I want to kick around an idea or two about knowledge and facts. a starting point is:

1. I am now fully developed as a human who functions and knows a lot of facts and has a lot of abilities to act on my surroundings.

That is, as I awaken to start to think about epistemology I have some history. I am developed. I know things. It occurs to me that some thing must account for that.

The things I know I consider a set of knowledge bits or k-bits. I call this mess or set R1. Things I personally know. It is nearly impossible to find a kbit or characterize one. w do not communicate or even think in terms of the bits.

One of the things that do exist in my environ is other humans. I presumably am communicating with them right now (we'll see).

In order to think a fact as a prelude to communicating it I have to do some mental work. This work result in a fact or concept that we can consider a member of a set C. For instance Paris is in France. This is a fact, Ca. This fact isn't like a real thing. It isn't easily demarcated. Spend a little time and try to think what such a fact could be in actuality.

I do some mental process to assemble it and put it to words. I utter it and it is understood by another. If you think what may be going on here in terms of molecular structure you can see that over the 60 seconds to do this process between two human beings we have an amazing amount of goings on.

But what is the nature of this fact, Ca, in my brain? Or even in my mental space? How can that thing transform into or hook up with some isomer in another persons brain in such a manner for there to be a communication?

Ca is obviously some transform on a set of k-bits. Those little things that we can barely access or talk about. Paris and France are masses of k-bits assembled into ideas of places on a map pasted to a planet. 'in' is a concept involving space and is sort of misused when considering that a city can hardly be 'in' a country in any precise way. Or even exist as a demarcation for that matter.

I like to think of k-bit's as assemblies of neuronal strength relationships myself. At the bottom of any analysis this is what they probably are. But even that is impossible to define with any rigor at all.

So. R1 is that knowledge which each individual has. R2 is that strange isomorphic way in which we share knowledge.


<click>

51 minutes to wibble. Longer than I thought.
Explain what the assumption is. Use yourself as an example.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:I want to kick around an idea or two about knowledge and facts. a starting point is:

1. I am now fully developed as a human who functions and knows a lot of facts and has a lot of abilities to act on my surroundings.

Ontological assumption alert. Please evacuate the forum. This thread is about to explode.

You aren't fully developed and you know nothing? You have no abilities? I may be persuaded.

jamest wrote:
What I'm saying is that your knowledge is intertwined with English knowledge, since anything that you know is in English. Do you know any facts that can be thought of or expressed without a language in which to frame them? So, your knowledge is not distinct from knowledge which you share [in English]. That is, there is no distinction between R1 and R2, therefore there is no R2.

I think your line of reasoning would leave no R1. I am saying R2 is the shared language version and I think you are claiming that is all we have because it's all we can communicate?

You will have trouble supporting that my knowledge of how to motivate bipedally is in English.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
You will have trouble supporting that my knowledge of how to motivate bipedally is in English.

But you don't know how to walk, you just do it. Your will suffices to move you from A to B - but you have no idea how it all happens. Is your will to be categorised as knowledge?

Yes. It is knowledge of some sort. So is being able to turn intuitions and concepts and percepts into language. By 'you have no idea how you do it' you are referring to Kn, bits of K, that you do not know how to turn into Cn.

Tell me all the bits of knowledge that go into your idea of Paris being in France. Exhaustively.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:51 minutes to wibble. Longer than I thought.
Explain what the assumption is. Use yourself as an example.

jamest wrote:
Ontological assumption alert. Please evacuate the forum. This thread is about to explode.

You aren't fully developed and you know nothing? You have no abilities? I may be persuaded.

My thoughts regards perceiving myself as human, have developed. Yet, I am savvy enough to know [in a philosophy forum] that I shouldn't be saying that I AM a human on the basis of what I perceive.

You can say that you are human or not depending on what it is you want to convey. I will wager that you have referred to yourself as an I in the very recent past (look above!). I bet you have claimed to be human too.

I agree with you that 'I' and 'me' are C constructs and do not actually exist in some discrete fashion. They are functional concepts constructed out of bits of K.

(you savvy ole soul!)

So you are saying that if I am not conscious at the moment of the capital of France then I do not know what it is? You are limiting knowledge to only what is conscious and this is not going to be easy for you to support.

But. You are doing exactly what I am driving at. You are talking about Cn. We process many bits of subconscious, even intangible, knowledge into facts that are ready to report with language. This is why I have Kn and Cn as separate but related elements.

Now you will note that they say a newborn does not KNOW how to walk and then learns it. That's why I call that stuff knowledge. Also note that you do not unlearn or unknow how to walk when you sit down and get distracted.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:
My thoughts regards perceiving myself as human, have developed. Yet, I am savvy enough to know [in a philosophy forum] that I shouldn't be saying that I AM a human on the basis of what I perceive.

You can say that you are human or not depending on what it is you want to convey. I will wager that you have referred to yourself as an I in the very recent past (look above!).

Yes, 'I' exist. My nature is in doubt though.

I bet you have claimed to be human too.

Of course, out of habit. However, when trying to do philosophy involving metaphysics/ontology, it is important to break this habit. Otherwise, pea soup.

Yes. I am not talking about your nature. I'll leave the wibble-woo to guys like you.

Anyone of you is is sober will note that jamest did a good job of highlighting the confusion that arises about knowledge and why I have the K and C sets.

jamest wrote:I wanted to say a bit more about this:
...

... The conscious aspect of whatever it is that I am does not know how to do this. I, for example, have no idea how I walk. All I know is that my will suffices to make my body walk and that accidents will happen unless I have a particular posture. Similarly, I 'will' my posture thus, but have no idea how it happens.

The point is that knowledge is associated with consciousness or awareness of something... and having a will that is implemeted does not suffice to say that 'you' know something. If it does, then there are two kinds of knowledge:

R1 = my knowledge, of which I am consciously aware.
R2 = my knowledge, of which I am not consciously aware.

That's not how I am defining R1 and R2. R1 is private K and R2 is common knowledge like science and culture etc.

That is a little bit different then my original definition and I hope easier to figure.

Now with walking I can carefully watch, introspect, and search for how it is that I walk and then turn it into a set of concepts that I can communicate.

Grammar for instance is very easy to use, hence we know it, but explaining it is a science in itself. Most things are like this. The concept of 'I' is like this. It's a mess of knowledge and a feeling of continuity had by waking up with a context each morning. It isn't obvious that the actual fact of 'I' changes continuously into something other.