I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge as justified true belief, the Gettier problems, and the various proposals to resolve them.
I have some dissonance with all of ‘justified,’ ‘true,’ and ‘belief.’
Justified
There are two parts to my struggle with this as a component of knowledge:
- The first is that someone may believe something true with invalid justification; they may be able to exercise that truth in a manner that establishes justification.
- The second is perhaps a little more peculiar, and I’m unsure of its validity. As I understand Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, you can have true statements you cannot arrive at (axiomatically) or justify.
Belief
‘Belief’ seems to imply a thinking agent. This excludes inanimate sources as containing knowledge, which seems a peculiar constraint.
True
In abstract or constructed circumstances, like mathematics, you can talk about a statement being true. However, outside of that, the truth is almost never known with certainty; this is Descartes’s evil demon argument.
My Conception of Knowledge
When thinking about knowledge, I lean more toward Isaac Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong. Here is how I conceive knowledge:
- How demonstrably close is the claim to the truth to be effective?
- What are the error bars on your claim?
While this leans utilitarian, that is what gives knowledge its value.
This information (claim and corresponding supporting information) can be stored in static resources and is independent of belief.
The degree of knowledge can be described in terms of these parameters, these epsilons of accuracy and precision.
In short, you can measure knowledge by its truth-ε-ness.