signs of extreme boredom

i've been reading some philosophical stuff and.............

what is belief, truth and knowledge?

i'll make it short and simplify them. belief is accepting a statement to be true. truth is the reality on which the statement is based on. knowledge is the justification of one's belief of the truth.

here's an example which i copied from wikipedia;

"if someone believes something, he or she thinks that it is true but may be mistaken. This is not the case with knowledge. For example, a man thinks that a particular bridge is safe enough to support him, and he attempts to cross it; unfortunately, the bridge collapses under his weight. It could be said that the man believed that the bridge was safe, but that his belief was mistaken. It would not be accurate to say that he knew that the bridge was safe, because plainly it was not. By contrast, if the bridge actually supported his weight then he might be justified in subsequently holding that he knew the bridge had been safe enough for his passage, at least at that particular time. For something to count as knowledge, it must actually be true."

this makes perfect sense, until we come to the Gettier problem and his example which contradicts the earlier statement.

Smith and Jones, who are awaiting the results of their applications for the same job. Each man has ten coins in his pocket. Smith has excellent reasons to believe that Jones will get the job and, furthermore, knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket (he recently counted them). From this Smith infers, "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." However, Smith is unaware that he has ten coins in his own pocket. Furthermore, Smith, not Jones, is going to get the job. While Smith has strong evidence to believe that Jones will get the job, he is wrong. Smith has a justified true belief that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job; however, according to Gettier, Smith does not know that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job, because Smith's belief is "...true by virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief...on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job." These cases fail to be knowledge because the subject's belief is justified, but only happens to be true in virtue of luck.

now, this is what i think. knowledge about anything means to understand that particular matter in every possible way in that particular time. which means that knowledge has an expiry date, a period of validity. and that validity only lasts as long as the knowledge is true to the reality of that particular time. within that period of validity, we can do something else based on the knowledge, we can predict.

let's look again at the bridge example. the man knew that the bridge can support him, but 5 years later, he cross the bridge again and predicted that it will still support him. if the bridge collapses, then the knowledge is no longer valid and a new one must be made....if not, then it's still valid.

to answer the gettier problem, we use predictability and trial and error method. we repeat the similar scenario several times and use smith knowledge over and over again. should his knowledge be true by luck, then his prediction would be wrong and his knowledge would be invalid until proven otherwise. but if the same thing were to happen over and over again, then, though without a logical explanation and by coincidence, his knowledge is valid as long as it is not proven otherwise.

and that's supporting the idea of fallibilism, which is a philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. it is possible for knowledge to be invalid, but only after proven so. fallibilism is also coherent with chaos theory. as there can be no perfect knowledge, there can also be no perfect prediction.

this is how chaos theory works. it is impossible to have complete certainty of any knowledge as there are certain things that we do not know at all, things that we overlook, or things we fail to notice, things beyond our minds' ability. so, we have an imperfect knowledge, which we then apply in making a prediction, an imperfect one with slight, maybe unnoticeable changes due to the gap of knowledge. that changes may vary greatly over a long period of time, and cause abnormalities in predictions. that abnormality is the sign that the knowledge is no longer valid. if that man predicted the bridge can support him for another 5 years but it collapses after 2 years, then it would be chaos, the prediction would be wrong, and the knowledge would be invalid.


ok, shit, im seriously lost now.