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p.3 Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related phenomena such as thought, reasoning, and the pursuit of understanding. It is less a study of customary thinking processes - although they are relevant - than a study of better versus worse ways to think, reason, and form opinions.
p.3 Do I want to make good decisions in life...? If so, I had better figure out which of the available choices would best promote favorable outcomes. In other words, I need to form correct, or true, beliefs about the consequences that would ensue from the performance of different actions.
[JLJ - Yes, ideally, but the complexity of the life world sorrounding us constantly requires that we jump to conclusions about what is and what is not real, based on our experience and the assortment of cues available to our senses - event those not directly sensed, but 'uncoverable'. A clock is always ticking and therefore we always are in a predicament - of sorts. We must out of necessity operate at the level of using practical schemes which we execute in order to 'go on.' The true is truly an opinion, as are the predicted consequences of our actions. We as humans do not have the luxury of the truth available to us, at all times, and at all places - nor do we absolutely need it - in order to 'go on.' We often must act, and subsequently position ourselves in postures that are ready for whatever happens, and therefore with a ready capacity to seize the opportunities that ought to arise from these postures and ready potentials. The truth is, there are only truth claims.]
p.4 epistemology is particularly interested in the question of how one should go about acquiring a belief that is warranted, justified, or reasonable.
p.5 the term epistemology just means the study of knowledge (episteme, in Greek).
p.10 Coherentism depicts a body of justified beliefs as a holistic system whose parts mutually support one another.
p.13 Foundationalism... says that every root in a tree of (successful) inferential justification terminates after finitely many steps. Each stopping point (or starting point, one might say) is a belief that possesses justification it does not get from further (premise) beliefs.
p.18-19 Descartes... the starting point of the epistemic justification project resides in our own states of mind.
p.19 Prima facie justification is provisional, or tentative, justification, as opposed to justification on balance, or all things considered.
p.20 The two sources jointly supply enough justificational "juice" to make the belief ultima facie justified. But neither source alone would reach across that threshold.
[JLJ - Newspaper reporters and investigators often rely on this two-source technique to justify publishing claims - which by the way, remain only claims.]
p.21 I regard the deer hypothesis as a good explanation of the observed tracks in the snow. But my neighbor tells me: "A company called 'Toys for Tricksters' recently marketed a machine that simulates deer tracks... These machines have become very popular among jokesters."
[JLJ - A good example of how, in my mind, there exist and can exist only truth claims, rather than actual truths themselves, perhaps - if I am wrong - they are composed of the pure substance truthonium. The "deer tracks" are practically assumed in order to 'go on,' because the alternative is unlikely, and equally unlikely to impact your practical ability to 'go on.' I suppose a drone flying over a snow-covered landscape could deploy and retract at intervals, a spring-loaded deer hoof tipped device, making an imprint in the ground, and simulating a deer traveling by. I suppose one could type "Toys for Tricksters" into the Google serach engine and see if the company exists and does in fact sell a deer track making device, perhaps one which can be purchased, likely at amazon.com. Practically, there is almost always a quick-and-dirty test of any claim, in order to avoid falling into the trap of a clever scammer.]
p.25 As we have seen, foundationalism and coherentism are the leading theories of the structure of justification. They also constitute the dominant players in what might be called traditional epistemology.
p.25 The term justifier refers to anything that helps make a belief state justified or unjustified.
[JLJ - <satire>Oh I see. A justifier produces justificational "juice," or should I say, "juice-tice"?</satire>]
p.48 Does the premonition of an upcoming disaster constitute evidence of the truth of its content?
[JLJ - Premonitions should act only as one of the ways we seek input in order to decide how to 'go on.' One has to use wisdom in order to decide on a practical level of paranoia, and then move forward with an appropriate mitigation. One cannot worry every detail, all the time. One should adopt a successful scheme, based on the circumstances unique to one's predicament.]
p.51 Epistemologists spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge.
[JLJ - Why? Why not just see it for what it is, an 'object' of sorts that supports discussion and decision making, and ultimately something grasped at in order to 'go on.']
p.51 According to an analysis based on the Oxford English Corpus, "know" is the eighth most commonly used verb in English; it is ahead of "see" and "think." It serves as our chief linguistic means for expressing epistemic ideas.
[JLJ - I did not "know" that.]
p.64 To know P is for the fact P to be causally connected in an appropriate way with your believing P. (Goldman 1967, 358)
p.72-73 Why do we have the concept of knowledge? ...First, knowing P seems to ensure being in a position to use P apprpriately in reasoning about what to do and what is the case... Second... we often use the concept of knowledge to mark good sources of information... Third... we might think that one of the main points of the concept of knowledge is to mark when we get the truth due to our own competence. Understanding these functions is itself an interesting project for epistemology.
[JLJ - Yes. Epistemology should stop trying to define the word knowledge - and instead try to determine why humans hoard knowledge like squirrels hoard nuts. Perhaps we are programmed by our human nature to sniff at information sources, collecting and storing for future use those that are timely, relevant and actionable - effectively pre-deciding the conditions of their future use - setting the tripwires for future action - and some of which we subsequently select, in order to improvise at every waking moment how to 'go on.']
p.75 despite all the hard work since Gettier's 1963 paper, it remains unclear how knowledge can be defined or even whether it is definable.
[JLJ - Knowledge is something grasped at in order to 'go on.' Knowledge can be defined only with regard to the scheme that one selects in order to go on, that calls for the grasping, the probing, and the direction taken upon execution. We must suspend disbelief in order to have anything remotely connected to knowledge. Perhaps knowledge can be defined as anything usable to construct an argument, for taking any kind of practical action, when in a predicament, where we have to do something. Why not just give up discussing knowledge and instead substitute a discussion of 'practical rules of thumb, that usually work, when intelligently and strategically applied?' Rarely are the consequences of being wrong, fatal. So we guess, and we move on in our predicament, where we guess again.]
p.83 You don't know you're not now dreaming.
[JLJ - Kind of irrelevant. In either case, we have to decide how to 'go on.']
p.84 You do not know you haven't spent your entire life being deceived by an evil genius.
[JLJ - Looking at this another way, considering the lack of evidence to the contrary, or even the presence of a single subtle clue, a practical level of paranoia is not reached where we should even consider giving this concept any thought. Regardless, we have to determine how to 'go on.']
p.88 You don't know, and you're not in a position to know, that you're not a BIV [JLJ - Brain in a Vat].
[JLJ - Define the universe as the vat, then this applies to all of us. One could argue that it is irrelevant whether or not we are actually a Brain in a Vat. We have to decide how to 'go on', regardless.]
p.98 think about arguing against a determined flat-earther. The flat-earther claims the earth is flat and explains to you how there is a massive conspiracy afoot that extends to satellite photography.
[JLJ - This is why in my thinking, there are no truths per se, but rather only truth claims. You can keep arguing forever, on any subject. At some point the social elete stop arguing against, and what emerges from the debate is paraded as a truth. But the problem - whatever it is - is also likely more complicated than initially considered, and what has yet to be discovered tomorrow impacts what is considered truth today.]
p.107 Maybe it isn't as simple as "knows" means knowledge. So-called contextualists claim that what you say when you say a person "knows" varies with the context in which you say it.
[JLJ - Exactly. "Knows" is a verbal short-cut for "intelligently-backed premonition or guess that X is a certain case of Y." Perhaps we "know" in order to 'go on,' perhaps we "know" as part of a scheme of some kind, which relies on such "knowledge" as a practical tool of maneuver and positioning and understanding. Knowledge looked at in isolation from its part in a scheme to 'go on,' is perhaps bound to appear confusing and indescribable. Upon 'magnification' to the highest level, knowledge is simply part of a scheme to 'go on,' including any (out of practical necessity) jumping to conclusions from cues present or inferred - it can be nothing else.]
p.110 "knows that..." varies with the context of speech
p.110 To know P, you must have evidence that rules out all relevant alternatives to P. Irrelevant alternatives to P don't need to be ruled out.
[JLJ - See here, the authors are touching on my concept that we know as part of a scheme in order to 'go on.' In their tiresome example of making statements about the appearance of barns in barn-fascade-land, what they are missing is that we grasp at knowledge - correct or incorrect - in order to decide what to do at each and every moment we are alive. We only need to be 'pretty much' correct in order to 'know,' and to test our knowledge with an appropriate level of paranoia. Due to an incredible capacity to adapt, we often can be dead wrong in our 'knowing' (perhaps, in judging the fascade-ness of a barn structure) and still live happy and successful lives - but 'wrong' only in matters that are not critical, and which ultimately are correctable, upon early and prompt discovery, and do not have critical consequences. When we say that we "know" something, we are only saying that we have a level of confidence that is appropriate for the task at hand, and for the predicament we are in. We could replace, "I know that..." with "It is likely that..." or "I have some proofs that seem to point to the fact that...". ]
p.168 Gerd Gigerenzer and collaborators... champion the virtues of so-called "fast-and-frugal" heuristics... This group's standard of rationality is what they call ecological rationality. Ecological analysis takes an evolutionary perspective and tries to show how certain ways of reasoning are adaptive responses to people's environment. These simple and computationally "inexpensive" ways of reasoning, they argue, can be good at finding accurate (i.e., true) answers to questions, sometimes even better than more sophisticated and formally elegant procedures. As indicated, their standard of rationalty appears to be reliability, or truth-conduciveness
p.184 Tests conducted in empirical science are tests in which the outcomes can be observed. Perhaps they can only be observed with the help of instrumentation... but that is still observation.
p.196 One heuristic proposed by Kahneman and Frederick... is a short-cut they call the substitution heuristic. Suppose a person wants to determine whether an object, X, has a target attribute, T. The presence or absence of this target attribute, however, is difficult to detect, perhaps due to the believer's lack of information or of time. Instead of directly investigating whether the object has the target attribute, the believer uses information about a different attribute, a "heuristic" attribute, H, which is easier to detect and hence convenient to substitute in place of T. In effect, the believer investigates a different question from the one she initially asks herself.
[JLJ - Yes, but this this short-cut or "trick" "works" in general only if tested in a competitive environment, and only if no one in the immediate area is out to confuse the results of such a substitution test. Consider the case of a police detective wanting to determine if a certain suspect is lying, and therefore deciding to substitute a polygraph test for a time-consuming and expensive investigation. But the suspect, however, knows all about the polygraph test, especially about the control questions that you are supposed to respond to in a measurable way. The detective concludes that since the suspect did not respond measurably more to the question of lying than to the control questions, that the suspect was telling the truth. What happens is that the detective's "trick" that usually "works" is trumped by a more intelligent and sophisticated "trick" that usually "works." There is no guarantee that a trick that usually works, actually will work, especially when used in a predicament of sorts, and in the presence of another intelligent trick-wielder. Which trickster's trick is trickier?]
p.207 Epistemologists often speak of epistemic "sources," usually referring to sources of knowledge. The most familiar candidates for such sources are perception, introspection, memory, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and so forth. Each of these sources is thought to provide a method for acquiring knowledge... Knowledge can be acquired by reading or listening to the words of others.
p.242 Philip Kitcher (1990)... talking about "divisions of labor" in scientific inquiry. Instead of scientists all pursuing one and the same research program within a given field of science, it might well benefit the research community to have distinct research groups deploying different methods in pursuit of a solution to the very same problem.
p.243 Weisberg and Muldoon consider three research strategies, or patterns of intellectual interaction with other researchers... The first kind of scientist... These scientists work wholly independently of others. They do not allow the discoveries of other scientists to influence their own actions. Their method of "foraging" through the landscape ignores the results of others... Scientists who exemplify this style are called controls... The two other patterns of action represent some kind of response to what pevious investigators have done. So-called followers... follow the modes of research that their predecessors have undertaken. So-called mavericks take note of what predecessors have done but pursue something different
p.245 Weisberg and Muldoon suggest... that if science wants to search a scientific landscape rapidly for the most significant truths, the best system to employ to attain this goal is a population of mavericks, at least as compared with populations of controls or followers. Even small populations of mavericks will be sufficient.
[JLJ - I myself am not a maverick. There are only clear thinkers, and sheep.]
p.251 many philosophers think that to be rational, our credences as a whole must obey the axioms of probability.
[JLJ - Yet to use the author's barn-fascade argument, the probability is very very low that a certain, barn-looking structure, selected at random, is actually a fascade. But in barn-fascade-land, the probability is actually quite high. Soooo, what is called for in my opinion is a useful practical test of deception, before one even begins to calculate probabilities. All bets are off, in my opinion, when trying to be rational in the presence of someone seriously out to trick or deceive you, especially if they are intelligently executing a practical or clever scheme that usually works. How exactly, do you rationally play the cup-and-ball game, in the presence of a clever, scheming team of tricksters? The answer? You don't play, or else you execute a scheme of your own that is more clever, such as, suggesting the cup-and-ball game be played on a glass surface, with a video camera mounted underneath.]
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