Evolution

You're not going to have much luck applying philosophy mumbo-jumbo to discredit something which is actually observed. Or if you do, it will have the side effect of destroying any claim to ever being able to have knowledge of anything at all. Neither seems all that fruitful an approach towards epistemology.

Sayre said:

Do you think we have knowledge of evolution, or is it still just belief?

Is evolution a justified true belief?

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Sure.

Is there a gettier counter example you could come up with that might make evolution a belief rather than knowledge?

It seems like that is what embedded age "false history" claims do - they form as gettier counter examples to render evolution belief rather than knowledge.

Thoughts?

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What is a 'gettier' counter example?

Embedded age would make God a liar. It wouldn't be just like creating Adam as an adult, it would be like creating him with a scar from a fight he never fought, or perhaps even memories of things that didn't happen.

Paradoxum said:

What is a 'gettier' counter example?

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It's base on the Gettier Problem (try Wikipedia, I can't post links). It's a challenge to the definition of knowledge as being a "justified true belief" that creates a hypothetical situation where those three criteria are met but where we'd a say a person merely believes something rather than knows it.

I can't think of any that would apply to evolution at the moment, but I'm putting some thought to it.

KnowtheSilence said:

It's base on the Gettier Problem (try Wikipedia, I can't post links). It's a challenge to the definition of knowledge as being a "justified true belief" that creates a hypothetical situation where those three criteria are met but where we'd a say a person merely believes something rather than knows it.

I can't think of any that would apply to evolution at the moment, but I'm putting some thought to it.

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Ah ok, I might look it up later.

The Gettier case might be that you predict that a species that you've subjected to an environmental pressure will evolve in such-and-such a way and then when you come back tomorrow--lo and behold--it has changed as predicted. In this case, is it JTB that evolution has occurred or did you just happen to look at the stopped clock at the time it stopped at.

I would say we have JTB for evolution. We can replicate the above experiments over and over with varying degrees of granularity. To require more would be to declare that to have JTB we may never blink.

Sayre said:

Do you think we have knowledge of evolution, or is it still just belief?

Is evolution a justified true belief?

Is there a gettier counter example you could come up with that might make evolution a belief rather than knowledge?

It seems like that is what embedded age "false history" claims do - they form as gettier counter examples to render evolution belief rather than knowledge.

Thoughts?

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I feel these questions get posed ad nauseam because of an unawareness of how science is done. But let me ask you a question. You are aware of the fact of human project that has existed for age of taking wild animals and domesticating them, correct? You're aware,for example , that a teacup Chihuahua is not something found in the wild but was directly designed through artificial selection, yes? In fact, Russia has had an ongoing experiment in which they've taken many species of wolves and transformed them through successive breeding into tame dogs, and this is just over the course of a few decades, mind you. This is evolution. Now, you're probably objecting to something very specific in evolution, namely, I would presume, the idea of common decent or that species can radically change over millions of years. Why would you be so skeptical that such changes over millions of years would not also occur given that we can have such drastic changes through artificial selection now? It is simply the accumulation of mutations in DNA. Natural selection, which is blind natural process, works similarly like artificial selection, but where artificial selection has a conscious agent (i.e., us) selecting specific traits we like, natural selection allows certain traits to continue if they survive by means of adapting to their environment.

I do not think that the distinction between belief and knowledge is a meaningful one (and even less so if knowledge is being defined as 'justified true belief').

Given that we can only really rely on inductive reasoning, how do we know that we know? How do we can have a justified and true belief that what we are justified in believing based on our current understanding of the universe is in fact true?

I think that a lot of the debates about knowledge are attempts to trick us into the notion that any belief is as likely to be true as any other.

Sayre

Do you think we have knowledge of evolution, or is it still just belief?

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Yes, I'd say that the evidence we have accumulated indicates that we have something more in the way of knowledge that some kind of evolution has been taking place.

Is evolution a justified true belief?

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Yes, it is JTB, but we can't say that we know everything about it.

Is there a gettier counter example you could come up with that might make evolution a belief rather than knowledge?

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Not that I can think of, other than it seems the world has evolved in a progression of development from more basic forms to more complex, without much in the way of diffusion or regression. Which sometimes seems odd since Darwin said that evolution was basically non-directional.

It seems like that is what embedded age "false history" claims do - they form as gettier counter examples to render evolution belief rather than knowledge.

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Thoughts?

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Nope. Things evolved

Sayre said:

I believe in evolution and natural selection. I'm just questioning whether my position is a belief or knowledge. I'm not a creationist.

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Evolution is an explanation of observed phenomena, it makes true predictions that expand our understanding and insight.

It falls into the realm of knowledge.

I think that what Evolutionists need to do is say, "hey, we've proven that the Evolutionary methodology is inherently creative, but we made a really easy mistake thinking that two parallel Evolutions actually lead from one to the other (that doesn't gel with what we know about organisms requiring a unique identity to move from one environment to the next)"

If Evolutionists did that, I would believe Evolution.

Sayre said:

I believe in evolution and natural selection. I'm just questioning whether my position is a belief or knowledge.

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How and where exactly do you draw the line between belief and knowledge?

Sayre said:

I take knowledge to be JTB+. So at minimum the difference is justification and truth.

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How do you determine justification of a belief and how do you tell if it´s true?

Sayre said:

This is the heart of the epistemic problem.

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Yes.

Practically speaking, justification is determined by the reasonable objective bystander test.

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As far as I can tell "the reasonable person" isn´t an epistemological concept in philosophy but rather a quite pragmatic concept in legislation and law - it is a "legal fiction".
Just checked the wikipedia article - nowhere is it described as even only the attempt to distinguish between belief and truth.

Whatever Sayre, it's not knowledge until you can believe it.

Even once you believe it, the knowledge isn't worth anything until you can save something.

What did you think Believers were saying when they said "its important to be saved?"

They meant, we don't just believe what we believe for nothing.

So contrary to your opinion, I was actually answering the question.

Sayre said:

This is the heart of the epistemic problem.

Practically speaking, justification is determined by the reasonable objective bystander test.

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Sayre, I'm going to have to line up with Quatona with the point he made above about the bystander test.

The only concept I can think of that has a philosophical construction similar to the one you state here is that of the Outside Test for Faith, recently proposed by John W. Loftus. The Bystander Test might even have some similar structure to John Rawls, Theory of Justice (i.e. his 'veil hypothesis.') However, Loftus' argument seems to me to have an inherent structure akin to that of "Cultural Relativism," so there are some weaknesses.