contractualist OP t1_iw57qqk wrote on November 13, 2022 at 1:28 AM

Reply to comment by Ok_Meat_8322 in The "Reasonable Certainty" Standard for Belief (On the problem of other minds, our duties to future people, and believing in the unknown) by contractualist

>if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified, period. This isn't interesting or controversial.

Yet this goes at the problem of induction and skepticism in general, which argues that we should be mindful of our lack of certainty outside of a priori knowledge. It's also the view of many philosophers that we can never know things as their appearance, but who nevertheless fall back on only practicality as their reason for acting like everyone else.

The article argues that this level of skepticism is unreasonable and shouldn't even be kept in mind.

Although the main purpose of the piece is to show that the problem of other minds isn't a morality loophole, that we have certain duties to people in the future (rather than hypothetical people), and as an aside, a justification for athiesm.

Ok_Meat_8322 t1_iw8vrtz wrote on November 13, 2022 at 9:07 PM

>Yet this goes at the problem of induction and skepticism in general, which argues that we should be mindful of our lack of certainty outside of a priori knowledge.

I don't really see how; the proposition in question ("if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified") is tautological, or at most definitional- it merely sets out what we mean by "justification"- and so doesn't contradict any particular view or proposition.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind, if you'd like to clarify.

contractualist OP t1_iw97v88 wrote on November 13, 2022 at 10:27 PM

Philosophical skeptics may argue that there are no inductive beliefs (knowledge outside deductions or our direct sensations) that can be justified. For example, we don't know that we aren't brains in vats, so we can't say we are justified in believing that we are not.

I argue that this level of skepticism is unwarranted if we have reasonable certainty.

In philosophy, sound conclusions require 100% certainty (pretty much impossible for inductive knowledge). I argue that having something like 95% certainty and if its impossible to get any higher, is justification enough for a belief.

Ok_Meat_8322 t1_iwdkwp4 wrote on November 14, 2022 at 9:15 PM

>Philosophical skeptics may argue that there are no inductive beliefs (knowledge outside deductions or our direct sensations) that can be justified. For example, we don't know that we aren't brains in vats, so we can't say we are justified in believing that we are not.
>
>I argue that this level of skepticism is unwarranted if we have reasonable certainty.

Right but once again, the point of contention isn't so much whether belief is justified provided one has reasonable certainty, its what constitutes reasonable certainty in the first place (especially since "reasonable" or "rational" are often synonymous with "epistemically justified/warranted" in epistemology)- the skeptic agrees that a belief is justified if one is reasonably certain, but claims that inductive or empirical/factual beliefs can never be reasonably certain (since, for instance, we could just be brains in vats or in an ancestor simulation or whatever).

And just as an aside, epistemology seems to have mostly moved on from its obsession with answering the radical skeptic; this was the preoccupation of English-speaking philosophers in the early 20th century- so, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc- who were responding the idealists and neo-Hegelians who had immediately preceded them. But I think most people consider the radical skeptic to have been well answered, by arguments like Witt's in On Certainty for instance, and so have tended to move on to other problems.

That's not to say there's any harm in rehashing this issue, but it does seem to me that the problem you're attempting to solve has already been adequately dispensed with.