I know that I can only know that which I can potentially verify

Now, there is the concept of justice. Is that concept true or false? I always thought it was judgments (AKA as propositions or statements) which are true or false. We have say make an assertion about justice (or whatever concept) before we have what is true or false.

If you ask, as you have, how we know what we know, this much is true. We only know what we can conceive of. All infinite qualities like God, or existence are beyond conception. Once a concept is arrived at it can be compared for truth against the reality is is formed from. All the rest, how we prove our knowledge, or how we build upon our knowledge is secondary to a mental process of recognizing, identifying, defining, and catagorizing a bit of reality.

If your question is in regard to justice, then you are dealing with a moral form of relationship. There is no tangible justice. There is no mine or mill for justice, and yet people recognize that just such a quality is essential in their lives. So, when people create governments, as they are not grown any longer out of genetic forms of society, they must still produce to a necessary extent, all of the justice that families, clans, bands, and nations used to secure for them. We do not go into the future to have less of good than was produced in the past, but more. So, from the Gen, people had a sense of justice, and a concept of it, and from that understanding of a form they sought to recreate a larger nation producing the essential of justice for all people. This was the import of the Roman Law of Nations which was the beginning of natural law. And, I believe this is the good for which Governments are established, as in the first lines of Aristotle's politics.

It is easier to test a physical concept than a moral one. Certain moral concepts may take years to ascend and recede. We want to give a physical presence to what we consider as moral truths. Humanity continually produces institutions with a goal of a certain moral good. As these intitutions age, their existence becomes their sole reason for being, and the moral good is forgotten. They are forms which should be abandoned, and they would be if not for the other moral good held universally to be superior to justice or virtue; and that is, stability. People instinctively hate change. Me too. And yet life is change, and if moral forms do not as moral institutions supply the moral good people seek then change becomes more necessary and unavoidable.

I would say that we do not know it until we can concieve of it, and cannot begin to verify it until we have concieved of it, what ever it is. One essential characteristic of concepts is that they can be shared. By sharing the concept and the object we lose what seems to me to be the over riding sense of all life, that it is subjective and phenomenal. We share our forms and our ideas, and these all become forms of relationship that re-enforce our own sense of being and reality.

If you are saying that we cannot know that a proposition is true unless we understand what that proposition means, then I agree with you, although someone like Kant seems to have thought that he knew God exists is true, but did not know what that meant. Knowing that p is true presupposes understanding that p is true.

(On the other hand, it occurs to me that although I might not understand what it means to say that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I might know that it is true because that is what it says in several authoritative sources, like a biology text I own)

Well, I think I am a couple of floors from my heidgger on Kant, but I seem to remember the thought that conception preceeds verification, and in the example of myself and Kant perhaps, since God cannot be properly concieved of by virtue of being an infinite, it is not possible to verify God.

Your statement on ontogeny is dated, and while it is possible to see some evidence of vestigial organs in a develping fetus, for example, I trust that science discounts the notion over all. Certainly a great part of the problem with knowledge is the fact that to reason, and to critcize our knowledge we must already have a great deal of knowledge. Children learn, but they do not know because they accept so much on faith. Most people never begin to grasp to what extent they accept as knowledge what they have never personally examined. We stand on the shoulders of every previous generation in regard to knowledge, and the only measure of what they knew, and what we know is -enough. They knew enough to reproduce themselves and pass on this life to us. Do we know enough to do the same for the next generation? The test of knowledge is not some speck of certainty regarding an isolated fact, but is a general success of life and existence flowing out of our knowledge. It is the fact that we poison and rob our environment, and live in an unsustainable fashion, and still put so much effort into war that makes me doubt that we have learned anything, -or can know anything. Look for example at how many of us still depend upon luck or the grace of God for our daily bread. Does that fact not give you pause?

I was only pointing out that one can know some sentence is true, but not understand the sentence because some authority vouches for it. The particular example is irrelevant.

I think it is better to abandon truth of syntax, and regard truth of concept as more relevent. Syntax truth is like a brush stroke on a painting, but we know from art that single brush strokes are essentially unimportant to the final picture. I recently saw some Van Goeghs (sp) at the dia, and in one in particular, the faces on the people were not visible, as faces, and all the details of trees and boats and water were at close range, distorted, and, in a sense, untrue. When you realize, that from the perspective of the artist, that none of the details we would expect to make out in a photograph would have been visible, then you know the proper place from which to view the painting is from across the room where no face on the nickle sized head would be visible, and then the painting comes alive. Truth, like knowledge, is not an individual phenomenon, exactly as it appears. Rather, if a phenomenon can be captured, or defined by a concept, the concept can be measured for truth against the reality. A painting is like a recreation of a reality made from a conception. We recreate reality all of the time out of our concepts, and there they can be tested against the original for truth. If we look at language as a conceptual recreation of reality, we do not have to look at individual statements as true. It is possible to build up a picture of reality purely from fiction, and almost easier. Then it is possible to look at truth not so much as a thing, but as a process, like life.

I am sorry, but I do not know what truth or syntax or truth of concept is, or what is supposed to be the difference between them. Nor, what that has to do with my post, or with the theme of the thread. It is sentences (propositions, statements, possibly beliefs) that are true or false. And what makes a true sentence true, is that there is some fact to which it corresponds, and what make a false sentence false, is that there is no fact to which it corresponds. So, truth is a relation between a sentence and the world.

Fiction is not true. That is why it is called, "fiction".

I only have a few books on language, and they all seem to me to approach the truth like a court of law, and as something we tell. Sorry, but I don't see it that way because it seems really impossible to say something true at this moment that stays true. Even a true statement about an event suffers from lack of proof, so that the best we can ever manage is fiction. History is fiction. So is philosophy generally, since what it offers is a certain narative, or interpretation of human behavior. In fact, it is easier to tell the truth through allagory such as the Wizard of Oz, or Animal Farm, because if the proof is left aside, the story can be told before the audience grows bord. Consider that making even a simple true statement in regard to a commonly know fact often requires a multitude of words, and you see the problem.

Truth should not interfere with communication even, if justly speaking, communication is truth. The greatest of restraints upon human life is the eternal press of time, the coming of the seasons, the advance of age, and the quiet of death. How do we know this, that all things we know are measured against the haste of life? The life instinct tells us what we learn so soon as we see people and pets begin drop around us. Considered against the flow of time, perhaps the certainty of a myth has as much value to us as a verifiable truth. In any event, it is not words that are true, but conceptions. When we communicate, it is in the form of conceptions. When we recreate reality, it is out of conceptions. When knowledge is passed from one generation to the next, it is in the form of conceptions. When we think, it is in the form of conceptions. What we know we know as conceptions. In this sense, the word fiction as a made thing is no different than any other reality we recreate through our concepts. As Hemingway said in A Movable Feast: One true sentence.

So, if I stipulate that knowledge is truth, it is to bend the meaning of both from absolutes to approximations. We cannot have perfect knowledge. We cannot know perfect truth. We form concepts out of our insight of truth, and we test this knowledge against reality. Every concept is like a template of reality. We build houses out of the concept of a house. If we concieve wrongly we build wrongly. This is simplistic since a house is a conceptual manifold, but no one builds much of a house concieving of a cave. Rather, like life itself, and the advance of knowledge, it is a process. Sorry about all the words.

But fiction is not true, nevertheless. And that is, as I pointed out, why it is called "fiction".

Knowledge is not identical with truth, since, although I cannot know what is not true, there are many truths which I do not know, and which are still not known, by anyone, and there used to be truths no one knew, but which are known now.

We can go into flights of literary fantasy, and write poetry. But no one should confuse philosophy with either.

How do you know whatever you KNOW you KNOW?

Fiction comes from the same word as fact, and factory. Do you believe factories do not produce realities? Please, consider your language.

The difference between art, fiction, and philosophy is slight. In both instances, art and philosophy work with concepts. For an artist to create a scupture, he must first concieve of that object he would recreate, then, the art he produces becomes a test of his mental conception and his ability. Have you ever seen the art of children, the brain damaged, or the insane? A crooked mind produces a crooked art. It does not matter that philosophers use manuscripts to draw the similarities between their conceptions and their reality upon. It does not matter that it may be a social theorist, or a revolutionary that tries to turn their philosophical conception into a physical reality. The process is the same in both instances, that we know -at the moment we can concieve. If it is true knowledge, it is truth, and we can recreate what we desire in nature to suit ourselves out of our conceptions of nature.

Consider this: If a bit of knowledge is true, it is truth, and when we communicate, even through art, we communicate knowledge, and truth, because if we did not communicate truth, it would not be communication at all, but mis-commincation, and contrary to our human purpose of mutual support and survival.

If I can present to you a fiction, I can offer it as entertainment, and I can perhaps offer you truth without the necessity of a reasoned argument or proof. Since the absolute truth of a long and involved narrative is always an impossible burden, fiction can be a means of expediting truth. Since people have an emotional sense of the truth, the fast way of changing any perception of truth is through emotions, and there art comes into it own.

You ask a meaningless question. No matter how many times you throw the word "true" or "know" to a statement, it always adds nothing.

You ask a meaningless question. No matter how many times you throw the word "true" or "know" to a statement, it always adds nothing.

"I know that Quito is the capital of Ecuador" adds to nothing? "It is true that Quito is the capital of Ecuador" adds to nothing? By the way, what does "adds to nothing" mean?

Don't let me put words in his mouth, but it adds very little. To me it is so many words, and some I know the meaning of, and in a real sense I know nothing about it. So much of our knowledge rests on trust. Is it in the dictionary, in the encyclopedia? Did you go there and stay awake all the way. Do you own a map? An Atlas. To know it you must concieve it, and that knowledge is preconcieved, so you can say you know it when you don't know any more about it than I do.

Yes, I own a globe, and it shows Quito next to a star (which indicates capital) located in Ecuador. But you can look it up on the Web if you don't own a map.
Yes, much of what we believe and know rests on authority. But it is non-the-worse for that, since authority is a form of indirect or inferential justification, and we would know very little indeed without indirect or inferential justification. For example, I would not know that it had snowed overnight since I was asleep and did not observe the snow fall, unless I observed the snow on the ground in the morning when there had been no snow the night before. We know very little by direct observation. It is important, of course, to make sure that the inferences we make are sound inferences. In the particular case of justifying our beliefs by authority need to make sure that the authority is a creditable authority. So, when we seek an authority to tell us, for instance, how the word, "weird" is spelled, we should go to a good dictionary, and not ask a 5 year old child.