this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Well believing his room looks like that would be knowledge, because the room would look like that.
If it was about the background being the actual room, then the justified belief wouldn't be true.
I think the whole point is that the difference between belief and knowledge isn't about whether or not you're right, it's about whether or not your belief has been verified and proven to be true, so in OP's example, they would be right that the room looks like that, but that belief wouldn't have been verified due to the professor never seeing his actual room. Thus, a justified true belief, but not knowledge.
I agree and understand.
And technically, sort of, yeah. I don't have a certain answer, but this is exactly what epistemology deals with.
But I think this is just sort of conflating some things for humour a bit. Humour often relies on slight leaps in "actual" logic. It's definitely close enough for a joke, I'm just pedantically discussing whether it's technically epistemologically correct, if such a thing can even be determined.
It sort of is. Both are beliefs, but knowledge is something that's a true belief, but also, it has to be justified. So for instance believing that antibiotics help infections isn't necessarily knowledge if your justification for having that belief is "there are miniature soldiers in the pills who fight viruses with laser guns", then it's not knowledge. Especially because antibiotics affect bacteria, not viruses. If your justification is correct though, then it's a justified true belied, and thus constitutes knowledge.
But here if the knowledge is "that is how his room looks like", it would be a true belief, but then it wouldn't be justified, because it wasn't actually the room they were seeing. But the joke I think relies on the fact that technically it is justifiable because seeing someone's room (or a projection of their room) is in everyday practice justification enough to believe what you see. But is it that philosophically? Or if it's "I'm seeing his room right now", it would be justified, but not true?
Btw I'm not making an argument, I'm making conversation.
Fair enough, and I also just like the mystery of it all; I understand that a large philosophical question can't be definitively answered in a tweet. I would say that, while knowledge requires truth and justification, there's something more to it than just the presence of those 2 factors.
If I had never seen the sky, but believed it was blue, I'd be right, but I wouldn't be knowledgeable; I'd just be a lucky guesser due to the lack of justification for my belief. But would I be justified if I had read a book that said it was blue, and based my decision off of that? It seems arbitrary - what if the book was wrong? What if there were another book I had access to that described the sky as being green, but I simply decided I better liked the blue book?
I think real knowledge requires a level of certainty that a single point of justification can't reasonably provide, and that a "true justified belief" is a step between an arbitrary belief and real knowledge. Knowledge would essentially be a belief so well-justified that it requires no "belief" at all. In the end, I'd probably say that real knowledge is totally outside of human ability, but that's not a new concept.
I would say that the meme does a good job of producing a Gettier Case, which many philosophers recognize as valid counter examples that disprove the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge, indicating that a complete definition of knowledge requires more than those three elements.
Philosophers (aside from skeptics) were mostly agreed on JTB as a straightforward and elegant definition of knowledge for most of history and they have struggled to reach a new consensus after Gettier and instead are left with a hodgepodge of competing definitions. This could be perceived as something that might frustrate a philosopher, and that I think is why the meme positions this as a sort of "prank" for philosophers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem?wprov=sfla1