yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

No Truth Can Be Justified


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

The initial guesses at what knowledge was all about amounted to what is known as the justified true belief vision of knowledge, and it's still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themselves a Bayesian is a justified true believer, and that's the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify as true your beliefs. And if you've done so, then you can say, "I know that thing."

So 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's known. The problem with this is that there is no method of showing as true any piece of knowledge.

So the improvement Deutsch promotes in his books is this vision that Popper gave us, that all we have are guesses about reality, conjectures. People think, "Oh, that sounds a bit wishy-washy; it's just a guess." Well, it's not a random guess. It's not just anyone decides to have a guess and therefore that stands on equal footing to every other.

No, it's a guess that has stood up against trials, against attempts to show that it's false. And when people are unable to show that it's false via this method of refutation, then we accept it as a piece of knowledge. This allows us to thereby accept the fact that we're 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, and therefore there's this elasticity within the knowledge that allows us to say there's going to be errors. We're going to correct them and thereby be able to make progress off into the infinite future.

This is unlike the previous conception of knowledge which says once you've justified something as true, well, it's true. If it's true, that means there is nothing false about it, and therefore it can't possibly be refuted. It's a very religious notion.

The modern incantation of this is Bayesianism. Bayesianism says you have a theory, you collect more evidence, and you become more and more confident over time that your theory is correct. And it gets a little bit worse than that because then it says this Bayesian reasoning enables you to generate new theories, which you can't.

The best that it can hope to do is to show you that you are more confident in this theory than what you are in that theory. The Popperian view says if you can show that there's a flaw in a particular theory, you can discard that theory.

More Articles

View All
Warren Buffett's BIG $9,000,000,000 Investment
There’s no secret that over the past few years, Warren Buffett has been struggling to deploy Berkshire Hathaway’s monster cash pile. He hasn’t been able to find any really big investments to sink that money into. This was a focus in his 2019 shareholder l…
China Is About To Cause A Global Recession
Two of the world’s biggest economies, the United States and China, are struggling. Business activity in Shanghai was brought to a standstill for weeks. Disastrous. I think there is no other word for it. What’s up guys? It’s Graham here. Throughout the la…
How to Land a Million Dollar Deal on Shark Tank Ask Mr. Wonderful #24 Kevin O'Leary & Anne Wojcicki
Hey, Mr. Wonderful here, but I’m in the kitchen, so we don’t need Mr. Wonderful; we need Chef Wonderful. How are we gonna get them? Eg, well, um, but there’s no Chef Wonderful. You know what? I want to talk about Mother’s Day. It’s coming up, and this ye…
The Riddle That Seems Impossible Even If You Know The Answer
There is a riddle that is so counterintuitive, it still seems wrong even if you know the answer. You’d think it’s an almost impossible number. I feel like you probably hit me with some truth bomb. I mean, if you’re trying to create controversy and you’…
shower thoughts that broke the internet..
How many sides does a piece of paper have? I’ll give you a second. Two? No, it’s actually six. You don’t realize it until you start stacking it. There’s a lot of things in life that take us by surprise, a lot of things that aren’t really as they seem. Li…
Bloodwood: Rosewood Trafficking Is Destroying This National Park | National Geographic
Cambodia was once cloaked with forests. This is what it looks like today: more than half of the country’s trees have been clear-cut. Foreign appetites for red timbers are driving the destruction, and none is prized more than this Siamese rosewood. In Chin…