Do You Really Know ANYTHING? ft. Neil deGrasse Tyson

Do You Really Know ANYTHING? ft. Neil deGrasse Tyson –

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Huge thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson and everyone at StarTalk!

It seems easy to know things. The basics of epistemology haven’t changed much since Plato’s time, and we navigate every minute of our lives using a system of justified true belief. If we’re justified in thinking something, that thing is true, and we believe it, then it’s knowledge.

But as Gettier Problems show us, sometimes that justified true belief model just doesn’t work. We can satisfy every condition of JTB and still not know something.

So if that system isn’t reliable, then how can we really know anything at all? It’s a philosophical problem so big that we need Neil deGrasse Tyson to sort it out.

Neil deGrasse Tyson of StarTalk sets the record straight on what knowledge really is. Science, he says, is filled with things we can truly know with confidence. Sometimes they’re things we can count; other times we just hit a limit on how useful knowledge is to humanity.

The way we view knowledge in our collaborative endeavors sets the tone for how we go about life itself — and puts us in the best possible position to know more and progress with math, science, and humanity.

… and we FINALLY find out whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

Thumbnail: @Stafoh

Photo Credit: Knightmare6

Phone idea by great-haired genius Jake Roper

*** SOURCES ***

Edmund Gettier: “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” http://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf

Simon DeDeo’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo

Stephen Hetherington: “Knowledge and the Gettier Problem” https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/knowledge-and-the-gettier-problem/89E09E1B8508E159F3F3F04CE2232665

Borges, Almeida, and Klein: “Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Getting Problem” https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198724551.001.0001/oso-9780198724551

W. V. Quine, “The Ways of the Paradox and Other Essays” https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Paradox-Other-Essays-Enlarged/dp/0674948378

Roger Shattuck, “Forbidden Knowledge” https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Knowledge-Pornography-Roger-Shattuck/dp/0156005514

Brian Gallagher, “This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something” http://nautil.us/blog/-this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something

*** LINKS ***