Q&A: Knowledge Without Justification
Knowledge Without Justification
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: can one speak of knowledge without the ability to justify it, regarding something that someone claims to know while not managing to justify it—for example, in the context of the problem of induction?
Because it seems that most philosophers today give different reasons than your approach of intuition-acquaintance. And even insofar as they do accept the concept, such as inductive thinking, it seems they would speak more about probabilistic or Bayesian solutions, and some remain undecided, but you still don’t see people refusing to get on an airplane because of this. So in any case, it does not seem that there is one clear line of justification.
But if so, can a person know inductive conclusions when he does not actually have a plausible justification for them?
One might think that to some extent this is no different from any other basic assumption, where one can always raise a kind of skeptical question about what the justification for it is, and if you are a foundationalist then you would say that there are basic assumptions that do not require this. Or perhaps there is no need to show a justification for knowledge at all (and that is usually only a matter of pointing to the relevant sources of knowledge). But in any case, here it still does not seem, for the most part, that we are dealing with a basic assumption.
Thank you very much!
Answer
As I understand it, they know even if they do not understand how and why. This is similar to someone who sees with his eyes, but does not know how the eye works and develops strange (and mistaken) theories about it.
To be sure, one can discuss the distinction between a situation in which, without the correct theory, there is no reason to assume that this mechanism is reliable, and a situation in which it is possible even without the theory. But even there, it seems to me that people are considered to know, because their lack of knowledge concerns only the mechanism that brings them the knowledge, not the pieces of knowledge themselves.
Discussion on Answer
Knowledge cannot be justified. And not only knowledge. No mental experience can be justified, or described.
To understand that this is true, it is enough for you to try to explain and justify to a blind person what the color green is.
And then you will understand that everything you called justification is, in the end, merely a kind of cognitive-emotional manipulation of the other person into becoming convinced that your words are correct.
So in practice, it seems one has to distinguish between the person’s conscious-epistemic state as someone who knows, and his reasons for it.
That is, for example, many agree that there is a difference between the hemispheres with respect to synthetic and analytic kinds of thinking.
Only they would say that in both cases these are different thinking structures carried out by internal computation, for example, and we are aware only of the final product. Something like computer software accessible to the user, perhaps even based on artificial intelligence, where the user still usually does not know exactly how it works, and yet he is justified in believing that it works properly.
You would say, as I understand it, that the connection to the hemispheres does not contradict their being open to “external” knowledge? Sort of like free choice and dualism, right?
But in any case, the main justification for our believing is not connected to knowing the mechanism, but to the fact that we “understand” and “feel” that we are right. Something like sight?
There is something a bit strange about that, because as long as you do not know, as you mentioned, how can you trust the outputs?
But it is also somewhat reasonable, just as many philosophers once thought that the mechanism of sight was a kind of radar that transmitted signals and did not merely receive electromagnetic waves from the environment, and yet we would still say that they really did see correctly even though they interpreted the mechanism incorrectly.