The 'philosophical debate' thread.
 

Who wants start us off? ah **** it i'll do it,

what is it to KNOW something? define knowledge...


(anyone pulls out a dictionary i'll kill them, and then i'll use their dead hands to post something new to debate)

Knowledge is the infomation that a person's, or people's, brain contains. Knowing is the awareness and storage of that information by people's brains. You might define it as being the concious information somebody's stores, or it might be all of the information, concious and subconcious.

The information can be factually incorrect, it's still knowledge.

But isn't that taking everything we 'know' of the universe for granted, we could be completely wrong about everything in existance.

Yes we could. Knowledge can be different to fact and truth.

so you'd go with the theory that knowledge is belief more than anything? isn't that dependant on what you believe, or is to know something to know 'yourself' that it is true...

No. Belief is based around the parts of knowledge which you see as truth. Knowledge would include the parts of knowledge which you see as untrue as well.

For example, I don't believe in Christianity or Islam, but I still know a lot about it. And I'm well aware that religious/spiritual belief isn't the full spectrum of 'belief'. I need to think of more examples.


EDIT: To put it another way, if you're told something and you don't believe what you were told, you still know you were told it. You might argue that the information you recieve is what you believe you were told... but that's really called interpretation, not belief. I do think that knowledge depends on your interpretation of the information that comes your way and your selective recognition and recall of that information (different people will pay attention to and remember different parts of the same set of information).

so knowledge would depend on the person who took for granted that it was true? (sorry if this is wrong i'm trying to follow)

or is the case your trying to make that kowledge is 'true justified belief'?

Nope. A person's knowledge includes that which they take to be true and also that which they don't. They might be more likely to pass on the knowledge that they take to be true and to act upon the knowledge they take to be true. However, their knowledge still contains information they don't think is true.

The knowledge somebody picks up and retains will depend upon their own way of interpreting things (part of which comes from their 'beliefs', but from other factors too). If you exposed two different people to exactly the same external information in the same way the two people would still come away with different 'knowledge' of that same event.

Fact and truth don't have a verb form (I'm not sure of the linguistic term here and we're can't use dictionaries remember). Knowledge does, which is 'to know'. For knowledge to exist, somebody or something has 'to know' it. This is more specific than information or truth, which can kind of float around unknown.

Knowledge is the portion of information which something has been exposed to which that thing is able to recall in some way.

So was that it?