{"id":28495010,"date":"2021-10-15T07:48:29","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T14:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nav.al\/?p=28495010"},"modified":"2025-11-07T08:14:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T16:14:58","slug":"justified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nav.al\/justified","title":{"rendered":"No Truth Can Be Justified"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brett: <\/strong>Initial guesses at what \u2018knowledge\u2019 was all about amounted to what is known as the \u201cjustified true belief\u201d vision of knowledge, and it\u2019s still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themself a Bayesian<\/a> is a justified true believer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify your beliefs as true. And if you\u2019ve done so, then you can say, \u201cI know that thing.\u201d If I can justify as true my theory of gravity, then I should believe that theory of gravity, and only then can I say that it\u2019s known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with this is that there is no method of showing any piece of knowledge is true. The improvement Deutsch promotes in his books is this vision that Popper gave us, that all we have are guesses about reality. They\u2019re conjectures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People think, \u201cOh, that sounds a bit wishy-washy. It\u2019s just a guess.\u201d Well, it\u2019s not a random guess. It\u2019s a guess that has stood up against trials, against attempts to show that it\u2019s false. It\u2019s not that everyone who decides to have a guess stands on equal footing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When people are unable to show that something\u2019s false\u2014via this method of refutation\u2014then we accept it as a piece of knowledge. This allows us to accept the fact that we\u2019re going to be able to make progress in the future, because all of our knowledge is conjectural. All of it is our best guess at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s elasticity within the knowledge that allows us to say, \u201cThere\u2019s going to be errors. We\u2019re going to correct them and, thereby, be able to make progress into the infinite future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is unlike the previous conception of knowledge, which says, \u201cOnce you\u2019ve justified something as true, well, it\u2019s true.\u201d If it\u2019s true, that means there is nothing false about it and, therefore, it can\u2019t possibly be refuted. That\u2019s a very religious notion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modern incantation of this is Bayesianism, which says, \u201cYou have a theory, you collect more evidence, and you become more and more confident over time that your theory is correct.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It gets a little bit worse than that, because then it says, \u201cThis Bayesian reasoning enables you to generate new theories.\u201d Which it can\u2019t. The best that it can hope to do is to show you that you are more confident in this theory than you are in that theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Popperian view says, \u201cIf you can show that there\u2019s a flaw in a particular theory, you can discard that theory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Initial guesses at what \u2018knowledge\u2019 was all about amounted to what is known as the \u201cjustified true belief\u201d vision of knowledge, and it\u2019s still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themself a Bayesian<\/a> is a justified true believer.<\/p>\n

This is the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify your beliefs as true.<\/span> More <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[56,50,49],"class_list":["post-28495010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast","category-science","tag-innovation","tag-philosophy","tag-science"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNo Truth Can Be Justified<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nav.al\/justified\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No Truth Can Be Justified\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Initial guesses at what \u2018knowledge\u2019 was all about amounted to what is known as the \u201cjustified true belief\u201d vision of knowledge, and it\u2019s still the most prevalent idea today. 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