Thursday, October 10, 2019

Components of Knowledge

1. Validity: saying something relevant. If I walk to the right when I leave my apartment, I will walk to the right when I leave my apartment, insofar as that is true, unless it is untrue in some perhaps clever way.

2. Conditionality (knowledge statement): something understood to be true, emerging out of a given set of validities. If, when I walk to the right when I leave my apartment, and I see a mailbox as has happened before, then I can mail a letter, provided I have a letter, unless something rationally or irrationally or by some other condition physical or otherwise holds me back from doing so.

3. Exceptionism: knowing the number of alternatives. When I walk to the right when I leave my apartment I can sense a mailbox if I have the impulse, unless the mailbox was removed or if at the moment I attempt to discover it it never existed there, similar to saying the mailbox was removed or it never existed, or I can mail a letter, if we assume I have a letter and the correct conditionality holds. Or, we don't have a complete list of alternatives. But, if we do, then we do, if that condition holds.

4. Exclusions: For each of the alternatives, the same set of alternate possibilities hold but only via the same validity. For example, if you do not see a mailbox and it never existed there, the alternatives are still that it exists there and you can mail a letter if you have one, or the mailbox existed there at some time but was removed.

5. Now we have a set of truth-conditions which is simply a set of alternate possibilities given a certain validity. If the set of possibilities is complete, the alternatives are if possibilities remain or if we can question the original validity. So, if we know our list is exclusive (complete and not overlapping) given the validity, the only possible problem as truth-conditions is if the original validity is untrue, or conditionally if one or another outcome is more or less likely.

NOTES:

* Kripke's sense of pure conditionality seems to justify from my paper "The Logic of Coherence", that normally exclusive conditions should be viewed as equal in likelihood, assuming coherence. However, in most cases coherence would not be assumed. In cases of knowledge, however, a successful argument for coherence can be useful in reaching broader conclusions than a narrow context ordinarily allows. The existence of this assumption, however, assumes the lack of perfect specialization in the alternatives. A perfectly applied coherence is equal so far as usefilness to a perfect specialization on a specific matter, although the exact usefulness may be different between the two. However, perfectly applied coherence may require specialization on spacific matters.

* I have considered that preferences are necessary for free will, so if this is the case, if we judge conditionalities as preferences (probably sometimes we would not do so), then preferences may be one interpretation of truth-conditions, the others being other forms of likelihood, or else incomplete knowledge, or else lack of validity. However, as pure conditions in the world, likelihoods may exist simultaneously with incomplete knowledge, if not invalidity.

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