GeorgeW

I think truth is a fundamentally concept and it doesn't make sense to try to define truth in terms of more basic concepts. You can give examples illustrating the difference between truth and belief (we can have different beliefs, our beliefs can be wrong, but there's just one truth) but it's futile to attempt a definition. As far as I'm aware, the way we acquire confidence in our beliefs is, we update our priors within the concept of a model using Bayes' Theorem. But where our fundamental models and priors come from I don;t know, as far as I can tell we're born with them, they;re a consequence of our DNA. I don't at all get your train of thought by which a lack of absolute certainty absolves us from ethics. I sometimes dream and don't realize I am dreaming, so it's a t least conceivable that I am dreaming now. But I don't see how this possibility that I might be dreaming would absolve me of moral responsibility in the event that I am not.

I think you're confusing truth and knowledge. I think "Justified True Belief" is supposed to be knowledge, not truth. I don't think JTB is any good as a definition of knowledge. It seems to founder on the "justified" part. That seems to me to imply that we "know" something is true if 1) the strength of the evidence for it passes some threshold and 2) it happens to be the case that it is true. That is, we could "know" a statement is true, and falsely believe some other statement for which we have equally string evidence. Unless "justified" is meant to imply that the statement could't possibly be other than true, in which case I don't see why we need "true" as part of the definition. I think "knowledge" is the limit that confidence in a belief approaches. That is, we never actually "know" anything with absolute certainty, but with sufficiently strong evidence we can dismiss the possibility that we may be wrong as negligible.

There was an interesting theory I read in the alt.cult-movies newsgroup that the Marla Singer character was also supposed to be a projection of the narrator. That's why nobody else is upset or surprised to see her at a testicular cancer survivors group: she's not really there. It was also supposed to explain the narrator had a vibrating dildo in his suitcase: it's "her" dildo.

So hey, did the on air debate ever happen? I had some of the same objections to the book as PPP and I am interested to know how Stefan answers them.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, I mean "good" and "bad" as in good and bad for us, not in any absolute sense, e.g. if something tastes awful it's probably because it has poison in it. We may be excessively sensitive to some toxins, so some things that taste awful to us (especially as kids) may not have enough toxins to do us any harm, but it likely is a toxin that is responsible for the bad taste. I'm not really sure how free will got into it. I think the fact that we believe in free will is evidence (if any were needed) that it is helpful to believe in free will. I think it's pretty obvious that a fatalistic worldview will help lead to boneheaded decisions.

I think we're all rationalists here in that we want our beliefs to be based on reason and empirical evidence rather than superstition or arbitrary assertion. But it's not always clear how to interpret the evidence, or even what counts as evidence at all. I've been reading a lot of books on how the mind works, and it seems to me clear that we have at least some instinctual beliefs which are the result of evolutionary pressure. For example, people (and primates in general) have an inborn fear of snakes. People who live their whole lives on islands where there are no snakes are afraid of snakes when they first encounter them, and chimpanzees in zoos who have never encountered snakes will freak out if they are exposed to hoses which resemble snakes. Does it seem reasonable that a widespread, seemingly inborn belief that certain things are good, bad, or dangerous is in fact fairly decent evidence (not proof) that those things are in fact good, bad, or dangerous, and that beliefs that such things are good or bad or dangerous are in fact based on empirical data?

BTW, in at least some breeds of cattle the few bulls never get it on with the cows, the cows are all artificially inseminated.