Base_Six OP t1_jd49j0w wrote
Reply to comment by HamiltonBrae in The Folly of Knowledge: why we should favor belief as the focus of our epistemology by Base_Six
You can believe that you have JTB knowledge, but at that point what we're talking about is no different than any justified belief we possess. After all, we don't hold beliefs that we consider false. I think you could even reasonably describe a "Reasonable Belief" as one in which we ought to believe is justified and true, or to say it differently, that we believe is JTB knowledge.
The difference comes in terms of how we view a belief that is false. Under a JTB conception of knowledge, we usually say that someone can't actually know something that is false. While you can believe that you know that the Earth is flat, you can't actually know it because it's round. Under a Reasonable Belief paradigm, you can have a reasonable but incorrect belief. If someone believes something that's incorrect because they've got deficient evidence, that doesn't make their belief unreasonable.
What makes something unreasonable is if the justification we use to construct that belief isn't logically sound. For instance, cherrypicking evidence to support a belief is logically fallacious, so any belief that's supported based on cherrypicked evidence is unreasonable. This is the case even if the belief is true: coming to the correct conclusion doesn't mean we used logically sound methods to arrive at that conclusion. The difference between being taught something that's based on cherrypicked evidence and doing the cherrypicking yourself is that in the former case, you don't have the evidence necessary to tell that there's cherrypicking happening. That said, if we're aware that evidence and teaching can be flawed then we logically ought to check our sources. We should understand how our sources constructed their beliefs, as much as possible, and grant credence or disbelief to those sources appropriately.
Different people ought to come to different conclusions about a belief if they start with different evidence or different premises. Conspiratorial thinking is what renders a belief unreasonable, not the conclusions it generates.
HamiltonBrae t1_jddu4gn wrote
>You can believe that you have JTB knowledge
&nsbp;
Yes, I just think that under the reasonable belief paradigm that this is a contradiction. I think the idea of believing certain things are true has to be given up or surrogated with something else like the belief that something is empirically adequate. The contradiction could just be ignored I guess but arguably that also undermines the point of doing this kind of thinking which I think is to reduce things like that; after all, why was the reasonable belief paradign asserted in the first place. I think everyone probably inevitably tolerates some level of contradiction or paradox in their views though.
>The difference between being taught something that's based on cherrypicked evidence and doing the cherrypicking yourself is that in the former case, you don't have the evidence necessary to tell that there's cherrypicking happening.
I don't think you have the evidence to tell there is cherrypicking happening when you do it yourself either though. You think your picking of evidence is completely reasonable and isn't cherry picked at all. On the contrary, you will think the opposition are cherry picking evidence and ignoring your evidence.
>That said, if we're aware that evidence and teaching can be flawed then we logically ought to check our sources.
Yes, but we have more confidence in some sources or evidence than others to the point we don't think we need to check. We would consider this reasonable yet its possible the confidence is misplaced (and often is).
>and grant credence or disbelief to those sources appropriately.
And what is appropriate will seem different to different people.
>Different people ought to come to different conclusions about a belief if they start with different evidence or different premises. Conspiratorial thinking is what renders a belief unreasonable, not the conclusions it generates.
Its hard to see what separates conspiratorial from reasonable here because they are just coming from different evidences and premises too.
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