[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In philosophy, knowledge is traditionally defined as justified true belief. There are problems with this definition, as shown in this video.

The Gettier Problem: True Justified Belief without Knowledge - Epistemology Series

A Gettier problem is any example that demonstrates that an individual can satisfy the classical analysis of knowledge - justified true belief - without possessing knowledge.

Think Further Questions
1. Should we search for a definition of knowledge? Why or why not?
2. Why should we not define knowledge as certainty?
3. Do Gettier problems threaten everyday knowledge claims? How so?

**Contents
00:00 - The Problem
00:26 - Explanation
00:41 - Gettier Problem
00:50 - How It Works
03:54 - So What?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here's the full transcript.

The Problem
Suppose you look outside the window one day and see a figure shoveling snow. You recognize the coat and silhouette and think, ?Oh, my dad?s shoveling snow.? However, that person isn?t actually your father, but your next-door neighbor. He owns the same winter jacket as your father and is a similar height. Yet, coincidentally, on the other side of the house, your father is in fact shoveling snow. Can you say that you knew your dad was shoveling snow?

Explanation
In this situation, your belief that your dad was shoveling was justified - your neighbor looks very similar to your dad - and it was true - your dad was, in fact, shoveling snow on the other side of the house - but you cannot say you knew that your dad was shoveling snow. This example is what is known as a Gettier problem.

Gettier Problem
A Gettier problem is any example that demonstrates that an individual can satisfy the classical analysis of knowledge - justified true belief - without possessing knowledge.

How It Works
Philosophers have long attempted to give an analysis of knowledge by outlining the necessary and sufficient conditions that one must satisfy to be able to know a fact. Necessary conditions are requirements that a concept must have to be called that thing it is. For example, being divisible by two is a necessary condition of being an even number. On the other hand, sufficient conditions are qualities whose presence automatically qualifies a thing to be called the object in question. Being a beagle is a sufficient condition of being a dog, and so is being a pug, or golden retriever, or dalmatian.

Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato was the first to propose the classical analysis of knowledge, which defines knowledge as a justified true belief. This is known as the JTB theory of knowledge. A belief is any claim that you accept. A true belief is any claim you accept that corresponds to how things are in the world, and a justified true belief is a true belief that has proper evidence. In terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, all of these parts are necessary for knowledge, but none of them alone is sufficient to count as knowledge. For example, you may believe that aliens are real, but until your belief is justified and true, it is not knowledge.

The Gettier problem is named after American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 presented two famous counterexamples to the JTB account of knowledge. The most well-known case is about two men who are applying for a job: Jones and Smith. Smith has been assured that Jones will get the job by the company president, and he has counted that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket. He concludes that ?The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.? However, Smith himself unknowingly has 10 coins in his pocket and gets the job. In this case, Smith?s belief that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket is true, and he is justified in believing it; yet few would say that Smith knows this fact.

Gettier problems arise when there exists a relapse in the relationship between justification and truth. You are justified in believing your dad is shoveling snow because you see someone who strongly resembles him outside. However, the truth of your belief is not connected to what you see. It is only coincidentally true.

Philosophers have tried endlessly to adapt and revise the classical theory of knowledge to avoid the Gettier problem, often by attempting to find the ?fourth condition? of knowledge to add to the JTB theory. One of the simplest solutions is the no false beliefs condition. This account adds an addendum that knowledge cannot rest on any false beliefs. Therefore, your true justified belief that your dad is shoveling snow does not count as knowledge because it rests on the false belief that your neighbor is your dad. The issue with this solution is that there are cases of knowledge that do rest on false beliefs yet are knowledge all the same. For example, consider a detective who interrogates ten people who say they are witnesses to a crime. However, one of these ten people is lying. Therefore, when the detective concludes who committed the crime based on testimonial evidence, she will include a false belief that the one lying witness saw the crime. Yet, this single false belief does not invalidate the detective?s knowledge because of the large body of truthful witnesses who also saw the crime. An account of knowledge should not become overly demanding, discrediting everyday intuitions in order to surmount the Gettier problem. The no false belief condition seems to go too far.

So What?
The Gettier problem reminds us that a definition of knowledge cannot and should not require complete certainty. Although any account of knowledge that does not bind truth and justification together may encounter Gettier-style counterexamples, this may be an inescapable problem. We shouldn?t turn to radical skepticism and claim that we know nothing. Instead, consider the ways we use knowledge in our daily lives. Knowledge serves an important evolutionary function, whether it?s the location of a beehive on a mountain trail or that there?s a measles outbreak in Philadelphia. Therefore, we need a reliable process for deciding when to trust our senses and others? testimony, even if this process does not result in a foolproof analysis every time.

https://academy4sc.org/video/the-gettier-problem-true-justified-belief-without-knowledge/#:~:text=A%20true%20belief%20is%20any,sufficient%20to%20count%20as%20knowledge.

[alancalverd]

Can you say that you knew your dad was shoveling snow?

Thus showing that philosophy is simply amateur linguistics and a waste of  life.

Everyone knows that the sun orbits the flat earth -  never mind a fleeting glance at your neighbor, that's predictive knowledge derived from acute observation of absolutely consistent phenomena over thousands of years. We know it so well, and so universally,  that we base trade, agriculture and thus the whole of civilisation on it. We even have names for sunrise and sunset.  And it is absolutely wrong in every respect.

I know my Redeemer liveth. Bullshit, but what a great song!

I am coming to the conclusion that philosophy is the work creation program for  would-be academics who failed English 101 and were no good at football.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Thus showing that philosophy is simply amateur linguistics and a waste of  life.

You share your thought with AJ Ayer, who's a philosopher himself.

?All genuine problems are at least theoretically capable of being solved,? said the positivist philosopher A J Ayer in 1936. But most philosophical problems, he thought, were pseudo-problems, to be dissolved by close examination of the language in which they were couched. ?Such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as ?the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress?,? he thought, had ?no literal significance?, even for the person who uttered it, because it could not possibly be verified by observation or experiment.

Ayer said he plucked that sentence about the Absolute randomly from the writings of one of the most typical and dominant late 19th-century British philosophers, F H Bradley. He was asserting that almost all previous philosophy was literally nonsense, like ?All mimsy were the borogoves? but less amusing. And Ayer was saying that, if philosophy was to have any respectable, useful or well-defined subject matter, it would be found in the nature and function of language, not the nature and function of reality.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-philosophys-obsession-with-language-unravelled

You can accept it as it is, or try to revolutionize it with new disrupting ideas.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I'm preparing next video about cogito ergo sum as the first knowledge. Stay tuned.

A little flashback here. I found some short videos describing cogito pretty well.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The Problem
Suppose you look outside the window one day and see a figure shoveling snow. You recognize the coat and silhouette and think, ?Oh, my dad?s shoveling snow.? However, that person isn?t actually your father, but your next-door neighbor. He owns the same winter jacket as your father and is a similar height. Yet, coincidentally, on the other side of the house, your father is in fact shoveling snow. Can you say that you knew your dad was shoveling snow?

Explanation
In this situation, your belief that your dad was shoveling was justified - your neighbor looks very similar to your dad - and it was true - your dad was, in fact, shoveling snow on the other side of the house - but you cannot say you knew that your dad was shoveling snow. This example is what is known as a Gettier problem.

Gettier Problem
A Gettier problem is any example that demonstrates that an individual can satisfy the classical analysis of knowledge - justified true belief - without possessing knowledge.

There are problems in the common usage of each word to define knowledge, as follows.
Justified : In many examples of problems identified in discussion about knowledge, the word justified is treated as a binary parameter. Some very weak justifications are often offered to claim knowledge, which in the end will be shown false just to show a problem. Hence the problem often found with this requirement is when we accept inadequate justifications. The adequacy of the justification should depend on the extraordinariness of the information. Extraordinary information requires extraordinary justification.
True : Many things that we were sure to be true, are eventually proven to be false. As mentioned by Descartes, we are prone to errors and deceptions. We can not say that something is true without adequate justification. To say that something is true with certainty, we need extremely strong justifications with infinite accuracy and precision. It makes the requirement impractical, and often useless.
Belief : Dictionary defines it as ?an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.? While the statement is just a form of information, the acceptance implies some form of justification, even if the justification is irrational, such as based on indoctrination, intuition, instinct, feeling, and emotion.

From the problems shown above, it?s evident that the trichotomy suffers the problem of overlapping and contradiction. While the true requirement implies infinitely strong justification, the justified requirement is often only loosely adhered, thus creates a contradiction. The belief requirement also overlaps with justified requirement. To solve this problem, knowledge can be redefined as adequately justified information. This would make the concept of knowledge more practical and useful.
The adequacy requirement depends on the extraordinariness of the information. The knowledge should not be a binary value. We can have strong knowledge or weak knowledge based on the strength of the justification. Bayesian reasoning can be applied here.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Thus showing that philosophy is simply amateur linguistics and a waste of  life.

You share your thought with AJ Ayer, who's a philosopher himself.

?All genuine problems are at least theoretically capable of being solved,? said the positivist philosopher A J Ayer in 1936. But most philosophical problems, he thought, were pseudo-problems, to be dissolved by close examination of the language in which they were couched. ?Such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as ?the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress?,? he thought, had ?no literal significance?, even for the person who uttered it, because it could not possibly be verified by observation or experiment.

Ayer said he plucked that sentence about the Absolute randomly from the writings of one of the most typical and dominant late 19th-century British philosophers, F H Bradley. He was asserting that almost all previous philosophy was literally nonsense, like ?All mimsy were the borogoves? but less amusing. And Ayer was saying that, if philosophy was to have any respectable, useful or well-defined subject matter, it would be found in the nature and function of language, not the nature and function of reality.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-philosophys-obsession-with-language-unravelled

You can accept it as it is, or try to revolutionize it with new disrupting ideas.

We can try to make philosophy useful and meaningful again. Otherwise, people will look for alternatives to replace it, which they can find in cults, mysticism, and organized religions.
We can start by identifying problems in currently existing schools of philosophy, and offer some possible solutions. Let the new ideas spread and compete among one another. Surviving ideas will become part of accumulated knowledge of human civilization and whatever comes from it in the future.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Bayesian reasoning can be applied here.

There are already many online sources providing information on Bayesian reasoning, so I don't think I need to make my own version. Here are some of the best I can find on Youtube.

Think more rationally with Bayes? rule | Steven Pinker

In his explanation of Bayes' theorem, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker highlights how this type of reasoning can help us determine the degree of belief we assign to a claim based on available evidence.

Bayes' theorem takes into account the prior probability of a claim, the likelihood of the evidence given the claim is true, and the commonness of the evidence regardless of the claim's truth.

While Bayes' theorem can be useful for making statistical predictions, Pinker cautions that it may not always be appropriate in situations where fairness and other moral considerations are important. Therefore, it's crucial to consider when Bayes' theorem is applicable and when it's not.

0:00 What is Bayesian thinking?
1:01 The formula
2:41 When Bayes? theorem obscures the solution
4:25 Bayes? theorem in a nutshell

How To Update Your Beliefs Systematically - Bayes? Theorem

I didn't say it explicitly in the video, but in my view the Bayesian trap is interpreting events that happen repeatedly as events that happen inevitably. They may be inevitable OR they may simply be the outcome of a series of steps, which likely depend on our behaviour. Yet our expectation of a certain outcome often leads us to behave just as we always have which only ensures that outcome. To escape the Bayesian trap, we must be willing to experiment.

Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
Tony Fadell, Jeff Straathof, Donal Botkin, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Saeed Alghamdi

Useful references:
The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver
The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes? Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Bayes' theorem or rule (there are many different versions of the same concept) has fascinated me for a long time due to its uses both in mathematics and statistics, and to solve real world problems. Bayesian inference has been used to crack the Enigma Code and to filter spam email. Bayes has also been used to locate the wreckage from plane crashes deep beneath the sea.

Bayes theorem, the geometry of changing beliefs

You can read more about Kahneman and Tversky's work in Thinking Fast and Slow, or in one of my favorite books, The Undoing Project.

Contents:
0:00 - Intro example
4:09 - Generalizing as a formula
10:13 - Making probability intuitive
13:35 - Issues with the Steve example

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

This video provides an answer to a criticism against Bayesian thinking.

Is Bayesian thinking a sham?

There's a common criticism that people who claim to practice "Bayesian thinking" aren't actually doing anything special -- they're just using a fancy term to make their opinions seem more objective than they really are. In this video I explain why that criticism is misguided.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Universal Utopia 4 : Cogito ergo sum as the first knowledge

In the video, I quoted some important notes on Descartes' idea.

There are three important notes to keep in mind here. First, he claims only the certainty of his own existence from the first-person point of view ? he has not proved the existence of other minds at this point. This is something that has to be thought through by each of us for ourselves, as we follow the course of the meditations. Second, he does not say that his existence is necessary; he says that if he thinks, then necessarily he exists (see the instantiation principle). Third, this proposition "I am, I exist" is held true not based on a deduction (as mentioned above) or on empirical induction but on the clarity and self-evidence of the proposition. Descartes does not use this first certainty, the cogito, as a foundation upon which to build further knowledge; rather, it is the firm ground upon which he can stand as he works to discover further truths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum

It's unfortunate that he didn't do just that. What could have stopped him from doing it?
He could have prevented philosophy from being led astray by subsequent philosophers who came after him.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Extraordinary information requires extraordinary justification.

For the example with a rare disease, justification for accepting the claim of getting an extremely rare disease requires extremely accurate and precise tests.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here's a pretty detailed article analyzing knowledge.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/

The Analysis of Knowledge
First published Tue Feb 6, 2001; substantive revision Tue Mar 7, 2017
For any person, there are some things they know, and some things they don?t. What exactly is the difference? What does it take to know something? It?s not enough just to believe it?we don?t know the things we?re wrong about. Knowledge seems to be more like a way of getting at the truth. The analysis of knowledge concerns the attempt to articulate in what exactly this kind of ?getting at the truth? consists.

The attempt to analyze knowledge has received a considerable amount of attention from epistemologists, particularly in the late 20th Century, but no analysis has been widely accepted. Some contemporary epistemologists reject the assumption that knowledge is susceptible to analysis.

1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief
1.1 The Truth Condition
1.2 The Belief Condition
1.3 The Justification Condition
2. Lightweight Knowledge
3. The Gettier Problem
4. No False Lemmas
5. Modal Conditions
5.1 Sensitivity
5.2 Safety
5.3 Relevant Alternatives
6. Doing Without Justification?
6.1 Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge
6.2 Causal Theories of Knowledge
7. Is Knowledge Analyzable?
8. Epistemic Luck
9. Methodological Options
10. Virtue-Theoretic Approaches
10.1 The ?AAA? Evaluations
10.2 Fake Barn Cases
11. Knowledge First
12. Pragmatic Encroachment
13. Contextualism
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I'm planning for the next video to discuss deeper about knowledge itself.

Here it is.

Universal Utopia 5 : Redefining Knowledge

Traditional definition for knowledge is known to cause problems, such as Gettier problems. This video identifies those problems and offers the a solution by redefining knowledge.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Accumulating knowledge is like solving maze. It involves unknowns and trial and error. But it also involves improving efficiency by removing unnecessary things.

The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth

[alancalverd]

For the example with a rare disease, justification for accepting the claim of getting an extremely rare disease requires extremely accurate and precise tests.

Not at all! Evolution tends to eliminate diseases with exceptional symptoms so they become both rare and obvious. Having one brown leg on an otherwise white body is very unusual but ridiculously easy to diagnose ("in my professional judgement, Mr Jones, your legs are different colors, but you might want a second opinion") but deciding exactly which species of common cold virus you have requires a very sophisticated analytical technique.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

For the example with a rare disease, justification for accepting the claim of getting an extremely rare disease requires extremely accurate and precise tests.

Not at all! Evolution tends to eliminate diseases with exceptional symptoms so they become both rare and obvious. Having one brown leg on an otherwise white body is very unusual but ridiculously easy to diagnose ("in my professional judgement, Mr Jones, your legs are different colors, but you might want a second opinion") but deciding exactly which species of common cold virus you have requires a very sophisticated analytical technique.

Visual inspection is also a test. If it's extremely accurate for detecting a rare disease, then it's enough.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Philosophers have tried endlessly to adapt and revise the classical theory of knowledge to avoid the Gettier problem, often by attempting to find the ?fourth condition? of knowledge to add to the JTB theory.

We have tendency to try to solve problems by adding things to our previous solutions, which tend to make them more complicated. We don't want to throw away things that were useful or good enough for many known cases.

Sometimes, identifying unnecessary or faulty things in our previous solution and then remove them or replace them with a new one are what we need to get a better solution.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

How To Update Your Beliefs Systematically - Bayes' Theorem

Bayes' formula can be written in symmetrical form to make it easier to memorize.
P(A|B).P(B) = P(B|A).P(A)
Although it makes it harder to interpret

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Why you think you're right -- even if you're wrong | Julia Galef
Perspective is everything, especially when it comes to examining your beliefs. Are you a soldier, prone to defending your viewpoint at all costs — or a scout, spurred by curiosity? Julia Galef examines the motivations behind these two mindsets and how they shape the way we interpret information, interweaved with a compelling history lesson from 19th-century France. When your steadfast opinions are tested, Galef asks: "What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?"

The soldier and scout metaphor is closely related to deductive and inductive reasoning, respectively. To survive, we need to set them in balance. Being too close minded will prevent us from responding quickly enough in environmental changes, and lose in the competition. Being too open minded will make us vulnerable from scams.

To increase our chance to survive, there are 2 things we need to do.
- preventing changes that makes us worse off, which is analogous to soldier metaphor.
- making changes that makes us better off, which is analogous to scout metaphor.
The improvement and flexibility are necessary because of ever changing environmental conditions.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

While Bayes' theorem can be useful for making statistical predictions, Pinker cautions that it may not always be appropriate in situations where fairness and other moral considerations are important. Therefore, it's crucial to consider when Bayes' theorem is applicable and when it's not.

IMO, the objection on using Bayesian reasoning is more likely about unjustified addition or removal of assumptions used in the reasoning process. They include the goals in minds when making some decisions.