PHILOSOPHY - Epistemology: The Preface Paradox [HD]

Everybody has false beliefs, including you. But that means everyone's beliefs are self-contradictory. If we wrote down everything you believe in a book, we'd have to include one more statement in the book's preface: "some of the statements in this book are false". In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jonathan Weisberg (University of Toronto) explains the infamous "Paradox of the Preface", and what it might teach us about belief, reason, and logic.

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[JohnSmith-tdhd]

Warning: Some of the statements in this book are likely false, given the inherent propensity for statements of fact to sometimes be inaccurate. But if I realize that one of my beliefs is false, I will remove it from my book of beliefs. I can't know which beliefs, if any, are false beyond what I'm representing in my book, but I'm open-minded to new information. So since I don't know which, if any, of my beliefs are false, for each belief, I am forced to stay in the default position of all beliefs, namely "belief".

Instead of probability, use "confidence". I am "very confident" that A. I am a little confident that B. I have just a little confidence in C. I'm not confident in A&B&C. Using "confidence" rather than "probability" points out that the likelihood comes from you and how you feel, not a purported objective probability such as those used in statistics (Like to describe a coin toss). Your confidence in your accuracy is what you're expressing- a "probability" outside of statistics is simply your confidence masked in pseudo-scholarship.

There's also the issue of "unreasonable demands". When people ask you about any fact, they can always respond with "But how do you know?", and after you answer, they can do it again. They can do this forever. The only way to get anything done is to decide that you have enough information and move on, and note that you have enough information to discount other people's claims that none of your information supports (Like Earth being flat). Making unreasonable demands is sort of an argument from ignorance because it demands 100% accuracy before letting you believe something or act because it ends up being a claim that you're wrong because you COULD be wrong. Imagine thinking this way while trying to do anything- maybe by tying your shoes, you'll end up bring the Nazies back from the dead and starting World War III. How do you know that won't happen? Because causality and facts.

A genuinely certain person would be impossible to convince even when presented with what is genuine proof of his/her error. So real certainty is akin to insanity.

[ThreeSided]

You basically summed up my personal perspective on knowledge in this video. I've thought about it a lot. Here's my answer to the question at the end:

True knowledge as we define it is unrealistic. There is no need to reconcile knowledge with uncertainty, we just need to accept that the things we have are not truly knowledge and move on. Saying this is a problem is kind of like saying "I used to use a sponge to clean my car, but then I found out it wasn't actually a sponge at all, but a wash cloth! What should I do?!" It's silly because it somehow implies that a sponge is the only way to solve the problem of a dirty car, which we know is not true because he had been successfully washing his car with the wash cloth all along. Similarly, to say that there is a problem that what we've been working with isn't actually knowledge doesn't change anything about what we've accomplished. The desire to reconcile these two concepts isn't because it is a real problem, it's because we like to believe that we can know things, because it brings certainty, and therefore comfort, to our lives.

[bolerie]

To me it seems interily reasonable to think that I don't know anything for certain. Thing like "the entire universe was created last tuesday" and "the entire universe is a simulation" could always be true and therefore no knowledge I have is certainly true. But at least to me it doesn't really matter.

[ericharris]

Why not simply preface with: "To the best of my knowledge"

[lee]

I think epistemologically one would be a fallibilist or as the late Philosopher Rick Roderick put's it "A fallibilist is someone who passionately believes certain things. Passionately believes certain things, some of them quite bizarre, as you’ll find out as we go along. But about those beliefs, I believe that they could be wrong.".

[dariuspatrick]

Believing something that is wrong is not a contradiction if you don't know it's wrong and willing to correct it once you realize it.

[VidkunQL]

"I wish to thank all of the people who helped me to verify the assertions in this book, so that I am at least 99.99% sure of each one. But there are roughly 20, 000 assertions in this book, many of them independent, and I understand probability, so I know it is probable that at least one false assertion slipped past us. This is not a contradiction, just arithmetic. Sorry."

[DrZalmat]

Kinda reminds me of my chemistry professor in the first semester. "A good part of the knowledge I teach you is false. Unfortunately I don't know, which one".
As a human, errors are bound to happen and nothing is ever 100% certain. If someone claims something is 100% certain, he is either delusional about the statement/doesn't know better or lies. That is a fact (not a 100% one, of course :-) ). The only way to confirm something then, is bringing the probability of it being false way down. Yes, it could be wrong that the earth is spherical, but all evidence, observed by hundreds of thousands of people every day, says otherwise. So we have a lot of evidence from a lot of independent people. One is bound to make mistakes, but that all of them actually do the same mistake and so come to the same wrong conclusion is very unlikely.
So I define "knowing" for myself as "seeing the evidence has a very small margin of error".

[ikaSenseiCA]

I have frequent delusions and hallucinations (possibly schizophrenic), and I just YOLO it. Make a hypothesis, assume it's true, try to disprove it, fail or succeed. If successful, make a new hypothesis, if not, assume it's true for practical purposes.

[flamencoprof]

We just always must be prepared to say, if challenged "So far as I know.", and remain open-minded to reasonable corrections, rather than treat challenges as an unforgivable assault on our world-view.
When a cognitive therapist, rather than telling me how to think, simply pointed out that I held contradictory beliefs, I thanked him for it and voluntarily changed how I thought. It relieved a lot of subconscious tension as a result. I didn't punch him for screwing with my mind, ha-ha!

[cliffordhodge]

To make this seem less paradoxical we need merely consider belief on some other subject.  For example, if you ask me, "Will you ever die?" I naturally assent to the proposition, "I will die, " but if you then proceed to ask me about all the different moments when I may die - "Do you believe you will die in the next moment, T; do you believe you will die in the following moment T2, etc." for all the times when I might die, I will answer "No, " to every one.  Are my beliefs inconsistent?  I don't think anyone is inclined to say so.  There is a type of parallel with slippery slope and line-drawing problems.  For example, if you ask me another series of questions like, "Did you become bald with the loss of one hair?  with the loss of two? the loss of three? etc." I will again answer "No, " to each, but I will say that I am quite confident of my baldness nonetheless.  So the fact that I cannot stipulate which beliefs are false does not suggest I cannot consistently assume that the aggregate of beliefs contains some that are false.

[michaelwinter]

"This book includes models developed intentionally over time. As time still continues, these models may still develop. As such, assuming an error-free book, anyone reading this book in a time after this book has been written should assume there has been opportunity for modifications to the model presented here. This book, therefore, acts as a powerful snapshot of where the model currently is as well as serves as an excellent presentation of the current model - as of this writing.

"That said, I make more mistakes than the model I'm presenting. For example, this morning I intended to fill my coffee maker with 6 cups of water. In fact, I over filled by over half a cup. The 10% error in my coffee making is substantially more than the (scientifically quantified error) that is believed to be contained in these models. While all effort has been made to minimize both sources of error, rest assured I still had too much coffee this morning and errors found are likely my own and unintentional.

[you_just]

I know it's off-topic, but I had to correct a mistake here: Christian apologists don't argue that the world is perfect; it's quite obviously not. The reason it's imperfect is because we mucked it up, not because God is imperfect.

[CopelandMeister]

There's no paradox if people have contradictory beliefs. It doesn't violate the laws of logic at all. The fact that contradictory propositions are both held to be true by one and the same person is practically presupposed by logic. It's the reason we study logic at all.

[ceputza]

This is not a paradox. Who said this should have a logical value?
It's just words.

[jwpjsbdj]

What is there to reconcile between these two approaches? Our beliefs are indeed probabilistic, and indeed we also "sometimes think in terms of yes/no answers, to get through the day". That is to say, we get through the day using our beliefs of which we think the probability of them being wrong is negligible (but not zero). (In fact we get through the day on much less certain beliefs, like going for a walk when there's 20% chance of rain!). There's nothing incompatible with this. As for the preface paradox: Each statement in our book we believe with very high certainty. For arguments sake we are very self-assured and believe each of them with 99.9% certainty. However since this is a book of *every* belief we have, say 100, 000 of them, we are compelled to believe that the probability of all of them being true is 0.9999 ^ 100, 000 = 0.00005. In other words we must believe that its 99.995% true that at least one of our beliefs is wrong! certainly enough to warrant a statement in the preface...

[IXPrometheusXI]

I think the problem comes from taking knowledge to imply certainty. If we define knowledge as justified true belief, then fallibilism undermines the "true" part. We establish truth through justification. When we believe a proposition, then set out some justifications for it, we can't do anything else to establish the truth of the proposition. At this point, the claim that the proposition is true reduces to the claim that it is justified. This makes the "true" part something that we have to understand in retrospect.

Imagine I believe A, and I use x, y, and z to justify A. From my perspective, no more can be done, and I would have to conclude that I know A. But imaging you know q, which contradicts A. In that case, A is false, and I do not know A. If you told me q (and I believed you), then I might say something like "oh, I thought I knew A, but I really didn't." Now suppose a third party... let's say your mom, knows p, which contradicts q. Now it looks like I was right before, and I really did know A, and that now I'm mistaken. There could always be some additional fact that would reveal the truth or falsity of A, so we can never say that we've "gotten to the bottom of it." So saying that A is "true" doesn't really add anything to my claim of knowledge - really what I'm saying is that "as far as I know, A is justified." Which seems fine...

Mm.. I'm having trouble figuring this out. It seems like we could know lots of things, the problem is knowing that we know it. When it comes to belief, the best we can do is justify. Whether those justified beliefs count as knowledge relies on facts about the world we don't have access to in virtue of the fact of fallibilism.

Uh... hm. Well fuck. I don't know what else to say about it other than that I'm comfortable thinking that I can't know whether my beliefs are true whether they're justified or not, but that I believe (for reasons I have not articulated here) that I should attempt to hold only justified beliefs. Justification seems crucially important here, but truth, while ideal, seems inaccessible. And... so what? That seems fine. IDK, anyone else have anything to add to that?

[thenamelessdragon]

Here is an idea. "There are many people who have helped fact check and critique this book, without their help this work would never have been published. The author of this book has researched the content of this book extensively and has only included material he believes to be relevant and factual. The author however acknowledges there may be errors in this work and claims full responsibility for anything false or dubious in this work." That should about do it. It covers that the author has researched the heck out of it but human error can sometimes prevail. I also made that formal. Anyone thinking of using that as a preface has to credit me. Here's the wording: "Preface written and composed by DarkLady to whom I give credit and appreciation to".

[TheAnat]

I don't see why it's hard to reconcile these two things. There are things which I believe to be almost certainly true. Let's say their probability is above I know that I'm not 100% certain they are true, so there is no logical paradox. However, I also know that the probability of them being false is low enough for me to just ignore it. Therefore, I'll act as if they were true, and use simple logic instead of probability. To put it differently, I don't truly "know" anything with 100% certainty, but there are things which I'm so sure of that I'll just simplify things and say I know they are true.
There you have it, the two points of view are reconciled.

[tobiashenriksen]

As I see it there is no paradox in the preface - only, well, a badly written preface.

And lack of ability to express oneself precisely hardly constitutes a paradox.

What the author seems to mean is that "a) to the best of my knowledge all statements in my book are true", however, b)statistically I am bound to be wrong in some of my statements."