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JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

First, what do we mean by “knowledge”, and of those things we mean, what is merely allegory, and what is necessity?

Little of the universe is absent regular patterns. However, some are very noisy and difficult to find. Some are very subtle and hard to find. Some are either too large or too small to observe without relying upon instruments, and others must be deduced using logical instruments. We call these regular patterns ‘information’.

Humans can modify the real world in a variety of ways, leaving information behind. We can do this as simply leaving evidence of passage through a forces or field, or in archeological evidence. We can do this intentionally with cave paintings and writing. And we can do it with our architecture, monuments and earth works. We can do this by the memories that we transfer between generations through repetition of experience, advice and story.

A computer must run a program to create the experience we see before us when using it. Information must mix with memories, to create the experience we call ‘knowing’.

Knowledge is reconstructed from information by mixing with existing memories, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

But in colloquial language we seem to have an intellectual bias that wants to separate untrue knowledge from true, or at least tested, knowledge thereby conflating QUALITY of knowledge and EXISTENCE of knowledge. We can forgive philosophers this common error, since they are concerned most often with the persuasive quality (truth) of propositions.

And if we look carefully at the discussion of ‘knowledge’ we find philosophers conflating (a)existence/awareness, (b) risk/willingness to act, (c) truth content.

And moreover, truth content consists of two additional properties: (c.i) persuasive power assuming an honest participant, and (c.ii) parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

“Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as:

(a) awareness (existence) of a regular pattern combining information and memory to create an experience, which we then also remember.

(b) all knowledge is theoretical, and open to revision (no premises are certain)

where theoretical propositions contain both:

(d) truth content(parsimonious correspondence with reality).

(c) persuasive power (sufficiency) in an honest discourse(risk reduction/reward increase),

JUSTIFICATOIN VERSUS CRITICISM = CONTRACT VS TRUTH

So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality).

If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting.

In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility we can rely upon.

The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of our lives epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as method, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses.

Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms are contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science by contrast, produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society.

So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science.

This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contractual relations.

And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine