A common definition of knowledge is: "justified true belief." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Justified by who? One's self? One's social circle? One's town, village, or city? Anything greater than that is exclusively a modern phenomena, I'm sure you'd agree.

Is there a "justified false belief" that one would immediately be able to differentiate from a "justified true belief"? How so? What is the significance of the "true" multiplier/descriptor in the context of the overall phrase/other two words?

A belief? Naturally this is the most base, non-enveloping conceptual descriptor to describe such, sure. Would you have any objection if your use of the word "belief" in this context were to be substituted with, say: "opinion", "judgement", "desire", "preference", or "goal". Do you find any of these substitutes more or less fitting or some even outright more accurate or completely incompatible? If so, why?

For instance, a distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how." Knowing how to ride a bike, for example, does not seem to reduce to propositional knowledge (at least not easily). Its justification is the ability to stay upright on a moving bike, which is not linguistic. It seems possible that someone who has lost their capacity to understand and produce language might nonetheless know the to ride a bike. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, perhaps like the difference between an ability and a skill. One or the other being more or less easy, hard, if not next to or entirely impossible, by simply following written or verbal (or physical) instruction? Perhaps "talent" rising above both the two? What are your thoughts on that?

But I wanted to bring up another sort of knowledge: "knowing what it is like to be." We can consider here Nagel's example of "what it is like to be" a bat and to possess a faculty of echolocation. This might be impossible to know, but it is certainly something I think people would love to know. And if they could remember their time as a bat, we could say they "know what it is like" to have echolocation, and yet this seems to obviously be a sort of knowledge that is non-linguistic, and which doesn't seem to line up with "belief" either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does a man go out to his driveway and ask "Gee, I wonder what it's like to be a car?" Not likely. He turns the key, drives it, and more or less basically gets the idea. Especially if he has to maintain it. The reason I mention this example is because there are video games where you can be things you ordinarily can't: a millionaire, a gang leader, an animal, even a stray cat. Sure, it's not really, exactly the same. But surely any thinking person can "get the idea" at least in a substantial sense. Do you disagree? This reminds me of the classic "qualia" argument, how basically: "two people can watch the same sunset, we can describe it in a physical, optical sense in near identical terms, but neither person can really describe what it's 'like' or 'means' to ones self." Do you feel that to be of relevance or relation?

The 40 Year Old Virgin is an example. At one point, the titular protagonist describes breasts as feeling like "bags of sand." Obviously, simply correcting him and furnishing him with a more accurate tactile example is not wholly adequate.

And perhaps the limit of this would be the Chinese Room, or the person inside it, who has gained knowledge of how linguistic statements interact, but none of the phenomenological whatness intended by them. Knowledge of the signs, but not what is signified.

knowledge of how linguistic statements interact, but none of the phenomenological whatness intended by them — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, this would mean, language is not primarily for utility. At least, it has another significant function. Whether by intent or not.

Sort of like how puns arise. I want a coffee. You sell coffee. I have enough money for a coffee. I ask for one. You serve me one to my hand and the bill at the same time. I say "ouch", perhaps as a reaction to the price of the coffee. A machine would assume this is a reaction to the temperature of the coffee. Or would it? Is this what you mean?

Justified by who? One's self? One's social circle? One's town, village, or city? Anything greater than that is exclusively a modern phenomena, I'm sure you'd agree.

Is there a "justified false belief" that one would immediately be able to differentiate from a "justified true belief"? How so? What is the significance of the "true" multiplier/descriptor in the context of the overall phrase/other two words?

Normally justification is presented in terms of "epistemic warrant," i.e., "good reasons to believe." This goes back to Plato who pointed out that if we just happen to hold true beliefs for inane reasons, it does not seem to be the case that we "know" such things.

A belief? Naturally this is the most base, non-enveloping conceptual descriptor to describe such, sure. Would you have any objection if your use of the word "belief" in this context were to be substituted with, say: "opinion", "judgement", "desire", "preference", or "goal". Do you find any of these substitutes more or less fitting or some even outright more accurate or completely incompatible? If so, why?

"Judgement" and "opinion" make sense to me. I am not sure about "preference" or "desire." I can certainly know my own desires, but I wouldn't equate desiring something with knowing it. It seems that knowing should come prior to desiring, for how could we desire what we do not know ("know" in the broadest sense, including sense knowledge).

So, perhaps like the difference between an ability and a skill. One or the other being more or less easy, hard, if not next to or entirely impossible, by simply following written or verbal (or physical) instruction? Perhaps "talent" rising above both the two? What are your thoughts on that?

Right, some things you cannot learn from reading or listening. Almost everyone is going to fall on a skateboard the first time. Reading about how to ride a skateboard is probably of pretty limited benefit here.

Does a man go out to his driveway and ask "Gee, I wonder what it's like to be a car?" Not likely. He turns the key, drives it, and more or less basically gets the idea. Especially if he has to maintain it. The reason I mention this example is because there are video games where you can be things you ordinarily can't: a millionaire, a gang leader, an animal, even a stray cat. Sure, it's not really, exactly the same. But surely any thinking person can "get the idea" at least in a substantial sense. Do you disagree?

The car example seems strange to me. I don't think a car is conscious so I don't think there is anything it is like to be a car.

I 100% agree that we can imagine human experiences more or less well, dependent on what experiences we have had. Perhaps we might even be able to imagine animal experiences to some degree, although this seems like it would be far less accurate.

But then we would have to wonder why this is? It's not because people and animals interact with different things or a different world. And it's not because we don't think those things can be accurately described in a way that should transcend particular sensory systems. To my mind, if suggests an essentially phenomenological component to knowledge. Because animals have different senses, different "form/information," (of whatever we'd like to call it) related to these things enters their awareness. I am also skeptical as to whether any non-human animals can understand things in a propositional manner, so that is a big difference.

Sort of like how puns arise. I want a coffee. You sell coffee. I have enough money for a coffee. I ask for one. You serve me one to my hand and the bill at the same time. I say "ouch", perhaps as a reaction to the price of the coffee. A machine would assume this is a reaction to the temperature of the coffee. Or would it? Is this what you mean?

Not quite. I wouldn't imagine a machine. I'd imagine an actual experiencing person in a room who is practicing manipulating Chinese characters correctly for years and years but never learns what they mean. He can use the characters correctly and have conversations, and he knows what the characters are like, but the content of the conversations will be absent. To signs will only refer to other signs, or to his memories of seeing the signs.

Likewise, we could imagine a dystopian future where an anti-color tyrant has everyone's eyes surgically implanted with lenses that make them only see in black and white. But, since knowing colors is useful, the high tech implant also projects symbols that let people know what color things are.

So these people can use color language just find. When they leave their autocracy and go to places where people have normal vision they talk to them just fine when using color language. And yet, when we remove the implants and they see color for the first time, it seems like they have come to know something new. Hence, language, as with other signs, is not merely about the signs themselves.

Perhaps we might even be able to imagine animal experiences to some degree, although this seems like it would be far less accurate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is most interesting to me. Why not? Do you think there is an animal that is somehow more advanced than say, the average person? Surely such a notion is ridiculous. Where are their cities? Their sciences? Their mastery of the environment and the atmosphere? The point being, as a higher being, the idea of some other (yet clearly lesser) being's "existence" as something "unfathomable", eh just doesn't convince me. If that makes sense? Sure, it's different. It takes understanding, some sort of "sensory empathy", if you will. But the idea of it being something just "indescribable" (in a technical sense, not a "provable" sense) seems to need a bit more evidence than just "oh you're not that fly that just mindlessly flew into a lamp so you'll forever live a life damned to miss out on what that was like". If that makes sense.

an actual experiencing person in a room who is practicing manipulating Chinese characters correctly for years and years but never learns what they mean. He can use the characters correctly and have conversations — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, what differentiates this from using say, random shouts or phrases or whistles (basically speech). To me this reads as "he can speak a different language and have conversations in that language but doesn't really know what he's saying." Kind of a mental cliff dive there for me. Can you explain more based on what you perceive to be my understanding?

Edit: So, basically like a kid randomly shining a flashlight outside his window and seeing a light flash in return. Every time he "flashes" (turns the light off and then on again) any number of times, the person shining a light back responds with the same number of flashes. That kind of deal. That defines a "conversation" in your original context?

To me this reads as "he can speak a different language and have conversations in that language but doesn't really know what he's saying."

Yes exactly. So, for a concrete example, we give the guy a short story in Chinese and he produces a grammatically correct book report on it, which even includes some detail on "what I liked and didn't like about the story."

So the guy can use Chinese characters according to the rules of Chinese. He even expressed an opinion (although not one he actually has). Does he read Chinese? He has no clue what the story was about, or even that it was a story, or what his output said. To him, it was just another set of pages of characters he has learned how to manipulate. Clearly, he knows the rules of how these symbols work, but there seems to be something huge missing from his knowledge.

I will admit, this scenario is quite implausible. I am just using it as a limit case. There are obviously much more believable, real life examples where people know how to use words and phrases, or symbols, but don't really understand them. But in the real world cases they will always also not really know how to use the symbols, words, and phrases that well either, since I would argue that the phenomenological side is pretty essential to how we learn to use signs.

As an aside, I actually think this is partly why learning to code with random data is so difficult. There is no intelligibility to the inputs and outputs, and so even if you can check that you are doing things "correctly" there is no content to anchor what this means. This is my experience at least.

Perhaps we might even be able to imagine animal experiences to some degree, although this seems like it would be far less accurate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let's take the bat example. I find it difficult someone of your intellect would find it surmountable to create a video game (assuming you knew everything there is to know about "making video games") or rather, a simple few moments of imagination to form a thought experiment, where a player could "view the world" with echolocation. It's literally the only thing they have to avoid crashing into hard, possibly blunt or even sharp objects. Not that hard to visualize. Reminiscent of military/air sonar, isn't it?

My point is, it's not hard to dumb yourself down (though accurately and in relative ratio/correspondence does take a fair amount of intellect) enough to imagine. In fact, would you not say a fighter jet piloting a military jet using radar to see his targets and allies is, in many if not most ways, basically a similar experience to the bat? Think about it. Sure you have your own thoughts going on (mission objectives) but at the end of the day the little blips that give little information (other than if you crash into any of them you will likely die) ultimately guide your way?

We all have the same faculties or rather appendages, but the brain and development (or lack thereof) or other related systems either bolsters or hinders their "usefulness". The same dog that can't open a doorknob a 2-year-old could even if there was a pallet of dog food behind it to save it's life can sniff out a single bullet 100 yards away or the slightest residue of explosives under three layers of airtight seal thus saving the lives of possibly millions of people (in the right scenario). So, while some things aren't quite so hierarchical, there's certainly clearly defined descriptions or telegraphic, structured forms of experience. Certainly ones that humans can detect, describe, or at least talk about with some significant degree of accuracy.

Basically, that bat that just got done defecating in a cave isn't just sitting there pondering about the metaphysical ramifications of Plato's Cave or the ramifications of determinism vs. consequentialism, for example. There's much, much less going on in that little brain of its, I'd guarantee. Ergo, it's not hard to imagine the experience, perhaps with a bit of effort.

"Judgement" and "opinion" make sense to me. I am not sure about "preference" or "desire." I can certainly know my own desires, but I wouldn't equate desiring something with knowing it. It seems that knowing should come prior to desiring, for how could we desire what we do not know ("know" in the broadest sense, including sense knowledge). — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem certain enough, that you could know your desires but I wonder NOW if you ought to at all....Doubting from the start? No reason to believe...yet. I am not questioning this "faith" you have in your knowings of self desires. I am wondering why you think these knowings would come after desiring? Of course knowing precedes desire, it proceeds your birth, therefore your desires. Was it ever truly about the desire? Or was it the mind scrambling to rewrite reality into something digestible?

I'd answer the "How" question literally. I asked myself in the privacy of my mind that same question, with genuine curiosity. [because I want to know how my mind thinks about the question and other things that come with that aka this ]

How will the mind help prepare a digestible enough answer to poorly spew out here Kizzy? I feel I ought to do. How could we desire what we do not know? By thinking about thoughts. By using our brain with body in harmony, as a unit. As one, of it. Becoming what was ought to be from the beginning, and experiencing it. Once or twice???

We have the power! Day by day. Nighty, night. As above, so below. Is it in the chance?

Knowing self to fullest possible point means intentions are knowable, by measuring or weighing the value, time, and power of thought behind them. Is it relevant to understand what happens if or when intention bypasses itself? How is for later.

Say intentions are bypassed in itself, when what is imagined, thought in privacy of mind, perceived internally in mental space aka mind collides with what actually plays out in reality? Now if/when these intentions with no goals, no action, is just suspended potential, when does it become meaningful? When is the impression made into reality. By shaping our perceptions (knowing intentions, or knowing self "enough" - self knowledge that is used to make a difference in the way the world may be seen by offering the chance for another to see how it is, by observing...you and the way you and I see the world is influenced, though differently, from the intentions we allowed to take shape. Or is the thoughts of intentions, self before decision or actions while just a body is sitting, waiting even whirling around to be distorted into something we can defend? What was always going to happen? Is the brain just being and the act of thinking the same thing? Or is focus required, a goal, a purpose. Function and expectations are linked to morality and truth. As well as, illusions of intentions or when the need for justification reshapes truth and morality,

"Deception of Certainty" — Kizzy

The ideas that can be thought about with the goal being an unknown desire, potential desires are to be unknown, they are to be found when the time is right. :halo: Or wrong? :fire: Left? :point: Weast!? :chin:

:eyes: This way, Patrick :sparkle:
:up: :starstruck:

So to understand THE potential [you have] with effort, focus, and or attention to what we do day to day, in our environment, given the current status/state/place in reality. Mentally, physically, literally, and not. Use your imagination!!! Do you know how to do that? Think for yourself? before we "know" fully for ourselves, but attain it by being able to account for self enough to be able to and see it in another.

If the mind has or holds ideas that cannot be justified using your words or language skill/communication source and connections through explanations or demonstrations YET, but they still shape our experiences then perhaps knowledge is not simply "justified true belief" but also a truth established through action, recognition, and relational understanding. I'm wondering more: HOW is knowledge shaped, transmitted, and affirmed?


Glad you asked, Outlander!*

Would you have any objection if your use of the word "belief" in this context were to be substituted with, say: "opinion", "judgement", "desire", "preference", or "goal". Do you find any of these substitutes more or less fitting or some even outright more accurate or completely incompatible? If so, why? — Outlander

yes means substitution is applicable, no means I object the substitution and use of other words in place of the use of the word "belief" (in context to this discussion):
1.belief~opinion > no
2.belief~judgement > maybe>if yes must be verifiable, if no then you have a belief in self to make the judgement to not sub the word for belief, knowledge by comparison, justified in confidence or surety of answer yes or no
3.belief~desire > yes
4.belief~preference > no
5.believe~goal > yes

1.Bias (irrelevant, aka who cares?),4. (see 1. opinion) I think we should disclude "preference" as it can effectively be grouped with the scope of 1. opinion.
2.,3.,5. knowable, knowings, knowledge...knowing 2,3,5 is possible, but not always attained as its up to you and the choices foreseen in/with/from time.
*All substitutes you mention can be attributes of character with such held "belief/s" - bias is knowable but irrelevant for substitution--no need necessary. If such the need for the word replacement, I wonder why is this important for further clarification? I might [I am, beginning to actually already started to question the need for such word substitution in regards to a tailored liking, or end goal requiring such a use for another..Or is the reason to make belief as an excuse to act? Judgement no matter what beliefs are held will verify credibility of subject with specified or belief/s, need references, think: who could vouch for you?

Is it possible thatIntentions with power of knowledge shape perception, allows perceptions to shape reality, and reality loops into belief. - main focus for me and a topic worth a grand discussion to be had, YET!

Perhaps we might even be able to imagine animal experiences to some degree, although this seems like it would be far less accurate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We can and we shall at least try...if necessary. For what though? We ought to do it for ourselves. Imagine you as an animal, even. That could be fun. I am obviously a rat on fire....but we can attempt to understand, engage actively and from that is a breathing point, a base to launch from when we get that chance to do it AGAIN to others. We can Imagine the experience...accuracy tbd. Verifiable? I think so.

- :up:

Yes, there is perhaps a useful clarification here. I have been conflating two things:

A. The need for any sense knowledge to achieve abstraction and an understanding of meaning (an intellectual understanding of things); and

B. The need to have had particular experiences to gain particular sense knowledge.

Because I would tend to agree with you. I don't think having the sensory system of a bat is going to help me attain new intellectual knowledge. Maybe it could, by helping me notice certain things, but only in an ancillary way. We humans can create all sorts of instruments to probe the being of things, and so we are quite able to access intellectual knowledge through our senses, even if such knowledge is not available to our senses unaided. We have chemical sensors far more sensitive than the nose of a bloodhound, and radars far more powerful and sensitive than a bat.

So, perhaps the knowledge of "what it is like to be a bat" is largely or wholly just sense knowledge. Still, when we consider things like "being a black man in America," or "being a single mother," it's important to recall that our imagination is only so powerful, and that each particular experience is also unique, such that our extrapolations based on our sensory/intellectual knowledge to experiences we have not had might include crucial errors.

Whereas point A speaks to the "man in the Chinese room." Some sensory knowledge is required for us to gain intellectual knowledge. A man who has never left a blank room, but who has learned to read, and has read about the world outside the room, will have severe deficits. Even the room gives him some sense knowledge, so he will understand something of what he reads. But the attainment of intellectual knowledge cannot be reduced to language or the rules of language. This would be in line with the idea that the intellect must abstract the intelligible species from the senses. We experience language and other sign systems through the senses, but this might not be enough in extreme cases where common sense experiences have never occurred.

Now another question might be: "would being a bat grant us new aesthetic knowledge?" or "new experiences of beauty?" On the one hand, it seems obvious that possession of different sensory systems means that different things will "please when experienced." Flies love feces for instance. On the other, if we think of beauty as "what pleases when known" and move away from immediate sense knowledge, then perhaps the difference only matters so much. Yet I think experiencing things directly in new ways might lead to an experience of beauty as known in new ways too. That's my intuition. Because beauty relates to wholes, and different types of sensation relate to wholes in different ways, new senses would add new access to beauty.

This seems apparent when we consider someone born blind who is given their sight. It seems the new sense knowledge would also lead to new aesthetic knowledge (even if we think brute animals are incapable of aesthetic knowledge on account of lacking an intellect).

However, understanding ("intellectual consideration") would also seem to be of a higher intellectual order than justified propositional belief, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't justification require some degree of understanding

Absolutely. So, discursive justification (proofs, etc.) start from the higher level (understanding at least something) and try to progress back to that level vis-á-vis some other object of knowledge. We try to move from understanding to understanding.

Aquinas actually has it that judgement is most proper to understanding (knowing truth as truth simply), and only secondarily ascribed to discursive judgement.

Sense knowledge is prior to discursive judgement. I suppose understanding is in some sense beyond it (but is itself most properly called judgement).

So, is this properly knowledge? It does seem to involve an adequacy of experience to things. If it isn't knowledge, what do we make of the fact that it seems possible to imagine "what it is like to be" more or less accurately, or to gain direct experience in some of these cases? If we aren't gaining knowledge of "what it is like to be..." then what are we gaining? "Memory?" But then it seems we can use that memory to say: "that's not what that is like!" That is, to call some description false, implying that such memories contain truth (and thus knowledge).

I would allow that intellectual knowledge might be most properly called knowledge. However, understanding ("intellectual consideration") would also seem to be of a higher intellectual order than justified propositional belief, and "knowing what it is like to be..." seems to include a crucial element of understanding. Maybe Mary the Color Expert is relevant here too perhaps. The perfection of the conformity of the intellect to being seems like it might require a grasp of things not reducible to language (but of which language can serve as a sign). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course, if you ask Derrida, this conformity is an impossible problematic. Grasping things not reducible to language is the "other" side where understanding meets its metaphysical (under erasure) counterpart, for to acknowledge at all is a transcendental affair as that which is acknowledged stands at an epistemic distance from ipseity (to borrow the jargon typically used for this kind of talk), and no matter how strong the grasp is, it is structurally untouchable (notwithstanding Husserl, et al).

But anyway, you seem to be talking about empathy, and whether it is possible. Do you really think being in a marginalized group makes one so radically different from those who are not, but sympathize, that knowing what their plight, their issues, their pov, should be called into question? The knowledge claim of one who stands outside a group depends not so much on the qualitative distinctness of the group, but rather on the universal descriptive features of this group and seeing here that there is warrant for their cause. But interpretatively. one does stand at a distance as one stands naively outside any field. This, though, doesn't make empathy impossible, just limited.

The bat? That is a theoretical distance that is almost absolute, again, especially given that language itself is an alien imposition on all things.

I'm familiar with the broad critiques of 20th century philosophy. I am not really a fan though. For one, they very often start from the premises of the Anglo-empiricist tradition (even if this is normally to somehow debunk it), or draw on those who did (e.g. Wittgenstein), but I think those premises are quite deficient. That and you get a sort of broad rejection of the pre-modern tradition, largely on the back of Kant's charge of dogmatism and Heidegger's charge of "ontotheology."

I think these critiques are far weaker than is generally acknowledged, and start from an inaccurate understanding of "classical metaphysics." For example, as Gadamer and others have pointed out, Heidegger starts from the late-medieval nominalism he is familiar (e.g. Suárez) with and then backwards projects this onto classical metaphysics writ large. Yet neo-scholastics and Catholic philosophy more generally tends to look at the late-medieval/Reformation period as one giant "wrong turn" in philosophy to begin with.

The reduction of "reason" (and the activity of the intellect more generally) to discursive ratio alone is a primary culprit here, and the post-structuralist epistemic challenges don't seem immune from this tendency. More broadly, the entire notion of reason as primarily occurring within the context of "language games" tends to be simply presuppose this view of reason, and normally many of the Anglo-empiricist epistemic presuppositions (again, even if they oppose that camp's conclusions). Likewise, the emergence of Sausser's semiotics, and the resultant decoupling of the sign and signified requires that one not begin from the tripartite semiotics embraced by C.S. Peirce, John Deely, etc., which comes out of the Latin tradition (originally from Saint Augustine in the Doctrina Signorum).

This perhaps explains an historically interesting phenomenon. Catholics love their phenomenology. Husserl's prize student Edith Stein is a Catholic saint. The phenomenologist philosopher Karol Józef Wojtyła became the pope and saint John Paul II. Ferdinand Ulrich is another example, or Hans Urs von Balthasar or Erich Pryzwarra.

Yet the epistemic and metaphysical conclusions reached in this alternate tradition tend be quite different (and in some sense, vastly more optimistic). I cannot help but think that this divergence comes from avoiding some of the bad epistemic premises that come down through Hume and Kant and dominate both analytic and continental thought (although prehaps overcome in Hegel to some degree), and the deflation of reason (a sort of concomitant of Charles Taylor's "buffered self," which trends in continental thought, enactivism, etc. have tried to overcome, but often without wholly leaving behind some of its presuppositions). My take is that there is a certain forgetfulness here, an inability to see other options because history has been swept aside by the "devastating" charges of the "critical philosophy."

But anyway, you seem to be talking about empathy, and whether it is possible.Do you really think being in a marginalized group makes one so radically different from those who are not, but sympathize, that knowing what their plight, their issues, their pov, should be called into question? The knowledge claim of one who stands outside a group depends not so much on the qualitative distinctness of the group, but rather on the universal descriptive features of this group and seeing here that there is warrant for their cause. But interpretatively. one does stand at a distance as one stands naively outside any field. This, though, doesn't make empathy impossible, just limited.

No, I don't. I think we are in agreement here? I was just pointing that out as a common position that seems relevant to the consideration of "what it is like to be..." I think human imagination, while fallible, is capable of accurately covering such ground to varying degrees, and I also think that claims to special epistemic status due to being a member of a group tend to be bunk. This is not to say they might not be appropriate in some cases, but they are often called upon to adjudicate questions in economics, political science, etc., where I think the special pleading is not appropriate.

The bat? That is a theoretical distance that is almost absolute, again, especially given that language itself is an alien imposition on all things.

Well, this gets back to the first part of my quote. Do I think it is possible to imagine what it is like to be a bat? Sure, obviously. How accurate will such a conception be? That's a tough question; I'm agnostic. However, do I think that "being a bat" would grant access to intellectual knowledge that humans cannot possess? Probably not much. As noted above, we have radars that are more sensitive and powerful, and we can gather the information, the form/act, of things through various medium (e.g. sound waves) and abstract from them via instruments. Yet there still seems to be a sensory knowledge element that cannot be attained, and quite possibly an element of aesthetic knowledge too.

I don't see language as a "barrier," here. I think language, sign systems, models, etc. (and the senses) are best thought of a means of knowing, that through which we know, not what we know. The sign vehicle in the semiotic triad is not some sort of impenetrable barrier that forever keeps the object and the interpretant separated, but is rather the very means of their nuptial union, which is why the sign relation is irreducibly triadic and defies reductionist analysis. The difficulty in "knowing what it is like to be a bat," rather flows from the difference in sense knowledge (which is itself ultimately a primarily a means).

I think Kant, and philosophy following him, errs by taking the old scholastic adage "quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur," "everything is received in the mode of the receiver," and problematically absolutizes it. There is an element of ecstasis in knowing, a "going out" and a "joining" that gets washed out and lost. Likewise, the way in which the "mind is potentially all things," gets lost in the emphasis on how the receiver receives, but not upon how the receiver is changed by (and becomes identical with) what is received.

There is something very interesting in the way modern thought swan dives into skepticism across an epoch where advances in technology and scientific theory rapidly accelerate, leading to advances the would have seemed like magic a mere generation ago. One would think that techne would serve as the proof of episteme. Even a radically skeptical reading of Plato, one that would reduce him down to doing not much else over 2,000+ pages but offering up Socratic irony, would have to allow that Socrates gives way to the knowledge embodied in techne. And yet here we are. Perhaps this is because folks like Alasdair MacIntyre are right and this surge in theoretical knowledge has come at the same time as a collapse in practical and aesthetic knowledge, leaving a sort of vacuum in the modern psyche. That might make sense, and it would explain things like the Amish outperforming their neighbors on all the measures of welfare economics (e.g. income, wealth, life expectancy, health span, self-reported happiness, marriage stability, etc.) all while supporting massive families and eschewing centuries of technological progress and theory.

JTB (Justified True Belief) is both insufficient and excessive to describe the kind of knowledge I’m referring to.

On one hand, JTB is too rigid to account for culture—it struggles with context, time, and change. It doesn’t adapt well to dynamic environments.

On the other hand, it’s not process-oriented. The introduction of new information disrupts JTB—hence the Gettier cases. (See my thread “Gettier’s Gap.”)

To understand “knowledge of what it’s like,” we need a flexible, dynamic concept of knowledge. One that can organize itself and that is self-aware—aware of its own knowledge and capable of adapting and revising based on experience.

JTB lacks this. It deals in binary: things are either right or wrong, with no room for gradual shifts or evolving perspectives. It assumes a static, divine-like grasp of truth. But we don’t have divine knowledge, which is why we need a more adaptive sibling to JTB for dynamic scenarios. (See my concepts of DK and JTC: Justified True Crisis)

“Knowledge of what it’s like to be” is, in this sense, an organizational knowledge structure that is aware of its own process. It reflects on states such as perception and language over time, allowing it to become a knowledge state of its own—knowledge of what it’s like to be (at t1). But it will always be a approcimation because Its such a fuid process which is hardly graspable.

Time is crucial in cultural evolution, because what it’s like to be something changes. This links to the Ship of Theseus problem.

In life, there are many organizational structures with different ways of accessing the world—and therefore many forms of “what it’s like to be.” But there are intersections between these structures that all creatures can relate to: groups, love, fear, and a shared knowledge of the world—even without language. However, without language, this knowledge is more fleeting, because perception changes.

Static knowledge, expressed through language, offers a crucial advantage: it’s more stable over time—depending on the domain we’re looking at.

However, other thinkers offer up several different types of knowledge. For instance, a distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how." Knowing how to ride a bike, for example, does not seem to reduce to propositional knowledge (at least not easily). Its justification is the ability to stay upright on a moving bike, which is not linguistic. It seems possible that someone who has lost their capacity to understand and produce language might nonetheless know the to ride a bike. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure if being able to ride a bike should be regarded as knowledge based on the theory of knowing how.   It should be regarded as an ability to interact or control the balance when on bike, hence an ability of riding a bike.

How would it be like to be a bat?  No one would know it unless he or she is a bat.  Whatever comments on that question would be a fictional description from imagination.

Knowledge is the rational beliefs on reality verified by sense perceptions, personal experience or logical reasoning.

I'm familiar with the broad critiques of 20th century philosophy. I am not really a fan though. For one, they very often start from the premises of the Anglo-empiricist tradition (even if this is normally to somehow debunk it), or draw on those who did (e.g. Wittgenstein), but I think those premises are quite deficient. That and you get a sort of broad rejection of the pre-modern tradition, largely on the back of Kant's charge of dogmatism and Heidegger's charge of "ontotheology." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess by Kant's dogmatism you refer to the transcendental dialectic, which Michel Henry (who is my current interest) refers to as "the lost desert of the dialectic." And Heidegger's ontotheology has to be understood in light of his own spooky "What IS Metaphysics?" which I always appreciated as a nice balance, but he never really understood religion.

Debunking the angloempiricist tradition: what else is there? There is Buddhism, which is really just a radical phenomenology, as I see it.

I think these critiques are far weaker than is generally acknowledged, and start from an inaccurate understanding of "classical metaphysics." For example, as Gadamer and others have pointed out, Heidegger starts from the late-medieval nominalism he is familiar (e.g. Suárez) with and then backwards projects this onto classical metaphysics writ large. Yet neo-scholastics and Catholic philosophy more generally tends to look at the late-medieval/Reformation period as one giant "wrong turn" in philosophy to begin with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I can't imagine Heidegger as a nominalist. Things in the world are "of a piece" with language that "opens" them (alethea). Presocratics, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and not to forget Kierkegaard whom he dismisses as a religious writer, but read his Concept of Anxiety and you find a lot of what is in Being and Time. And Nietzsche. And the Greeks.

But I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I don't find the expicit presence of nomilalism. Perhaps I'll read Gadamer and Suarez to see this. Is this where I will find this "onto classical metaphysics writ large"? Why onto classical?

Greek, yes. But classical in any other way, I don't see it. You know better than I, no doubt.

The reduction of "reason" (and the activity of the intellect more generally) to discursive ratio alone is a primary culprit here, and the post-structuralist epistemic challenges don't seem immune from this tendency. More broadly, the entire notion of reason as primarily occurring within the context of "language games" tends to be simply presuppose this view of reason, and normally many of the Anglo-empiricist epistemic presuppositions (again, even if they oppose that camp's conclusions). Likewise, the emergence of Sausser's semiotics, and the resultant decoupling of the sign and signified requires that one not begin from the tripartite semiotics embraced by C.S. Peirce, John Deely, etc., which comes out of the Latin tradition (originally from Saint Augustine in the Doctrina Signorum). — Count Timothy von Icarus

But phenomenology is not about language games, though one can compare Wittgenstein with hermeneutical indeterminacy. Post structuralists like Derrida are not into tripartite semiotics. Derrida takes Saussure as a starting place to show how structuralism fails to center meaning, but see John Caputo's thoughts: His deconstruction only leads to one place, which is the completion of Husserl's reduction in a complete annihilation of the presumption to know. This is more Meister Eckhart (I pray to God to be rid of God) than it is post structuralism. It is a revelation.

I can see resistance to this. It is really, as Levinas would put it, a giving over to the tout autre, which, I have come to believe, is the essential telos of philosophy. Rorty understood this, and switched to teaching literature, which has the actuality of living affairs, but he was a philosopher, not a mystic. He never saw the significance of it.

And again, this is not to contradict all you say. It is just to point out the importance of post-post modern thinking: Wittgenstein wanted to put and end to metaphysics because it trivialized this, not because he thought it absent of meaning.

This perhaps explains an historically interesting phenomenon. Catholics love their phenomenology. Husserl's prize student Edith Stein is a Catholic saint. The phenomenologist philosopher Karol Józef Wojtyła became the pope and saint John Paul II. Ferdinand Ulrich is another example, or Hans Urs von Balthasar or Erich Pryzwarra. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting the way this goes, the Heideggerian theologists, Karl Rahner, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, and of course, Edith Stein, not a Heideggarian, but a Husserlian phenomenologist ( was coincidentally reading her dissertation on Empathy when you mentioned her). Catholics are still mostly Thomists, no? I read read precious little of Summa Theologica

But Heidegger achieved the first comprehensive exposition of the soul, and he might not object to my putting it like this, given that near his death, he stated he never really left the church, surprising Karl Rahner. His openness of truth and human existence and the "nothing" of metahysics restores God to a primordiality lost in tradition (though he would not put it like this. His is a thesis of equiprimodiality, leaving, and aligned here with Wittgenstein, authentic insight to the unspoken. Big issue. Depends on who you read. I lean toward affirmation, evidenced by ethics and aesthetics.

Yet the epistemic and metaphysical conclusions reached in this alternate tradition tend be quite different (and in some sense, vastly more optimistic). I cannot help but think that this divergence comes from avoiding some of the bad epistemic premises that come down through Hume and Kant and dominate both analytic and continental thought (although prehaps overcome in Hegel to some degree), and the deflation of reason (a sort of concomitant of Charles Taylor's "buffered self," which trends in continental thought, enactivism, etc. have tried to overcome, but often without wholly leaving behind some of its presuppositions). My take is that there is a certain forgetfulness here, an inability to see other options because history has been swept aside by the "devastating" charges of the "critical philosophy." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't have much patience for analytic philosophy. All talk, no substance, literally. As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel, they simply forgot that we exist. Which is why think phenomenology finally has it right, that is, the movement toward givenness and the the actuality that lies before one cancels the scholarly work, or, allows it to recede into an invisible understanding that is the stability of being in a world. One now steps into eternity, says Meister Eckhart, and implicitly, Derrida, I mean, Derrida follows the matter all the way down the rabbit hole and one does not end up with bad metaphysics. Rather, it is, finally, the world and its inherent religious dimension in the existential disclosure. This is where philosophy has been trying to go since the beginning of inquiry. I think philosophers like Rorty (Dewey, James, Peirce) are right, well, reject metaphysics, but simply see the world as foundationally empty. I recall Simon Critchley criticizing Rorty for trying a secular pragmatic analysis of ethics while standing in the nullity of an argument.

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self I have right here. I will begin later today. Thank for that!

No, I don't. I think we are in agreement here? I was just pointing that out as a common position that seems relevant to the consideration of "what it is like to be..." I think human imagination, while fallible, is capable of accurately covering such ground to varying degrees, and I also think that claims to special epistemic status due to being a member of a group tend to be bunk. This is not to say they might not be appropriate in some cases, but they are often called upon to adjudicate questions in economics, political science, etc., where I think the special pleading is not appropriate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You know, I think this right. To talk about othes in these contexts involves one in the broader contexts of political ends, trying to secure funds to redress actual problems, relying on iffy data, spinning research, and so on, and this turns positions into distortions, and these are thrown into the collective thinking, congealed into meaning, then become assumptions in an ideology. The ctuality is lost, as with the way a very nice observation that people are harmed by careless talk turns into dissertations about how we should modify or limit speech and podium pounding campaigns, making statistics into social realities. I AM in favor of a gentler world, more caring of others, but I don't want the new "simulacra" of the politically driven media.

If that, or thereabouts, is what you are talking about.

don't see language as a "barrier," here. I think language, sign systems, models, etc. (and the senses) are best thought of a means of knowing, that through which we know, not what we know. The sign vehicle in the semiotic triad is not some sort of impenetrable barrier that forever keeps the object and the interpretant separated, but is rather the very means of their nuptial union, which is why the sign relation is irreducibly triadic and defies reductionist analysis. The difficulty in "knowing what it is like to be a bat," rather flows from the difference in sense knowledge (which is itself ultimately a primarily a means). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree if is wasn't for that pesky business of the question, the "piety of thought". It is not as if there is no question as to the relation between language and the world. The triad only makes sense if such questions are just ignored. Phenomenologists say the world we live in and talk, make plans, and so on, is fine. It is the bulk of our lives (the they, Heidegger calls it, not pejoratively. He calls normal time "vulgar" time, again, not to mock this, but to say it stands outside analysis, as Einstein might call everyday concepts of gravity preanalytic, and thus vulgar) that is like this. But philosophy wants to close in on the presuppositions of all this, which brings question to all things, and language, the question language asks of itself, seems to be the final question.

I think the idea you’re reaching for is what John Vervaeke calls ‘participatory knowledge’, one of the ‘four p’s’ (the others being propositional, perspectival, and procedural.) Participatory knowledge is not just ‘knowing about’, but knowing through active engagement and absorption within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between world and subject and is constitutive of both identity and a sense of belonging. It is the knowing of being through being, so to speak. (summary).

Another source this brought to my mind was Eliade’s ‘The Sacred and the Profane’, which posits that the source of religion is re-creation of, and therefore participation in, the creation of the world, or the sacred order. Congregants become participants through liturgy and ritual.

Interesting, participatory knowing has also appeared in a thoroughly modern guise in the form of physicist John Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’, in which observers play a central role in the manifestation of reality, ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon’.

Contrast that with the attitude of scientific objectivity, which presumes a fundamental division between observer and observed. Which characterises the ‘society of the spectacle’ in which we’re all observers rather than participants, always ‘outside of’ or ‘apart from. ‘