My humble apologies for the tardiness and neglect of this thread. Aside from being very busy, I have been finding it a little hard to work on. This is a really important project to me, and I really want to do it, but keep pushing up against mental blocks and feelings of pointlessness and nihilism. All the same, here's a preview of the next post. Hope you enjoy.

V. Knowledge and Knowing

    There are many ideas, concepts, definitions, formulations, descriptions and paradigms for “knowledge,” which in my mind makes the entire ideal that much more questionable :twisted: .In this post, I would like to cover the common philosophical definition (which I feel most other definitions can be reduced to) and observed potential “shortcomings,” the prose in both its colloquial and technical uses, what it seems to imply and what's perceived as problematic in its colloquial and technical usage.

    In later posts, we'll be able to see how despite our definitions and descriptions, it still seems to leave something to be desired.

    It seems appropriate to begin with a discussion on defining knowledge. Sometimes abstractions are difficult to define. We want to define it so we can put into words what we feel we know it is. Should we not already know something then? That is, would this imply that we know how to know (perhaps unbeknownst to us) before defining and knowing what knowing and knowledge is?

We've observed how the first steps towards what we call “knowledge” seem to begin with faith and not something more “solid.”

    Within the study of philosophy, most discussions around the definition of knowledge revolve around Plato's very concise definition: a true, justified belief. Not only is one required to believe a proposition, but also to have a “justified” reason and rationale for why they believe it, and the proposition must be “true.” At first glance, it may seem sufficient, but upon further investigation we can see that while the best that perhaps Plato (and maybe anyone else) may have been able to come up with, there are some aspects that seem arbitrary or left to scrutiny based on its own merit. Colloquially, we've probably all noticed when people say they know something where there does not seem to be ample reason to. Furthermore, we also encounter in matters that are completely open-ended with respect to matters that can't be “proven” one way or another, at least not in accordance with some already established rigorous system for gathering information and “proving” claims. In these instances, one may simply be reflecting their conviction. But then, considering the above definition for knowledge being holding knowledge of something to also be a conviction; a strong belief and/or sense of certainty. For a conviction to be knowledge, the above requirements seem necessary. Otherwise, in a world that seems to have many consistent aspects, without a boundary and delimiting of some kind, anytime anyone said they “know” would be taken with much less weight that as is experienced now.

Let's revisit the Problem of the Criterion using Plato's definition. Simply, we have a circle, and at one end there is “how one knows” and the other “one just knows,” and there are arrows flowing clockwise from one end to the other. In defining knowledge, we seem to need to break our own rules for what makes something known. In a “true, justified belief” we, at some point, have to just start without what for most things would be a “justified” reason; “one just knows.” The rule is being broken at the start (and pretty much only at the start, which makes it a intriguing paradoxical situation) because it defies “how one knows” which would be the justification or reason for knowing. But as we've seen earlier, it seems problematic to describe how one knows without already knowing something.

So what happens when one has belief that they are “justified” (I find this to appear very subjective and arbitrary) in having but isn't true? This is a simple rendition of the Gettier Problem.

[Note: I won't be covering all definitions, as some I find to be too “loose,” “broad,” or simply not applicable to what we're trying to address, which is why I happen to question the ideas of knowing and knowledge, i.e. my skeptical philosophy. Also, most definitions can be reduced to a “true justified belief, in my view and opinion.] [Note: I would like to take a minute to talk about a specific perspective with regard to language and how words gain their definitions. There is prescriptive and descriptive usage. A word with a prescriptive use is defined by means of “titling” where there is clear delineation of what the word means, such as when someone in a specific field has a new idea to talk about and needs a word to represent it. In descriptive use, words are labeled with definitions predicated on how people in general use the word. With the broader topics of prescriptive linguistics and descriptive linguistics, prescriptive linguistics is the set of technical rules that dictate how a language operates, while descriptive linguistics is the study and attribution of rules based on how all people of language-use-group utilize the language.]