You shouldn't believe or disbelieve anything

G

granpa

Registered Senior Member
Why BELIEVE that it WILL rain today when you can KNOW that it MIGHT rain today?

You shouldn't believe or disbelieve anything. You can & should always know.
Something is known Beyond a reasonable doubt if the laws of cause and effect make it impossible for it not to be true

I KNOW with certainty that a 2 headed coin will come up heads if flipped.

If the coin has a heads and a tails then I dont know what it will come up as but I KNOW the probability is 50/50.

If I have 3 coins in my pocket, one with 2 heads, another with 2 tails, and another with one head and one tail and I pull one out at random and, without looking at it, flip it then I dont know the true probability for that particular coin (which could be 0 or 50 or 100 percent) but I still KNOW the a priori bayesian probability for that particular coin is 50/50.

If I continue flipping that particular coin and observing the results then the Bayesian probability for that particular coin will gradually change and approach the true probability for that particular coin.

Put simply if I keep getting heads then I will start expecting to see heads. But even after a thousand heads there is still a very small chance that I just got lucky 1000 times.

But at no point is it ever necessary to believe anything. You can and should always know
 
Knowing that it MIGHT rain isn't real knowledge. You don't know if it will rain or not. This is dumb.
 
It is odd that you generalize 'one should know stuff' about a vast, complicated world, yet your example of a coin has only two possibilities.

If the world were as simple as the flip of a coin we could all go home.
 
granpa said:
Why BELIEVE that it WILL rain today when you can KNOW that it MIGHT rain today?

You shouldn't believe or disbelieve anything. You can & should always know.
Click to expand...

How would you explain the distinction that you are trying to draw between 'belief' and 'knowledge'?

Something is known Beyond a reasonable doubt if the laws of cause and effect make it impossible for it not to be true
Click to expand...

Doesn't that confuse "the laws of cause and effect" with the 'laws of logic'?

And how do human beings even know what the laws of logic supposedly are, apart from intuition?

But at no point is it ever necessary to believe anything. You can and should always know
Click to expand...

I guess that I would define 'belief' as something like: 'Belief is a representational mental state, with a proposition as its content, in which either the truth or falsity of the proposition is affirmed.'

I would define knowledge as 'Justified true belief' (that's a traditional definition).

Defined this way, knowledge would seem to be a subset of belief. Knowledge is belief that is both true and justified.

That would suggest that it's impossible to know x without simultaneously believing x.

(Excluding 'knowing how' sorts of knowledge like knowing how to ride a bike. That might not be propositional knowledge at all and you might not be able to explain in words to anyone how to do it.)
 
From Post 1
But at no point is it ever necessary to believe anything. You can and should always know
Click to expand...
It would be nice if a person could always know the best decision. Sometimes circumstances require us to make the the most reasonable guess & act on it.
 
spidergoat said:
Knowing that it MIGHT rain isn't real knowledge. You don't know if it will rain or not. This is dumb.
Click to expand...
I disagree.
Knowing that it might rain is to express your certainty that there is a non-zero chance of rain,
Your knowledge is limited to there being a probability.
If indeed that is what is known, then at least one is not overstepping the mark and claiming to know that which they can not.
 
granpa said:
Why BELIEVE that it WILL rain today when you can KNOW that it MIGHT rain today?

You shouldn't believe or disbelieve anything. You can & should always know.
Something is known Beyond a reasonable doubt if the laws of cause and effect make it impossible for it not to be true

I KNOW with certainty that a 2 headed coin will come up heads if flipped.

If the coin has a heads and a tails then I dont know what it will come up as but I KNOW the probability is 50/50.

If I have 3 coins in my pocket, one with 2 heads, another with 2 tails, and another with one head and one tail and I pull one out at random and, without looking at it, flip it then I dont know the true probability for that particular coin (which could be 0 or 50 or 100 percent) but I still KNOW the a priori bayesian probability for that particular coin is 50/50.

If I continue flipping that particular coin and observing the results then the Bayesian probability for that particular coin will gradually change and approach the true probability for that particular coin.

Put simply if I keep getting heads then I will start expecting to see heads. But even after a thousand heads there is still a very small chance that I just got lucky 1000 times.

But at no point is it ever necessary to believe anything. You can and should always know
Click to expand...

To your last statement sure . I agree

But to others to know is a conundrum .
 
To ''believe'' is simply to consider the reliability of something, to have confidence that something is true.

I have confidence that my car should start tomorrow, and I'll commute to work, without issue. I believe that it should happen, but I don't know for certain.

We can't know everything.
 
wegs said:
I believe that it should happen, but I don't know for certain.
Click to expand...
Believe usually means 'in the absence of evidence'.

Peter Pan told Wendy to believe; she had never flown before.
If she had flown before, her saying she "believes" she can fly would be nonsensical.

In the case of your car, you do more than believe; you have evidence - a pattern of it starting:, today, yesterday and previously.
If it does start tomorrow, the world is as simple as it is today. No new questions will arise tomorrow when it starts.
If it does not start tomorrow, then there will be questions that need answering.
 
DaveC426913 said:
Believe usually means 'in the absence of evidence'.

Peter Pan told Wendy to believe; she had never flown before.
If she had flown before, her saying she "believes" she can fly would be nonsensical.

In the case of your car, you do more than believe; you have evidence - a pattern of it starting:, today, yesterday and previously.
If it does start tomorrow, the world is as simple as it is today. No new questions will arise tomorrow when it starts.
If it does not start tomorrow, then there will be questions that need answering.
Click to expand...

I believe you're wrong.
 
I believe that my car will start tomorrow. I also believe that little voices inside my head are telling me to rule the world.

If my car starts tomorrow, should I also attempt to rule the world?
 
Yazata said:
Defined this way, knowledge would seem to be a subset of belief. Knowledge is belief that is both true and justified
Click to expand...
That's interesting.
I imagined that after belief, knowledge is the next step in the hierarchical acquisition and processing of Information.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top