On Belief, Knowledge, and Justification

[smoothmoniker]

Beast, I'm going to come back and hit your post a little later today, because you said some interesting stuff that I want to think about.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm happy to follow your path no matter where you take us sm. I love this stuff!

In preparation I have reminded myself of the difference between deduction and induction, because I'm pretty sure the fuzz factor there is a problem.

You haven't proven I live in the Philly area. I mean, I *do*, but you haven't proven anything. You've taken a set of really obvious signs that point to it and induced that I do. The signs sure look obvious. But it's still an induction, not a deduction. And now if you accept that I live in the Philly area as fact, and build other deductions and inductions on TOP of that fact, you might be building your understanding of reality on a house of cards.

I might be so fascinated by Philly (hey, it's possible) that I want to be there and am lying about the whole thing. But we can probably get to a deduction that I live in the Philly area. It's totally provable, because if you want to, you can come here and see it.

I don't think this kind of statement is inductive or deductive; I haven't moved from a sample to a group, or from a group to a sample. I'm inferring - moving from a collection of data to a likely conclusion.

I'm more interested in the state of my belief prior to verification. True, I could get on a plane, come visit you, get my bad self all sloppy up with cheesesteak, but prior to me actually doing that, I still have a justified true belief that you live in Philly. The point where we might disagree is that I think I'm able to call this belief "knowledge" in the normal sense. I have enough justification for my true belief that I can say "I *know* that UT lives in Philly.