That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.
I think the philosophical claim is that, when we think we know something, and the thing that we turns out to be false, what has happened isn't that we knew something false, but rather that we didn't actually know the thing in the first place. That is, not our knowledge, but our belief that we had knowledge, was mistaken.
(Of course, one can say that we did after all know it in any conventional sense of the word, and that such a distinction is at the very best hair splitting. But philosophy is willing to split hairs however finely reason can split them ….)
To say that this is not "knowing" is (as another commenter noted) hair-splitting of the worst kind. In every sense it is a justified belief that happens to be false (we just do not know that yet).
On Jan 1 2024 I "know" X. Time passes. On Jan 1 2028, I "know" !X. In both cases, there is
(a) something it is like to "know" either X or !X
(b) discernible brain states the correspond to "knowing" either X or !X and that are distinct from "knowing" neither
Thus, even if you don't want to call "knowing X" actually "knowing", it is in just about every sense indistinguishable from "knowing !X".
Also, a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to X is indistinguishable from a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to !X. In both cases, we possess knowledge which may be true or false. The knowledge we have at different times alters; at all times we have a belief that we have the knowledge that justifies X or !X, and we are correct in that belief - it is only the knowledge itself that is false.
You evidently want to use the word "know" exclusively to describe a brain state, but many people use it to mean a different thing. Those people are the ones who are having this debate. It's true that you can render this debate, like any debate, into nonsense by redefining the terms they are using, but that in itself doesn't mean that it's inherently nonsense.
Maybe you're making the ontological claim that your beliefs about X don't actually become definitely true or false until you have a way to tell the difference? A sort of solipsistic or idealistic worldview? But you seem to reject that claim in your last sentence, saying, "it is only the knowledge itself that is false."
If someone is just going to say "It is not possible to know false things", then sure, by that definition of "know" any brain state that involves a justified belief in a thing that is false is not "knowing".
But I consider that a more or less useless definition of "knowing" in context of both Gettier and TFA.
The strength of the justification is, I would suggest, largely subjective.
E.g. a neurologist would likely be happy to speak of a brain knowing false information, but a psychologist would insist that that’s not the right word. And that’s not even approaching how this maps to close-but-not-quite-exact translations of the word in other languages…
This is one of the best questions ever, not just for philosophers, but for all us regular plebes to ponder often. The number of things I know is very very small, and the number of things I believe dramatically outnumbers the things I know. I believe, but don’t know, that this is true for everyone. ;) It seems pretty apparent, however, that we can’t know everything we believe, or nothing would ever get done. We can’t all separately experience all things known first-hand, so we rely on stories and the beliefs they invoke in order to survive and progress as a species.
Furthermore, OP’s choice of putting “know” in quotes seems to suggest that author is not using the word as conventionally understood (though, of course, orthography is not an infallible guide to intent.)
IMHO, Gettier cases are useful only on that they raise the issue of what constitutes an acceptable justification for a belief to become knowledge.
Gettier clauses are specifically constructed to be about true beliefs, and so do not challenge the idea that facts are true. Instead, one option to resolve the paradox is to drop the justification requirement altogether, but that opens the question of what, if anything, we can know we know. At this point, I feel that I am just following Hume’s footsteps…
Only in abstract discussions like this one. And in some concrete discussions on certain topics, not "knowing" seems to be essentially impossible for most non-silent participants.
Or, try renaming the variables and see if it still bothers you identically.
This is something that a lot of Greeks would have had issues with, most probably Heraclitus, and Protagoras for sure. Restricting ourselves to Aristotelian logic back in the day has been extremely limiting, so much so that a lot of modern philosophers cannot even comprehends how it is to look outside that logic.
From my point of view, "to know" is a subjective feeling, an assessment on the degree of faith we put on a statement. "Knowledge" instead is an abstract concept, a corpus of statements, similar to "science". People "know" false stuff all the time (for some definition of "true" and "false", which may also vary).
Not to mention what does it even mean for something to be false. For the hypothetical savage the knowledge that the moon is a piece of cheese just beyond reach is as true as it is for me the knowledge that it's a celestial body 300k km away. Both statements are false for the engineer that needs to land a probe there (the distance varies and 300k km is definitely wrong).
A flat-earther may feel they "know" the earth is flat. I feel that i "know" that their feeling isn't "true" knowledge.
This is the simple case where we all (in this forum, or at least I hope so) agree. If we consider controversial beliefs, such as the existence of God, where Covid-19 originated or whether we have free will, people will often still feel they "know" the answer.
In other words, the experience of "knowinging" is not only personal, but also interpersonal, and often a source of conflicts. Which may be why people fight over the defintion.
In reality, there are very few things (if any) that can be "known" with absolute certainty. Anyone who has studied modern Physics would "know" that our intuition is a very poor guide to fundamental knowledge.
The scientific method may be better in some ways, but even that can be compromized. Also, it's not really useful for people outside the specific scientific field. For most people, scientific findings are only "known" second hard from seeing the scientists as authorities.
A bigger problem, though, is that a lot of people are misusing the label "scientific" to justify beliefs or propaganda that has only weak (if any) support from the use of hard science.
In the end, I don't think the word "knowledge" has any fundamental correspondence to something essential.
Instead, I see the ability to "know" something as a characteristic of the human brain. It's an ability that causes the brain to lock onto one belief and disregard all others. It appears to be tendency we all have, which means it's probably evolved by evolution due to providing some evolutionary advantage.
The types of "knowledge" that we feel we "know", to the extend that we learn them from others, seem to evolve in parallel to this as memes/memeplexes (using Dawkin's original use of "meme").
Such memes spread in part virously by pure replication. But if they convey advantages to the hosts they may spread more effectively.
For example, after Galilei/Newton, Physics provided several types of competitive advantage to those who saw it as "knowledge". Some economic, some military (like calculating artillery trajectories). This was especially the case in a politically and religously fragmented Europe.
The memeplex of "Science" seems to have grown out of that. Not so much because it produces absolute truths, but more because those who adopted a belief in science could reap benefits from it that allowed them to dominate their neighbours.
In other areas, religious/cultural beliefs (also seen as "knowledge" by te believers) seem to have granted similar power to the believers.
And it seems to me that this is starting to become the case again, especially in areas of the world where the government provides a welfare state to all that prevent scientific knowledge to grant a differential survival/reproductive advantage to those who still base their knowledge on Science.
If so, Western culture may be heading for another Dark Age....
I thought this was interesting:
> Instead, I see the ability to "know" something as a characteristic of the human brain. It's an ability that causes the brain to lock onto one belief and disregard all others. It appears to be tendency we all have, which means it's probably evolved by evolution due to providing some evolutionary advantage.
It is substantially hardware (the brain) and software (the culturally conditioned mind).
Rewind 100 years and consider what most people "knew" that black people were. Now, consider what most people nowadays "know" black people are not. So, definitely an improvement in my opinion, but if we can ever get our heads straight about racial matters I think we'll be well on our way to the second enlightenment.
That's arguably good. If you restrict yourself to something that you know is a valid method of ascertaining truth, then you have much higher confidence in the conclusion. The fact that we still struggle even with getting this restricted method shows that restrictions are necessary and good!
Then you bootstrap your way to a more comprehensive method of discourse from that solid foundation. Like Hilbert's program, which ultimately revealed some incredibly important truths about logic and mathematics.
Also I don't think this definition fits with people's intuition. At least, certainly not my own. There are times where I realise I'm wrong about something I thought I knew. When I look back, I don't say "I knew this, and I was wrong". I say "I thought I knew this, but I didn't actually know it".
And to give a concrete example related to this as a whole, people should have known that getting to know something by not knowing it more and more is a valid epistemological take, just look at Christian Orthodox Isichasm and its doctrine about God (paraphrased it goes like this: the more you are aware of the fact that you don’t know God then the more you actually know/experience God”). Christian Orthodox Isichasm is, of course, in direct connection with neo-Platonism/Plotinism, but because the neo-Platonist “doctrine” on truth has never been mathematically formalized (presuming that that would even be possible) then the scientific world chooses to ignore it and only focuses on its own restricted way of looking at truth and, in the end, of experiencing truth.
I think that, without using a definition of "knowing" that fits the description of definitions you are declaring useless, you won't be able to make any sense of either Gettier or TFA. So, however useful or useless you may find it in other contexts, in the context of trying to understand the debate, it's a very useful family of definitions of "knowing"; it's entirely necessary to your success in that endeavor.
To know something in this sense seems to require several things: firstly, that the relevant proposition is true, which is independent of one's state of mind (not everyone agrees, but that is another issue...) Secondly, it seems to require that one knows what the relevant proposition is, which is a state of mind. Thirdly, having a belief that it is true, which is also a state of mind.
If we left it at that, there's no clear way to find out which propositions are true, at least for those that are not clearly true a priori (and even then, 'clearly' is problematic except in trivial cases, but that is yet another issue...) Having a justification for our belief gives us confidence that what we believe to be true actually is (though it rarely gives us certainty.)
But what, then, is justification? If we take the truth of the proposition alone as its justification, we get stuck in an epistemic loop. I think you are right if you are suggesting that good justifications are often in the form of causal arguments, but by taking that position, we are casting justification as being something like knowledge: having a belief that an argument about causes (or anything else, for that matter) is sound, rather than a belief that a proposition states a fact - but having a justified belief in an argument involves knowing that its premises are correct...
It is beginning to look like tortoises all the way down (as in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...