be interesting to know)

    Back to the OP, in your example, you're referring to a specific person,
    a human generaljospehus
    named Caesar, very famous, so there is already a lot of knowledge attached to him, like how he is human. Then, the property of "being a human" is incompatible with the property of "being a number". Therefore, because Caesar is a human, he cannot be a number , so
    "Caesar is not a prime number"jospehus
    nor any number.
  • Thought: Conscious or Unconscious activity?
    A thought may pop out of nowhere (you start thinking about a certain song in a library, where did that thought come from? Maybe you heard a little girl sing that song without realizing it), but when it is there it is a conscious activity because you are aware of it can remember it, write it down, discuss it, etc...

    @bahman Although I agree you cannot "deal with all knowledge we accumulated and memorized in unconscious mind" , when we think we focus on a particular information. We don't need to be aware of the entire content of our mind to create a thought. It usually comes from stimuli, and from the first thought comes a second thought related in some way to the first one, and so on.
  • The trolley problem - why would you turn?
    I would do nothing.

    If I face a problem like this and am well aware that if I save them I kill another worker it would seem like it is in my responsibility to save them, because I am the only one that has the power to do so. However, in this problem where someone will die no matter what, the question is, who will or should die? Now, because I do not have any information about these workers the question remains unsolved. Even if I had some information (like in the case where the 3 of them are murderers), I do not believe I have the right to decide who should live and who should die. Either way it is not my fault that the incident happened and so I do not have any responsability.

    Plus, I think that when people say they would turn, it's mostly just talk, if they were actually confronted to that situation they would probably freeze.
  • Lifestyle of an agnostic


    This would be an agnostic theist's lifestyle (comedy aside).
  • Lifestyle of an agnostic


    This would be an agnostic atheist lifestyle (comedy aside) as "it's pointless to talk about [God]".
  • Lifestyle of an agnostic
    Because beliefs strongly determine how we act, an agnostic, while sustaining the fact that he doesn't know and/ or can't know, will still be more inclined towards atheism or theism, if not he will have the problem you refer to as being "paralyzed" by agnosticism.
  • Lifestyle of an agnostic
    I would rather say:

    Agnostic: I believe knowledge of God's existence is unattainable. Or
    I don't know whether God exists or not.

    Either way, (a)gnostics speculate on knowledge of God's existence while (a)theists speculate on the belief of God's existence. What Socrates presumably said "All I know is that i know nothing" is how agnostics feel in regards to God's existence. They can have a belief about the topic, but no knowledge.

    Simply put, to see the difference between agnostics and (a)theists, you have to understand the difference between knowledge and belief.