Justified true belief: knowledge and the myth of propositions

[Iwannaplato]

One just can get more relevant. I have knowledge about you as an object in my world,

Not according to you...

Just a misunderstanding. It is well known in philosophy that subject and object can never be separated, it is only done so in dialogue to understand their relationship to our apparent reality. You agree apparent reality is subjective, this comes about through the energies/objects in the outer world altering our biology/bodies through our senses which is experience. It is these effects which we call apparent reality, and it tells us more about our experience than it does about what causes the experiences.

You have made the argument several times in several ways that what is outside us we don't know about. We know about our experience. We don't know about what is out there.
But when this is pointed out, you start to change your tune....

just as I am an object in your world, we make assumptions about like creatures in our subjective realities, but they are assumptions, which seem for the most part prove out and we communicate on this basis.

The fact that we share a similar apparent reality only underlines our similar structure and form, essence, however, is shared with all other creatures, like our cousin the worm.

And now suddenly you know what the apparant reality of the worm is!!!!

So, you've manage to make claims about things that are outside you. Not only is this realism, but it's a realism where you do not have the problem of other minds.

You have the same model in a post to Dontaskme

It was Spinoza that stated that the way we come to know the outside world is through the alterations that the physical world/objects make to our bodies. He was a seventeenth-century philosopher, and he believed in appearance as reality; but even Plato warned us, not to be fooled into thinking appearance is reality. Just as sound or the energy waves in and of themselves are not sound, it is the effect upon our biology, the eardrum that gives the emergent sound to a biological subject. This sound, however, is a melody only the subject hears, for it is a self-simulation or biological readout. Sound is a biological effect and the same is true of what we call objects, the whole of apparent reality is simply an emergent biological readout of the energies that surround us.

You are in contact with a biological readout, not the things in themselves out there. Well, we and the worm are not inside you. All you have, according to you, is your biological read out. Yet you know, somehow, that we are all pretty much the same and you think you can weigh in even on the apparant reality (the experiences) of us and worms. This is cake and eat it too, given that we are outside of you.

[PeteOlcott]

The Gettier problem is that some cases of justified true belief don't amount to knowledge, so the JTB definition is inadequate. But I suggest that Gettier-cases really demonstrate the muddle caused by the myth of propositions.

A Gettier-case is a story with dramatic irony. Given that the story is fictional, we Gettier-spectators know the complete situation, because we have, as it were, objective knowledge of the features of reality in the story. But the protagonist doesn't have this knowledge. Here is an example.

A woman sees a group of people and mistakes one of them, a stranger, for her friend. So she believes her friend is there. And as it happens, her friend really is there, but hidden. So what she believes is the case. But does she know her friend is there?

The point is, what happens in the story has nothing to do with propositions. The woman’s mistake does not come from a false premise. She just believes the stranger is her friend, which is not the case. And her belief that her friend is there is not propositional. Propositional belief is as muddled an idea as propositional knowledge. There are just beliefs and knowledge-claims expressed by means of propositions.

We want to say that what she believes is true, because her friend really is there. But that is the myth of propositions at work. What she mistakenly believes to be the case is a feature of reality, which is not a proposition. When we believe or know a feature of reality is the case, we do not believe or know a proposition. So we do not believe or know something that is true or false.

The woman does not know her friend is there because she lacks objective knowledge of that feature of reality. And afterwards, apprised of the situation and her mistake, she would not say she knew her friend was there. That is not how we use the word 'know'. She would say she believed the stranger was her friend, but was mistaken.

We say we know a feature of reality is the case only if it is, or we think it is, the case. And if it turns out not to be the case, we don’t say we have stopped knowing it. We just say we were mistaken. For example, we don’t say we stopped knowing the earth is flat.

Gettier-cases recycle the JTB definition's concentration on: subjective knowledge - what an individual knows - effectively ignoring objective knowledge and its justification; propositional knowledge - S knows that p - as though what we know is propositions rather than features of reality; and the truth condition - S knows that p only if p is true - which gets things back to front. Our knowing that p doesn't come from the truth of p. It comes from our knowing the feature of reality that p asserts.

There are features of reality; there is what we believe or know about them, such as that they are the case; and there is what we say about them, which may be true or false. To muddle these things up is a mistake.

But Gettier-cases also contain the solution to the Gettier problem. The protagonists believe things for reasons that don't objectively justify their beliefs, which is why their beliefs don't amount to knowledge. Objective knowledge of features of reality, which may be expressed by means of true factual assertions, frees us from subjective, epistemic isolation. It's the objective knowledge that we Gettier-spectators have.

If you're interested, there's a full discussion, under the same title as the post, at:

http://http://www.peasum.co.uk/435531068

I solved this a few years ago.

Knowledge defined to overcome the Gettier problem
When knowledge is defined as a justified true belief there is a gap in the degree of connection between the justification of the belief and its truth. When we define knowledge as a justified true belief such that the justification proves that the belief is true this gap is eliminated. copyright 2021 PL Olcott