posted by
ptc24 at 10:19am on 20/04/2012
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Hypothetical:
In Town X, a burglary is reported to the police. They investigate, and their investigation leads to Bob, who has previous convictions for that sort of thing. They find the stolen goods at Bob's house, Bob is questioned, he confesses, it goes to trial, Bob pleads guilty, the jury is convinced by the evidence, and Bob is sentenced accordingly.
In fact, Bob had not committed the burglary. In fact, he had a provable alibi - he was out committing another burglary (of equivalent severity) elsewhere in town at the time. The original burglary was done by a friend of his, and he was just storing the goods at his house. Given that demonstrating his alibi wouldn't have saved him any prison time, and would have involved fingering his accomplices (which would have damaged his standing in the criminal underworld), he felt that the simplest thing to do was to take the rap for the original burglary.
This is all to illustrate a philosophical point about the word "know" (and "knowledge" etc). A poll:
(ETA Note that the previous convictions don't count when I'm asking whether the legal system knew Bob had committed burglary... I meant to ask "...committed burglary on that day" or something similar. This ETA is before anyone but me has answered this, so all the results reflect this ETA)
In Town X, a burglary is reported to the police. They investigate, and their investigation leads to Bob, who has previous convictions for that sort of thing. They find the stolen goods at Bob's house, Bob is questioned, he confesses, it goes to trial, Bob pleads guilty, the jury is convinced by the evidence, and Bob is sentenced accordingly.
In fact, Bob had not committed the burglary. In fact, he had a provable alibi - he was out committing another burglary (of equivalent severity) elsewhere in town at the time. The original burglary was done by a friend of his, and he was just storing the goods at his house. Given that demonstrating his alibi wouldn't have saved him any prison time, and would have involved fingering his accomplices (which would have damaged his standing in the criminal underworld), he felt that the simplest thing to do was to take the rap for the original burglary.
This is all to illustrate a philosophical point about the word "know" (and "knowledge" etc). A poll:
(ETA Note that the previous convictions don't count when I'm asking whether the legal system knew Bob had committed burglary... I meant to ask "...committed burglary on that day" or something similar. This ETA is before anyone but me has answered this, so all the results reflect this ETA)
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9
Did the legal system know that Bob had committed burglary?
Was the outcome just?
View Answers
Yes - Bob committed a burglary and served a sentence for burglary, your point?
4 (57.1%)
No - Bob was punished for a crime he did not commit.
2 (28.6%)
I don't believe in punishing people for burglary anyway, so No
1 (14.3%)
Furthermore
View Answers
This is a completely ridiculous hypothetical and the legal system wouldn't have acted that way
0 (0.0%)
This is reasonably realistic, at least in terms of how the legal system acted
2 (25.0%)
Ummmm...
6 (75.0%)
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I want to say that the outcome was not just, but not for the reason written beside the 'No' radio button. It is unjust because Bob's friend who did commit this burglary has not gone down for it, and presumably will not do so in future because the police think the crime is solved. That seems to me a much more convincing argument for injustice than hairsplitting about whether it's just for Bob to serve the right length of sentence despite the wrong things being said about it in court.
(Meanwhile, the poor police are off on a wild-goose chase for the perpetrator of the burglary that Bob really committed, since the actual culprit now has what appears to be an ironclad alibi!)
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I think my answer is still no, though. Suppose his alibi had been that he'd been out elsewhere committing murder. He might still have confessed to the burglary (on the basis that it carried a lighter sentence and would act as an alibi should he come under suspicion for the murder), and then it would clearly not be true that the legal system knew he had committed burglary on that day (because he didn't, and lied and said he did). No evidence relating to where Bob really was is involved in the legal system's justification for believing he committed burglary, so I think it's reasonable to say that the question of whether its belief constitutes knowledge ought not to depend on where he really was either.
This is one of those situations in which a belief is both justified (in that the legal system has good reason for thinking it), and true, but still not knowledge because the justification doesn't connect up with the truth – the justification is in error, but the erroneously derived fact turns out to be true anyway for a different reason. Like this incident.
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It's not quite the same, but I did once try to figure out what happened if you were charged with two related crimes, and they could prove you were guilty of one or the other but not both. And there was an obscure case where someone was in fact found guilty of the lesser of them. But I don't know if there's an official answer to what's supposed to happen.
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Sufficient evidence to prove alibi would very likely be sufficient to convict him.
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I'm not sure, but I think that if you admit to a different crime during a trial you are likely to be rearrested because of what you have said. But I can't remember whether I only think this through watching shows like Law and Order UK :)
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(Is the underlying question about "knowledge" that isn't actually true and may be falsified, despite following best practice to be sure of that knowledge?)
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There was an incident in an RPG I was once playing. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, there are psykers - people with psi powers. We were playing a group working for the inquisition. As far as we were concerned, psykers came in two types; sanctioned and unsanctioned. Sanctioned psykers were OK, we had one in our party. Unsanctioned psykers... there's a procedure for sanctioning them, but for those without the authority to do so, it's kill on sight.
In our party, we had the Assassin, the Scum (basically a con-man character) and the Sanctioned Psyker. Previously there had been incidents that caused the Assassin to hate the Scum. Also the Scum got corrupted by Chaos, and mutated, and developed psyker abilities, which he kept secret. Then there was a fight with some space dwarves. The Sanctioned Psyker used an ability, and had a freak psychic accident that caused him to swap minds (well, bodies - the bodies stayed in place and the minds switched) with the Scum. The Sanctioned Psyker, in the Scum's body, then proceeded to use a highly visible psi power for self-protection. The Assassin saw this, shouted "Unsanctioned Psyker!" and proceeded to try to gun the Scum down. And I thought: I've read web pages on philosophy that deal with this sort of thing.
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The reason I chose 'no' to the question about it being just is that Bob had a strategy, admitting to the crime he didn't commit in part to maintain his standing in the criminal underworld. Also, he deliberately prevented his friend from being arrested for a crime he committed (which might have been the result of further investigation if he had not confessed, even if he had not said 'My friend did it'), which is in itself a crime that he hasn't been put on trial for.
But as you can see, all my quibbles are about justness, not about knowledge, so I should stop there :)
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However, to me, the mistake seems to be assuming that because we have a word "know", that it maps cleanly to a relevant philosophical concept (that fulfils all the expectations of "something you can reason with", "something you have good reason to think true", etc, etc). It seems more likely that there is (at best) a number of overlapping concepts that "know" describes well when they coincide, but people would disagree about when they don't.
So I realise this is one of the edge cases, but I'm not sure the answer is "yes" or "no"... :)
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(Obviously Spanish is not the only language in which this is the case, it's just the one that comes most easily to my mind because I've spent time studying it.)
P.S. This should probably spark a discussion of whether you can ever really know a person :)
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I'm definitely not sure that I know any language where 'knowing something that really has happened because you have been convinced by evidence that it has happened' is distinguished from 'thinking you know that something has happened because you have been convinced by evidence that it has happened when in fact it hasn't happened but something else equivalent has, with that result that you sort of know something that has happened for which you didn't have any direct evidence, and where you will never realise that this isn't knowledge type A' :)
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:)
Yeah, not really expect that :) The closest I can think of is when people use varying emphases and modifiers, like "I know it, I just KNOW it" means "I have a strong feeling but no evidence" or "You can't KNOW that" means "it's pretty certain that it is, but it's always possible you've misinterpreted it"
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[1] A case in point re pragmatics: 'relatively new concept' means something a bit different to a classicist like me from what it might mean to e.g. a modern linguist ;)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua_languages#Evidentiality
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There you go, that was more fun for a discussion of knowledge as a concept :)
(Scare quotes for 'tense' because it's a complex concept!)
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Are there any examples of this phenomenon which don't have that form?
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(Also, the above reasoning only yields the belief that the Scum's mind is an unsanctioned psyker; that must be combined with point (c) a second time to reach the conclusion that it's legitimate to gun down the Scum's body right now. That latter conclusion is certainly not knowledge, since it's not even true. Only the intermediate conclusion about the Scum's mind constitutes the sort of quasi-knowledge we're discussing here.)
I think I'd agree that it's not clear that this fits into my suggested unifying pattern.
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