Ken, let's not do this again, okay? You ducked several of my posts in another thread when we were going around and around on this very point. If you want to go back to that thread and answer the posts you left unanswered, then I will be happy to engage again. Otherwise, no thank you.

It means that I have a standard. To admit that I am "human" is just to admit that I have a limits.

So fine, I'll admit that when something is intolerable, I am not going to tolerate it.

Nothing about "being human" necessitates that one put up with absurdity. And nothing about "being human" necessitates that one treat absurdity in one way as opposed to another. Admitting that I am "human" does not show me anything significant. People can be intolerant, and people can be hypocrites, and people can be "understanding and courteous". As my previous post notes, you've given me no reason to be the latter; and, in fact, you've given me, on my view, sufficient reason to be the foremost.

That is an extremely weak criteria for sincerity, that he has no reason to lie.

And it is also possible for him to hold a belief concerning the time without my asking or his answering.

The willingness to assent is necessary and sufficient condition for belief. Actual sincere assent is sufficient condition for the willingness and therefore sufficient for belief. All we have done, however, is swap the wording around.

We have established that someone who sincerely say "P is true" believes in P, but didn't we already know that? Are we supposed to be satisfied with that? What does it say for people who believe but don't actually admit to the belief?

It is true that someone believes only when he finds justification and that justification leads him to believe the proposition to be true.

His belief in the proposition's truth causes belief, but it doesn't create knowledge, because knowledge requires actual truth, correspondence or coherence or whatever truth.

The subject may take their belief as knowledge, but it is not necessarily so.

Hey, Mr. Fight. Here's my take on it. Propositional knowledge (I think we had general agreement) is a kind of believing. Perhaps a very special kind of believing. If we agree with a tentative definition such as "justified true believing" that puts us into the business of asking, with respect to any given claim to know, "How do I know the belief is justified?" and "How do I know that the belief is true?" My belief that my belief is justified requires, in turn, its own justification doesn't it? My belief that my belief is true, only raises the next round of the same questions, doesn't it? I always come back to, "How do I know that?" That's why I contend that to know something merely means "to believe something to be true." To know is, in the final analysis, to believe. So then, what does "believe" mean? It means to give credence to, to assume to be reliable, to trust. I have to trust my source of information and my reasoning powers before I can believe something and call it knowledge. My criteria for believing something are precisely the same as my criteria for knowing, because there is no difference between the two.

Of course, if someone truthfully says that he believes that p, then that is (nearly) a sufficient condition for believing that he believes that p. But I did not say it was a necessary condition for believing that he believes that p. That is obviously not true. There are, of course kinds of evidence that someone believes that p. What a person says and does under certain conditions. I am not, of course, saying that we can know with certainty what goes on in the mind of others. Only that we can have good evidence for what others are thinking or feeling, etc. And evidence is a matter of degree. But that is a somewhat different issue (although, of course, connected) from what we are discussing. The issue is called, "the problem of other minds".

To believe that your justification is authentic is not the same as to believe that which your justification justifies.

"I believe that I know X" is not the same as "I know that X."

"I know that it is raining outside right now" is not the same as "I believe that I know that it is raining right now."

The latter requires that you know.

We're here to talk about knowing in the first place. The justification you have for knowing in the first place would not be the same justification for your believing it.

A nearly sufficient condition only has the capacity to be a necessary condition.

Logical criteria for ascribing belief to others is sincere assent or sincere utterance.

Okay. That's perfectly clear. I don't think I implied anything different. In the first case you have concluded something about the nature of your justification. In the second, you have concluded something about the proposition itself.



Yes, they are indeed two different sentences...



Might as well throw in, "I know that I believe that it is raining outside." They are indeed different semantic constructions. It remains to be seen whether anyone can show they actually mean something different.



Sorry, I don't follow that at all. "I believe that I know ..." requires that I know...? In what sense is there a requirement? They are both claims to know something. The latter is merely a redundant form of the former, in my view.



Maybe that expression "knowing in the first place" was defined earlier in the thread and I missed it. I will hunt for it, or perhaps you will direct me to it. Until then, I will not presume to know how to respond any further.

Peace,
D.

That's why I contend that to know something merely means "to believe something to be true." .

It is true that someone believes only when he finds justification and that justification leads him to believe the proposition to be true.

His belief in the proposition's truth causes belief, but it doesn't create knowledge, because knowledge requires actual truth, correspondence or coherence or whatever truth.

The subject may take their belief as knowledge, but it is not necessarily so.

They're not just two different sentences. They mean two different things....IF you do in fact know, then "I believe that I know" requires knowledge. IF you're hedging, then "I believe that I know" requires at least that you are willing to put forth what you know through the test of the conditions for knowledge, though you're not absolutely certain.

Of course, if someone truthfully says that he believes that p, then that is (nearly) a sufficient condition for believing that he believes that p.

Sometimes people believe without justification, and even believe contrary to justification. The Church Father, Tertullian famously (or infamously, if you like) said, "Credo qui absuirdum est" (I believe because it is absurd). Notice the "because". Belief without (or contrary to) justification is often callled, "faith".

It may be the justification that causes someone to believe, but it need not be. If I ask someone, "why do you believe in God?", he may give me one of two answers:

1. I believe in God because I was reared in a very religious household, and everyone is my family believed in God. or,
2. I believe in God because there is a world, and the world must have been created, and the creator must be God.

1. Is not a justification for his belief in God, but it does explain why he believes in God.
2. Is a justification for his belief in God. It may also explain why he believes in God.

So, some justifications are explanations, and, therefore, of course, some explanations are justifications.

Dichanthelium and I are on the same side here, I am sure of this.

I cannot fathom belief without justification.

I accept these:

1. Justification is defined as that which explains why a belief is true.

2. One cannot explicitly deny the truth of a belief. Saying I believe P is the same as saying I accept P as true (note you said this earlier, and I look at it as tautological). So to say that I believe P, but P is not true is a direct contradiction.

Now, if both of these are true, it follows that one cannot to believe without justification is an impossibility. Believing contrary to justification necessarily equates to believing in what one knows to be false.

If this is possible, we might as well throw out even the basic line of thought of this thread.

If what I am saying is right, and I throw it out there for correction, then the ideas Dichanthelium is playing with are not baseless: to the subject, I believe and I know have the same meaning.

But people do believe in God, and a mother may believe her son is innocent of criminal charges, even without evidence, or contrary to all the evidence. That is simply a fact.

Believing contrary to evidence is not believing, and certainly not knowing, that your belief is false, a statement p may be justified, but nevertheless false. The belief that all swans are white was was held for a long time, and was justified on the grounds that all observed swans were white, but it turn out to be false when black swans were observed in Australia.

I don't think that justification explains why a belief is true, since, (1) as I have pointed out, a belief may be justified but false, and (2) what explains why a belief is true is that the world is as the belief describes it to be. What justification does is to justify the belief that the belief describes how the world it. So, if I believe that the cat is on the mat, what explains why that belief is true is that there is a cat, and the cat is on the mat. And what justifies that belief that the cat is on the mat is, of course, I can look and see that there is a cat on the mat. So, the justification does not explain why the belief is true, but it gives me reason to think that the belief is true. Notice, I may look and not see that the cat is on the mat. So my belief would then not only be not justified, but contrary to justification. However, it is clearly true that there may be a cat on the mat anyway, if there is an explanation for why it is that when I look I do not see the cat on the mat. I could be drunk. I could be inattentive, and there could be all kinds of explanations for why I might not be able to see the cat on the mat, and think that there is no cat on the mat. And, indeed, I might also think there is a cat on the mat, even if I don't see a cat on the mat, because there is something wrong with my eyes, e.g. I am blind, and I know it. So I might believe the is a cat on the mat even contrary to justification.

Beyond Belief

Once One removes any skepticism or uncertainties from nature's equation, from One's thoughts, truth is All that remains.
Beyond belief, beyond theories and faiths, complexities and doubts, beyond our own reflexion is the simplicity of truth, the true Oneness of All.

=
MJA

There is a biological, social, and emotional content to what we call belief that pertains to why I stated earlier in the thread that "belief" is a meaningless concept (at least as typically defined). I have, for the sake of decent discussion and intellectual stimulation refined my focus to a much more analytic discussion focused on wrangling known definitions.

It may be true that someone believes in God because they were raised to believe in God, and this is an explanation but not justification. But to respond to your anecdotal evidence: I am an agnostic who doesn't take a side in the issue, but I do take a keen interest in questions of religious belief. I was raised in a very religious family and have had countless discussions on the topic. And despite believers having a willingness to admit that raising has a formative role in belief, and my own observations that believers often focus solely on affirmative evidence, I have never experienced a believer who willfully accepted that he believed something that ran counter to the evidence that he or she has accounted for.

Ultimately, you are inputting objective evidence upon a formation that is dependent upon subjective evidence. We cannot assume that justification is not present within belief formation simply because it has lead to false conclusions or because the believer is selective in what evidence he considers.

Ultimately, when we define belief as an assent to truth, when one says "I believe" we must also assume that he would be willing to say "I know". Of course, you would be entirely correct to point out that most would acknowledge a difference between saying "I know" and "I believe", in that one is stronger in its relation to certainty. Since certainty is impossible outside of meaningless tautologies, both phrases become more than a little vague and difficult from this point of view.



To say that justification shows why a belief corresponds to the world is to say that justification shows why a belief is true.

It is very true that a belief may be false, but to the believer it cannot be so. That would invalidate the very definition for belief you posted earlier.

You are right. Whenever we believe that p, we must also believe that p is true. Else we would not believe in the first place. But, of course, since "to err is human" we also believe that some of our beliefs are (nevertheless) false. Naturally, if we knew which those were, we would not believe them in the first place. So, we try to sift through our beliefs, as best we can, trying to separate the sheep from the goats by using our brains.