The Value of True Belief - Epistemology Video 2

This is video 2 in an introductory course on epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is a normative discipline, which tells us how we ought to believe. But what's the value that we are after with this 'ought'? Presumably it is truth. But then what's so valuable about true belief? Is it instrumentally valuable, as means to an ends, or is it valuable in itself?

[radosawjasiewicz]

Somewhere in this world, in Poland to be exact, some people might have heard my soft laughter while I was watching this series, so they knew I was laughing. What they couldn’t have known, however, was how much I enjoyed it. Thanks :)

[오다윤-fg]

As a philosophy undergraduate I have been looking for a channel to further my professional academic knowledge of philosophy. And you'll never imagine how glad I am to reach yours!!

All your videos have been extremely helpful (especially the ones on Siegel and Rinard) and I feel like I actually learned from you as much as I do in my lectures.

This new series on epistemology is already giving me some ah-ha moments, making me realize what I missed from my epistemology professor 😂

Thank you soooo much and keep up the good work!!

Love and respect from Korea.

[ErikBronk]

"...assuming they don't need hammers" is the best joke I've heard from you yet. Laughed... re-watched it... laughed again... thinking about it now I laugh again. Your talent to simplify these complex ideas is extraordinary and your videos are always entertaining and sometimes, let's say, stand-up (comedy) worthy.

You helped me through my first partial read-through of Kant's Critique. I did the reading and rereading (rarely did I stumble upon a sentence that I did not immediately had to read again). I read it in Dutch (Veenbaas & Visser (2004), Boom). I sometimes reread it in English [Project Gutenberg].
At some point in the Dialectic I got so lost in my own wild and undoubtedly ridiculous ideas about it's meaning and possible implications that I took a break.
I know that in the near future I will make a fresh start with it, in the hopefully justified (probably... we'll see about that tomorrow I guess) true believe that your wonderful, clear and often hilarious lectures patiently await me in the interweb-void.

I can not thank you enough and I wish you well.

Dankjewel Victor / Dank u wel meneer Gijsbers.

Groet,
Erik Bronk

[financefiction]

Thanks so much for making these videos! Best epistemology content on youtube so far!

[台男波哥]

0:00 normative discipline
1:40 Must be focused on value, on something that is valuable
2:50 What value? One answer to that is going to be truth.
4:00 why do we care if we believe true things or not?
5:00 instrumental value vs intrinsic value
9:00 subjective value vs objective value
12:35 Truth as the intrinsic goal of belief
13:50 objective wins, but how about instrumental vs intrinsic?
14:05 or maybe both?
14:40 orange juice
16:45 instrumental? can't be quite right
18:20 sometimes it might actually be valuable to have false beliefs: self-confidence, forgot to buy food, knowledge of every horrific murder
20:45 cognitive psychology: balance between speed and accuracy
23:25 e.g. Mr.X(老高XDD)
24:10 true belief is somehow intrinsically valuable
24:45 if you say I don't believe that I don't think I have here a knockdown argument right against you
26:00 conclusion at this point: objectively and intrinsically

[gotaro]

What a fantastic video, extremely educational and also very fun (made me laugh a couple of times)

Thanks!!

[NRWTx]

I had a big laugh when you showed the absurdity of the subjective value position. Learning and laughing = perfect teacher.
Thanks for your generosity, looking up for the next lectures. Regards.

[ahmed-lfio]

Clear and interesting, that didn't feel like 30 minutes :)

[darrellee]

- Beliefs ought to be true.
- We generally assume that our beliefs are true, otherwise as rational epistemic agents we would not believe them.
- True belief usually has some instrumental value.
- False belief can also have instrumental value.
(e.g. I believe there are evil spirits in the red berries. This belief is useful because its behaviorally isomorphic to the true belief that the berries are poisonous.)
- We can also want to believe false things
(e.g. I want to believe that my wife isn't cheating on me.)

[darrellee]

interesting that in order to talk about epistemology, we first have to talk about values. Is that because values are basically a fundamental type of knowledge?
I think values might constitute a type of a priori (or innate) knowledge.
A priori to the individual's experience, but synthetic and empirical from the perspective of life and 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution.

[NRWTx]

Whats the difference in speaking about objective value judgments or factual value judgments ?

[NRWTx]

Who are the people in ethics thinking about values in subjective terms ?

[АклызМелкенды]

giving up you status as a thinker is a very taoist thing

[JaNeZnau]

I don't believe truth can be objective belief with intrinsic value. I think our knowledge (believes) is always guesses. So, the better a guess can do for us instrumentally - the more true it is. But never the real and final truth. Because the content of the physical world and content of our mind is radically different. I don't think it destroys me as thinker, because I believe in that concurent instrumental truth because this is my concurent instrumental theory about the truth. I don't believe it as a final dogm, only as the best current answer.

[PeterOzanne]

I found the expression "true belief" confusing: on reflection, it looks like you mean "belief in something which is factually correct". It would be clearer to say "correct belief" or "mistaken belief", because many humans often "truly" believe, for example, that a politician will solve all their problems, or that the world is flat, or was created in 6000 BC. That is a "true belief", since they are certain that it is true.
I would also like to ask if epistemology is only concerned with relative, and not absolute, truth. As Lao Tzu and others have often said, absolute truth cannot be written, spoken, or communicated: for example, each of us can have a direct experience of the reality of Being (especially if not clouded by thought). We can taste an orange, but that taste is not communicable. Perhaps this is a different area of learning from epistemology! 🙂