That’s funny right there! Good one!
I’d offer that the “root word” is “OW”… As in “Knowledge HURTS!” I’m starting to think my purpose in life is to get that message across. Adapting your example helps: “NO WIN” is at the heart of Knowing too!
But I must admit (speaking WITH you all, not ABOUT or AT you), my greatest fear is, the “general population” will never see the words “NOW IN” in the word Knowing…
Methinks some people have entirely too much time on their hands. 
Speak for yourself, possibly-imaginary entity! 
But seriously, I actually do test regularly to see if I’m asleep*… which requires a healthy measure of doubt about almost everything. I don’t generally doubt that I exist, for reasons detailed by Descartes, but beyond that I try to avoid making assumptions.
(*) One of the two most important habits to keep if you want to do lucid dreaming.
There’s no absolute truth. So knowing = believing.
Oh… lucid dreaming. I miss doing that. Might try that again.
‘possible imaginary entity’ that is exactly the kind of thing when I had in mind when I wrote ‘You could, at this point, argue that it is possible to be uncertain of these things – but that is not the same as actually being uncertain.’
Descartes didn’t doubt his existence. He didn’t really doubt anything, actually.
Is that absolutely true? Because if it is, you have found at least one absolute truth, which somewhat makes a nonsense of your argument.
Dimbo, just where…exactly…did you think that question would go? I have a very strong suspicion you weren’t looking for the direct answer but instead, the argument leading to it. The kind of question where the answer is already known but the debate might prove interesting.
Which is better, knowing or believing? It’s really easy. A perfectly mixed Black Russian served with an exquisitely prepared Pollo Chipotle sporting the perfect amount of Habanero and a side of Apple Pie Flautas.
I know I’m gonna love it, and I believe I’ll have seconds! 
I’m not really interested in arguing definitional matters, but I do make an effort to be actually uncertain instead of just potentially uncertain, even about mundane things. My line of work has gotten me in the habit of constantly keeping in mind the degree of uncertainty involved in most of the world around me, especially in regards to what could go wrong or how things could be abused. Code QA and security work tends to do that, since it’s all about finding corner cases and false assumptions. After spending most of the day being actively uncertain about things developers may have taken for granted, it’s hard not to be actively uncertain about the world outside of work too.
I mean, if I had to bet, my money would be on you existing as a real, live, sentient human being. Because of a variety of factors, such as the difficulty of getting a computer to pass the Turing test, the lack of any plausible incentive to fake a conversation about philosophy on a flashlight forum, and the near-zero risk of meaningful consequences if I’m wrong. But that just means I internally sort the possibility into a bucket of trivially-insignificant unknowns which aren’t worth further consideration.
I suppose I could just be hallucinating, overworking myself to the point of having visions or something, perhaps dreaming more coherently than usual, but my usual indicators don’t suggest that to be likely and it’s pretty rude and embarrassing to go around telling people they aren’t real… so I intend to continue as if the things I perceive are real until the incentive to do otherwise outweighs the incentive to play along.
Hence why I mentioned Gödel’s incompleteness theorem earlier. I was kinda hoping to head off that particular discussion before it started.
Sock Prison Kitty makes ToyKeeper sad. ;(
Understanding what we are talking about is critical, it is very important in this discussion to understand the difference between doubt, or uncertainty, and supposing or imagining.
For example; to me the sentence ‘I do make an effort to be actually uncertain instead of just potentially uncertain’ - makes no sense at all. You cannot make an effort to be uncertain about something any more than you can make an effort to be certain of something. There is no effort, or choice, involved - either you are certain or uncertain. You might make an effort to suppose something is uncertain, but that is quite a different thing.
Again, in your third paragraph you use works like ‘suppose’ and ‘perhaps’ - all of these are legitimate - supposing the world might not really exist is an interesting thought experiment, doubting the world exists is something quite different.
The similarities between your use of language and that of Descartes who you mentioned earlier is striking. He ran these words together also, equating doubt to an act of will - he also used words like suppose and imagine.
My point, anyway, is that we are often completely certain of things, this is evidenced by the way we act in the world on a daily basis.
Are you familiar at all with Wittgenstein?
I have found an easy test for that.
If you doubt the reality of something, stand still and let me smash you in the face with one.
If it hurts, you will know something useful.
Believing doesn’t require such stringent proof.
That’s what I think, anyway…
Yes, but why?
That test will simply not do for the sceptic, just because they are feeling pain doesn’t prove the existence of the external world for them - otherwise any experience would be a proof in this way. Even if it hurt like hell, one could still deny the existence of the object. What’s your next move?
Wittgenstein’s early works or his later works? I disagree with much of his early work (as, apparently, he himself did later on). But I think his later work would agree with me that debating definitions is kind of pointless.
One way to deal with Wittgenstein’s “frictionless ice” of philosophical language is to taboo any disputed words, replacing the symbol with the substance. But even using every technique he could think of, Wittgenstein was still pretty convinced that nobody would understand him, at least not until some possible point in the far future. It may seem cynical and sad, but I don’t think it’s such a terrible thing. Different people are really, truly, amazingly, profoundly different… so true understanding, especially on topics where language is unreliable or poorly developed, is extremely difficult. And the mental diversity makes life a lot more interesting.
In practical terms of daily life, I doubt it makes much difference. One person may think in terms of knowledge and certainty, while another thinks in terms of probabilities and quantified uncertainty. Both of them still hurt after getting hit in the face. It’s basically just the difference between 100% and 99.9999999%, which is the sort of trivially-insignificant difference I mentioned earlier. I won’t claim they’re the same, but I do think the difference almost never matters.
It’s probably better for much of the population to simply be certain… because when we start throwing big numbers around, people demonstrate how hard those numbers are to understand — by doing silly things such as buying powerball tickets.
(edit: s/how those/how hard those/ … oops)
I’m liking what you’re writing, but there’s a problem there. “Certainty” is a synonym for “faith”, which depends upon “belief”, not “knowledge”. I mean, IFF we’re to be bothered with such mundane trivialities as the definitions of the terms involved… I had a very vivid dream once, so I’m “certain” I can fly, unaided. Yet I “know”, every time I try, I end up with a new scar and no hang-time. “When I became a man I put away childish things.”
Now it looks like you’re punning, which I also like a lot. Puns require awareness of the web of connections of the meanings of the words more-so than just the definitions…
Precisely. But it only matters to one of them, who probably knows enough to move out of the way.
My “next move” would be to take the poor b@$tard to a hospital, then buy him a drink & try to understand what makes him think that way. At some point even plants will move away from a negative stimulus.
I believe that’s the programming we all receive as children.
I can only speak for the education system in the State of South Carolina, USA, but at the point in a child’s development where “Process Thinking” brain cells are developing, the child needs to learn Processes. Like Multiplication. What a surprise, how many people “learned” multiplication by reciting “The Times Tables”?? The trick was, to get the parents to believe that the “Memorization and Regurgitation” skill was an adequate substitute for the actual Arithmetic Processing. If you wonder why so many children are allegedly “bad at math”, consider the wasted opportunity — or is it an intentional effort to keep the children from being able to reason for themselves?
Turns out I was ignorant. I believed the other kids were “working the arithmetic” like I was, so I believed it when they told me I was “bad at math”. So I went to the school library and was the only one who checked out Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond and loving every word. Then went home and built electronic toys and repaired CB radios and 8-tracks; not to mention the cars and motorcycles rebuilt and hot-rodded… Oh, and the model rockets, chemistry, geology, gunsmithing and a lot of other “math-heavy” hobbies… “Bad at math”… I still believed.
It cost me a bunch of tuition money to work this out. I paid every cent from my own pocket, but it was worth it! Who else would go through the trouble, after they’ve been “graduated”? Fortunately for me, I learned to doubt what other people (especially interested strangers) told me. Not to brag, but a 4.0 GPA (curriculum included Calculus, various Electronics, 7 computer languages, etc) and a place on the Dean’s List doesn’t sound “bad at math”, does it?
So what good is “beLIEving”??
(yes, I know, I should have saved more money & gone to a better school, but I was quite ignorant, not to mention impatient to take charge of my own life)
The later. He likely would consider trying to properly understand concepts like knowledge and belief - but he also spent a great deal of his time trying to properly understand these concepts, and so (apparently) do we.
What, exactly, do you mean by true understanding?
This has nothing to do with what is probable. It has everything to do with what is logically necessary.
Ah, well, I could tell you… but you wouldn’t truly understand.
Seriously though, language is an imperfect way to convey ideas. Any given text has a variety of different interpretations. If it’s well-written, it’ll have a fairly tight nebula of reasonable interpretations and not many outliers off in the boonies. However, even then, the best we can ever really hope for is to aim someone somewhere near the idea we have in our own head, with very little chance of actually reaching the same exact point.
I must admit, I don’t know what this quote is responding to or what it means.
Going way back though, the only point I was getting at initially is that not everyone thinks the same way. Some truly do doubt the existence of their hand, their self, or the object they’re reaching for. Even if the difference between 100% and 99.99999% is trivial, they represent very different ways of looking at the world.
I think this thread alone shows at least a dozen different views on knowledge, belief, and other related topics. And at least a dozen bad* jokes about the difficulty of communicating clearly about these subjects… which I think may have been the OP’s intent.
(*) “bad” is a good thing for jokes.
