I remember that at this time of last year, I liked to blogsurf, and read how people are dying for Promos. Now, I don't get the joy of doing that anymore because people either stop blogging altogether, or improve a great deal for Prelims. Probably the only person to consistently blog about his results is Ivan, which is demoralizing every time you read it. Inevitably, he'll mention Shang Hui's results too, which demoralizes you even more.

At this point in time, people are working very hard. People are also preparing uni applications, such that all of a sudden the person sitting next to you seems damn imba.

Rather demoralising, really.
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I still don't know what knowledge is.

The most common definition of knowledge is "true, justified belief". I'm not sure if "truth" and "justification" are necessary conditions.

And now the problem becomes: "What is true?"

Correspondence theory: If a statement describes an object, and the object is really as it describes, then it is true. I think it is a trivial description, because unless we are talking about a fictional world, there is no way for us to know what that object "really is like". If you attempt to extend this theory of truth to metaphysical concepts, it is only possible for you to know if a statement is true only if you somehow have access to this realm of "knowledge of what statements are really true". At the end of it, it really just means "a statement is true if it is true."

Coherence theory: If the rejection of that statement entails the rejection of many other statements, then that statement is likely to be true. Note that unlike the correspondence theory, it doesn't try to define truth, doesn't assume the existence of knowledge about what something is like, and doesn't guarantee that what is coherent is true.

Pragmatic theory: If you can use that statement to do something, and it works, then it is likely to be true. Problem is, it is difficult to evaluable how "pragmatic" a statement is, especially certain aspects of pure math.

In response to the skeptical attack, I question the viability of the correspondence theory of truth. The only statements that are certain is transcendental statements, and regarding everything else, you cannot be sure that there exists an external reality, where true statements can be made about it, and you cannot be sure if your reasoning faculties are working fine. An implication of this is that if one were to subscribe to correspondence theory of truth, the only truths are transcendental statements, and nothing else, including mathematics, can be considered as knowledge.

Clearly, we use the word "knowledge" to include many other things, such as scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, and general knowledge. Since the definition of knowledge given above would not consider "scientific knowledge" and "general knowledge", we can conclude, it is either that "scientific knowledge" and "general knowledge" are misnomers, that the definition of truth is inadequate, or that the definition of knowledge is inadequate.

Suppose we use, instead, the coherence theory of truth in the definition of knowledge. Since the coherence theory of truth does not say what is true, but rather what is likely to be true, there is a certain degree of fuzziness in the boundary between the set of statements that are true and the set of statements that are not true. Since truth is one of the criteria in the definition of knowledge, it must also mean that there is a certain degree of fuzziness in what constitutes knowledge, unless the justification and belief criteria are much more stringent than the truth criterion. Belief is pretty much a universal set, so that leaves us with justification, and let's see if the justification criterion is more stringent than the coherence truth criterion.

The problem with justification is that it must be a way with which the infinite regress of justification can be arrested. Three methods of stopping infinite regress: foundationalism (branches into empiricism and rationalism), coherence, and pragmatism (deja vu?).

Foundationalism is based on faith. Ironically, there is no good reason to believe in rationalism rather than empiricism or religious fundamentalism. Why do we not doubt our reasoning faculties? If it has failed us once, it could fail us again (although that is actually an inductive argument, but never mind that), so why should we use it as the basis for justification? Why should we reject what we sense in favour of what is reasonable? If our basis for knowledge is faith, I think there is much to worry about (appeal to consequences, but let's not go into that too).

Perhaps you are questioning, "Can't we use some common sense to tell us which faith is more reasonable than others?"

I'm reminded of a quote from George Carlin.

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do..And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ..But He loves you.

But some other things we wholeheartedly believe nowadays are pretty absurd too. Science has convinced people that friction is caused by the complex intermolecular forces of attraction between the billions upon billions of rugosities of two surfaces, and when they slide across each other, the bonds formed between the rugosities of the surfaces continuously form and break. Yet, the frictional resistive force is simply proportional to the normal force that each surface exert on each other. Or that when you take the limit of (1-1/n)^n as n tends to infinity, and then you take that number to the power of product between the ratio between the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and the square root of negative one, you get exactly negative one! Brilliant, but it's not a lot more common-sensical than religious doctrine, no?

So let's cast aside foundationalism as a means to stop the infinite regress, and consider coherence. Amazingly, it is the pretty much same thing as the coherence theory of truth, that is statement is likely to be justified if it is coherent with other beliefs. The implication of this would be that a belief that is coherent with other beliefs is likely to be knowledge.

However, there is a big problem here. As I've mentioned before, the set of statements that people can conceivably believe is the universal set. This also means that for any belief, if I hold strongly onto it enough, such that I generate many other beliefs that cohere with it (e.g, conspiracy theories), then it may end up being more coherent than many other beliefs, and it is conferred the title of "knowledge". Surely, we would not accept that anything can become knowledge as long as we will it to be, we cannot use the coherence as a test of how justified a belief is.

We have ignored our good old friend "pragmatism" for quite a while, and we'd revisit him now.

William James: "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving."

Somehow, I kinda like that. But I can't justify it.

Heck.