Can you "know" something that isn't true?

It sounds funny. But when people thought the earth was flat (a long time ago) did they KNOW it was flat. That's just one hypothetical example. Is this possible?

 

You tell me what is meant by the word 'know' and I will tell you if it is possible.

 

'People' never thought the Earth was flat.
This is usually a sort of 'Urban Legend' given to new University students to soften them up for the new ideas they are going to be brainwashed with.

Now, Im sure there were people who did think this somewhere but generally speaking, from what we dig up, 'Peoples' throughout history of the planet have pretty much well understood the Earth was round.
The Mayans, Incas etc knew this full well.
Greeks were well aware.
Jews knew this.
Romans had it down to damm near the very exact circumferance.
Anyways..
The question must now be: When MistyMountain thought that ancient peoples thought the Earth was flat... did Misty KNOW they they thought that?

 

/\ HAHAHAHA


anyways, we can "know" almost nothing

 

You beat me to it.

The whole "they used to believe the world was flat" line is a mostly just an invention by elementary school history teachers to make Columbus seem more important than he was.

 

That's not true. There's still people out there who think the earth is flat. Tribal people who don't have very developed sciences or philosophies would have no way to know the earth is round. Yes, the Romans, Greeks, and others probably did know it was round (though it's hard to say if the common people knew it). But stone age people probably didn't.

Still, no one answered his question. Assuming they thought the earth was flat, and that was the truth to them, how could they *know* an untruth?

I'd say that they knew it based on their experiences in the world. The idea that the world is flat did not contradict with the rest of their knowledge, thus their worldview was a cohesive, consistent one.

 

Totally agree

Knowledge is an evolving process, people simply work to make sense of the world around them.

Ultimatly, does it actually matter whether they knew these things or not?
Or even if we we know is truth or not?

 

Whether anyone actually believed if the world was flat or not is beside the point. It's still a very valid question to wonder if we can know things that aren't true. One poster was quite right in saying that the answer largely depends on what it means to "know" something in the first place. But there is another problematic word in the question. The answer you get will no doubt largely depend on what it means for something to be "true," as well. To be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is. Plato would answer "No," since he defined knowledge as "true, justified belief." But this definition never seemed satisfactory to me. I always thought Plato was putting the cart before the horse by defining "knowledge" before defining "truth." And a philosopher named Gettier wrote a very good against Plato's definition in the 70's, I think.

A word of caution when defining "truth." Well, they're not my words; they were actually written by Frege:

"Is a picture, then, as a mere visible and tangible thing, really true...? Obviously one would not call a picture true unless there were an intention behind it. A picture must represent something. Furthermore, an idea is not called true in itself but only with respect to an intention that it correspond to something. It might be supposed from this that truth consists in the correspondence of a picture with what it depicts. Correspondence is a relation. This is contradicted, however, by the use of the word 'true,' which is not a relation-word and contains no reference to anything else to which something must correspond. If I do not know that a picture is meant to represent Cologne Cathedral then I do not know with what to compare the picture and decide on its truth. A correspondence, moreover, can only be perfect if the corresponding things coincide and are, therefore, not distinct things at all. It is said to be possible to establish the authenticity of a banknote by comparing it stereoscopically with an authentic one. But it would be ridiculous to true to compare a gold piece with a twenty-mark note stereoscopically."

- Frege, "The Thought"

 

Here's a thought, still using the flat earth example. If you look around yourself, you see the world stretching away in every direction in what appears to be a flat plane. To the individual, the world is flat, down is always down. Then, in a different prespective, the earth is round. Does this mean that the perception of the earth as a flat plane is false? No, it just means that it is only true in limited circumstances. Perhaps the same is true as far as our ideas about the earth being a sphere; if string theory is correct, there are many more (up to 11) dimensions, rather than just 3. But, the earth is still a sphere.

Another way to look at it is the way classical physics was absorbed by quantum physics/relativity. We still use Newton's formulas because they work (very well, too), but we also know they aren't the whole picture, and that at very large or very small scales (astronomical scales or subatomic scales, respectively), they aren't good enough anymore

I think the answer to how one can KNOW an untruth is this: it all depends on your perspective.

 

Can you "know" something that isn't true?

Everything we know, to be either true or false, positive or negative, we believe to be true. Anything we believe, whether right or wrong, we believe to be true. Otherwise why believe in it?

We can only know that what we believed previously was false in light of new knowledge. If we're honest with ourselves we can intuit that maybe it isn't rigt, or true. But then we'd have to live with this uneasiness of maybe being wrong, of believing wrongly. Which is why the common man usually didn't contemplate such things, they were left up to philosophers, scientists and religious folk (like Ptolemy, a scientist, who thought of the Earth as being the centre of the Universe). Common folk are probably more pragmatic.

We look back and ask ourselves, "How could they not have known?"

That's probably what people in the future will think of our generation.

 

Why does everyone keep saying the Earth 'appears to be flat'.
Now I might be at a huge advantage in that I happen to live on Prairieland but the Earth most definatley 'appears' to be a sphere and this is very very much true at night under the 'bowl' of the starlit sky.
Further to that the stars move in a way that would either 'appear' around the earth.. or the Earth spinning around 'in' them.
Either way - I can't believe any number of human throughout history did not find this pretty obvious.
I do know that one particular theory in Europe proposed the eye doesnt have enough 'power' to reach that far (they thought of vision more as a 'flashlight' sense projecting out) and that is why the horizon eventually drops off.
But looking at that theory you quickly realise its part of a debate on eyesight and its more a 'propositional' argument than something people actually believed explained the sphere of the Earth.

Anyways.. carry on

 

They thought the heavens was a dome over the flat earth. And they had their own reasonings about the stars, they thought they were gods that rode the bowl of the heavens.

 

I would say that you cannot know something that isn't true. I cannot know that the world is flat since it isn't really flat. But at anyrate, as one poster said, it depends larger on what one believe constitutes knowledge. One may include opinion in the category of knowledge, for example.

 

all you can know is that you know nothing

 

...which would mean you know something: you know that you know nothing. Which makes the statement self-defeating.

 

bingo.

when i consider 'know', i think, 'know for fact, know the truth'.

people say "i know.." all the time, but what they really mean is, "i believe..".

if people believed that the earth was round and said, "we know", it doesn't mean they really knew. they simply believed that the earth was flat.

if you follow this far enough, i think you'd reach bill's statement - knowledge that some 'you' exists, and that's all.

in any case, my definition of knowledge is that knowledge is of truth, and truth is truth no matter what people believe. some people say that if you believe it to be true, then it somehow becomes knowledge. to answer your question, you need a firm definition of what 'to know' means.


love,

 

Sorry.. who was that?