I'm looking for examples of "unjustified knowledge."

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m on the lookout for examples (if they exist) of sentences or utterances in which it is claimed that someone “knows” something where it is also implied that the one who is supposed to “know” it shouldn’t believe the thing believed in that instance of knowledge.

Real-life examples or natural sounding made-up examples are both okay.

The best example I can come up with is to imagine a case where, say, John is trying to figure out what day of the week Cynthia’s birthday is, and looks in a calendar to find out–but looks in last years calendar by mistake, yet also misreads that calendar, so that by coincidence he happens to get the day of the week right. I can imagine somone saying “John knew what day Cynthia’s birthday was on,” even though they might also say John should have believed otherwise than he did about the birthday, since he should have read the calendar more carefully.

Well, anyway. If anyone hears/reads/can think of better examples, I’d like to know about them.

-FrL-

2

Trying to figure out what knowledge is if not true justified belief, eh? The sort of example you’re giving seems to me to be something like a Gettier counterexample type thing (fallible reasoning that happens to work out by pure unrelated luck), only you consider it knowledge and unjustified, while, in the Gettier argument, the belief would be considered justified [via fallible justification] but not knowledge. (Justified in that believing something on the basis of having read it off the calendar is justified, though of course only fallibly, since misreadings can occur).

[But of course people can differ on what counts as justification and whether “fallible justification” is really justification at all. Or, for that matter, on what counts as knowledge. At any rate, I don’t have any new examples for you at the moment; just thought it interesting the way your example seemed to be similar to Gettier-type ones, just with a very different interpretation.]

3

I don’t understand. You’re asking if someone can misinterpret something in a way that they believe something to be true, and it is, but not for the reason they think it is?

Like, the world is round because the turtles shit on the plate world until it became unbalanced and flipped over, at which point they shit on the bottom of the plate world, and now it’s piled up and has actually become a sphere?

Like that?

4

Yeah, that sorta thing, except he’s asking for a case where you’d consider the result to be “knowledge”

5

[QUOTE=Frylock]
I’m on the lookout for examples (if they exist) of sentences or utterances…
[/QUOTE]
:dubious: Are you talking about… linguistics?

6

[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Trying to figure out what knowledge is if not true justified belief, eh? …
[/QUOTE]

Not quite. :slight_smile: But its somewhere in that area. There’s this paper that has made a small splash recently, in which the guy argues that truth is not part of the definition of knowledge, but rather, is just an implication (usually) of the act of making a knowledge claim.

I’m pretty sure I can make an exactly analogous argument that the same is true of “justification” and even “belief.” The same considerations that lead him to say “truth” is not part of the concept of knowledge but rather is simply implied by use of the term, I think can also provide for an argument that neither “justified” nor “believed” are part of the meaning of “knowledge” but rather are simply implied by use of the term.

The biggest obstacle to my making this plausible involves the fact that Hazlett (the author of the paper) has a fairly convincing line of argument that the word “knows” is often used unproblematically in contexts where it is implied that the thing “known” is not true.* He argues (this isn’t his only argument though) that this implies, or at least makes it plausible, that truth is not part of the concept of knowledge. On the other hand, it is (apparently) harder to come up with examples for “justified” and especially “believed,” but I’m going to try it and see what happens.

I actually like Hazlett’s argument, and I don’t want to use the analogous arguments about “justified” and “believed” as some kind of reductio on his argument. Rather, I want to push the line that at least in the case of the word “knowledge,” there is no concept associated with it but rather only a use. Whether this is true of all words or not I am not sure. But it would be an interesting line to pursue either way. “Meaning is use” has fallen far out of fashion lately but it would be fun (and I suspect right) to plausibly revive it.

-FrL-

*Some of this case is made in the paper linked. Also, a list of such uses is found here

7

If anyone thinks they understand what the OP is asking, I think that might qualify as an example. Maybe. Well, I’m not sure, really.

8

Let me try again.

Take the story about birthdays I told in my OP. And say someone says, “John knew what day Cynthia’s birthday would be on.” Do you think that someone saying this is correct? Do you think it’s true that John knew what day Cynthia’s birthday would be on?

If so, then notice that John knew when the birthday would be, even though the way John arrived at this knowledge was defective. He formed his belief about the birthday basically through a series of mistakes about what he was looking at when he examined the calendar.

I am looking for other examples like this–where someone knows something, even though if they were being careful, they wouldn’t have come to believe the thing they know.

-FrL-

9

[QUOTE=Ravenman]
If anyone thinks they understand what the OP is asking, I think that might qualify as an example. Maybe. Well, I’m not sure, really.
[/QUOTE]

It’s not that hard. Are there any contexts you can think of in which you might say “Bob knows Fact X” even though Bob has no justifiable reason to believe Fact X? Those examples are what the OP’s looking for.

(Of course, the OP is free to clarify that I’ve gotten it wrong. Misreadings do occur. :))

10

[QUOTE=Boyo Jim]
I don’t understand. You’re asking if someone can misinterpret something in a way that they believe something to be true, and it is, but not for the reason they think it is?

Like, the world is round because the turtles shit on the plate world until it became unbalanced and flipped over, at which point they shit on the bottom of the plate world, and now it’s piled up and has actually become a sphere?

Like that?
[/QUOTE]

Exactly what Indistinguishable said. I’m looking for just what you’ve described, with the addition that you would say that the person in question has, not just a correct belief, but knowledge.

So, for example, do you think they person you described knows the Earth is round?

-FrL-

11

[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
It’s not that hard. Are there any contexts you can think of in which you might say “Bob knows Fact X” even though Bob has no justifiable reason to believe Fact X? Those examples are what the OP’s looking for.

(Of course, the OP is free to clarify that I’ve gotten it wrong. Misreadings do occur. :))
[/QUOTE]

No, that’s exactly right.* Maybe I should have just put it that way. I just wanted to say a little more specifically what I was looking for.

-FrL-

*Though I’d include both cases where the person has no justifiable reason to believe it, and also cases where there are compelling reasons according to which the person shouldn’t believe it.

12

Wait, do you mean like if I understood what the hell you’re talking about as a result of reading your post?

13

Since the jokes about confusion are being repeated, my response will be repeated:

It’s not that hard. Are there any contexts you can think of in which you might say “Bob knows X” even though Bob has no justifiable reason to believe X? Those examples are what the OP is looking for.

14

Note: If your response to the OP is “What the hell are you talking about?”, you should probably ignore this post [though not this thread; hopefully the post above this one can clear things up for you].

[QUOTE=Frylock]
I actually like Hazlett’s argument, and I don’t want to use the analogous arguments about “justified” and “believed” as some kind of reductio on his argument. Rather, I want to push the line that at least in the case of the word “knowledge,” there is no concept associated with it but rather only a use. Whether this is true of all words or not I am not sure. But it would be an interesting line to pursue either way. “Meaning is use” has fallen far out of fashion lately but it would be fun (and I suspect right) to plausibly revive it.
[/QUOTE]

Incidentally, just as a hijack of sorts, as someone who is infatuated with the later Wittgenstein and generally feels sympathy towards the approach of ordinary language philosophy (at least as I understand it, though I haven’t read that much directly from the other players in that movement), I’ve long wondered on what grounds it is that ordinary language philosophy is apparently considered dead these days. Since you mention the fall from fashion of “meaning is use”, perhaps you could show me just why that came to be.

15

How about this…
I knew John would be at my house at 4:30 because he said he was leaving at 3:00 and it takes a half hour to get here.
In reality I missed the part when John said he was at Mary’s house which is an hour and half away.
So the first part was a miscalculation on my part, but in the end I was still right.

16

[QUOTE=Frylock]
I’m on the lookout for examples (if they exist) of sentences or utterances in which it is claimed that someone “knows” something where it is also implied that the one who is supposed to “know” it shouldn’t believe the thing believed in that instance of knowledge…
[/QUOTE]
Seriously. Are you asking this from a philosophical, or linguistic, or other point of view?

17

[QUOTE=Frylock]
Exactly what Indistinguishable said. I’m looking for just what you’ve described, with the addition that you would say that the person in question has, not just a correct belief, but knowledge.

So, for example, do you think they person you described knows the Earth is round?

-FrL-
[/QUOTE]

I suppose my example is not ideal. The turtle guy “knows” the earth is round as well as I do. He also “knows” how it got that way, and probably his belief in his knowledge of the “why” is at least as strong as my (different) belief about the “why”.

I’m sure there are millions of people today who believe the earth is round because “God wanted it that way”. And millions more who believe the earth is round essentially because someone they consider trustworthy (maybe a text book author or a geologist) has articulated the experiments and observations leading to a broad scientific consesus of the process that reulted in a round earth. And neither of these groups has seen anyhing to discredit that “knowledge”. I would have to put myself in the latter category, in that I can’t recall ever performing my own tests, whatever they might be, to determine the “truth” of the matter.

I think Richard Feynmann once claimed that you know nothing until you have personally validadted the claims of others as to the nature of reality. By that standard, I know almost nothing. Maybe even absolutely nothing. I have a certain degree of trust in my own intellectual ability to make judgements based on evidence. But hey, so does Deepak Chopra, and the two of us probably have a completely different “knowledge” of how and why the world is as it is. And neither of us particularly care, or are disturbed by, the differences between our knowledge.

Feynmann and other scientists have also written of the thrill of scientific discovery, when they experience “knowing” something that no one else in the entire world knows. But even then, they are not sure, until their knowledge or understanding is tested and validated by others – others whose knowledge and intellect are respected by the original discoverer.

Knowledge, as far as I can tell, is a broad consensus within a self-defined group.

Is knowledge “truth”? Is there a “truth” out there independent of what we “know”?

I don’t know. And that’s the absolute truth.

18

[QUOTE=emilyforce]
Seriously. Are you asking this from a philosophical, or linguistic, or other point of view?
[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to answer the question. I’m not trying to be difficult–
I just don’t know what you mean by the idea of asking a question from some particular point of view.

The question is just the question I asked. I’m looking for examples of sentences (written or spoken) of a specified type.

If you’re asking whether I’m asking the question as part of a philosophical pursuit or rather a pursuit in linguistics, the answer would be both. Directly, it’s a philosophical pursuit. But I also have a lingering interest in linguistics, and the question is relevant to that interest as well.

-FrL-

19

[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
Note: If your response to the OP is “What the hell are you talking about?”, you should probably ignore this post [though not this thread; hopefully the post above this one can clear things up for you].

Incidentally, just as a hijack of sorts, as someone who is infatuated with the later Wittgenstein and generally feels sympathy towards the approach of ordinary language philosophy (at least as I understand it, though I haven’t read that much directly from the other players in that movement), I’ve long wondered on what grounds it is that ordinary language philosophy is apparently considered dead these days. Since you mention the fall from fashion of “meaning is use”, perhaps you could show me just why that came to be.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry to disappoint, but I have no idea why it’s turned out that way. I’ll think about it though and tell you if I find anything out.

-FrL-

20

Thanks for the examples and discussion everyone.

I think I’ve ruined the examples by both overexplaining and failing to clearly explain what I was looking for. I’ll just try to be on the lookout for examples “in the wild” as it were.

But still, thanks!

-FrL-