What is knowledge? (A response to Popperian)

ID debates often bring up foundational worldview issues, and the following exchange in the current Answering P thread is also worth headlining:

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P, 62: >>Knowledge is information that, when embedded in a storage medium, plays a causal role in it being retained. This includes books, genomes and yes, brains. Furthermore, knowledge is objective in that is is independent of anyone’s belief. So, while I would agree that merely having a belief doesn’t make it true, we have a reason to suppose that our brains can genuinely contain knowledge.

What explanation do you have for the growth of knowledge? Let me guess: the reason why our beliefs may be true is because “that’s just what God must have wanted”?>>

KF, 64: >>Popperian:

Knowledge is information that, when embedded in a storage medium, plays a causal role in it being retained.

Gross error of definition.

Knowledge is not stored useful information but well warranted, credibly true belief. That is, responsibly free rational reflection is a condition of knowledge.

Knowledge comes about by a process of reflection, involving interior life and typically external experience and perception. This leads to processes of warrant on exertion of logical and/or empirical tests that lead to sufficient weight of warrant to put the stamp of credibility, knowledge, on. Though, this often comes with the proviso, that the degree of warrant is provisional, such as in science, management, law and many other practical affairs.

You have again set up and tried to knock over a strawman.

Now, of course, knowledge may often be posed in verbal forms or other representations amenable to storage, but that is secondary to what knowledge is.

Error, by contrast, often claims to be knowledge but in the end fails the test of warrant. (Let me add, following Aristotle, that truth says of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.)

Knowledge is one form of reasonable and trustworthy faith.

And, I deliberately use this term to underscore that faith and reason — contrary to commonly seen skeptical notions — are not opposites that are inevitably at war with one another.>>

Box, 65: >>Popperian #62 claims to address KF’s point directly, however he does no such thing. KF’s point is about the process of rational inference. KF clearly shows that this process cannot be a chemical/mechanistic process.

Popperian again fails to address KF’s point.>>

Mung, 66: >>Popperian;

C, 68: >>kairosfocus:

C, 70: >> . . . The dispute is whether what we call “knowledge” changes.

Please try to understand the analogy.

What was considered “knowledge” was “error” in this case.

At one time, our pool of “knowledge” included the fact that the Earth was only a few thousand years old.

That “knowledge” has been replaced by the new “knowledge” that the Earth is billions of years old.

That previous “knowledge” was an “error”.>>

KF, 71: >>Carpathian,

do you consider scientific or historical knowledge, etc. to be knowledge?

If so, you are forced to a weak form view of knowledge that does not demand absolute certainty or incorrigibility. That is, the relevant degree of warrant for many fields of responsible practice or prudent behaviour is some type of moral certainty.

In sum, if X is warranted to this degree, it would be irresponsible or foolish to act as though it were false, never mind that you are open to possibility of correction. In short, knowledge in this sense is a certificate of reasonable, responsible trustworthiness. Not, a guarantee that what we think we know at any given point is beyond possibility of needing correction.

If instead you insist on absolute certainty, the field of knowledge would collapse to a very sparse set indeed. In particular, science, history, jurisprudence, economics and a good slice of mathematics post Godel’s incompleteness theorems would collapse.>>

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Yes, what is knowledge lurks under the debates on ID. END