John N. Warfield writes:
> I propose to you that knowledge is depersonalized belief. Further that
> by depersonalizing belief to get the concept of knowledge, we replace a
> genuine concept--belief--with an artificial concept--knowledge.
>
> I propose to you further that truth is depersonalized conviction.
Bruce Viney writes in reply in LO2624:
> All you are in effect saying is that there are no certainties in life,
> only degress of probability, an idea which is as old as philosophy.
> ...
> Acknowledging that we can only deal in degrees of probability is
> interesting but in the end changes little, particularly at the extremes of
> probability.
I don't think this is *all* John is saying, if only because I parsed his
message rather differently. I read it as starting from, not ending with,
the uncertaintly of knowledge, and moving on to the practical and ethical
implications of that uncertainty.
Here's how I would paraphrase John's message:
What I believe is both uncertain (say in Bruce's sense of degree of
probability) and incomplete (particularly in the sense of being
interpreted from my particular worldview). When I try to "transfer" my
beliefs directly to someone else, they take both those limitations into
account, and use what they know of me - for example, my biases and
blindnesses, when I'm energetic or lazy in inquiry, how freely I project
conviction - to help them decide how much salt to take my claims with.
In this context, depersonalizing the belief means removing the explicit
coupling with me as the believer in question. For people who know me (or
who trust people who know me), this removes an important basis for their
practical judgement, particularly in situations where time for judgement
is limited.
I have always been troubled by discussions of the locus of knowledge: Is
knowledge intrinsically in people, or to some extent can it be extracted
and stored on disks, and then "read back" into someone else? John's
distinctions strike me as a useful cleaver, to divide the human-intrinsic
from the externalizable, and then to assess the value and importance of
each.
P-)
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