swine flu

Hi everyone,

You have no doubt been following the news about the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico and beyond. Click on the title above to connect to an interesting piece written about the limits of our knowledge of what is going to happen.

Those of you who have been thinking about knowledge as justified true belief should try to make the connection here. If Simon Jenkins (see article for details) claims that nothing serious is going to happen and that the disease will die out and disappear, and then indeed nothing serious happens and it does die out and disappear, does this mean that Simon Jenkins knew this was going to happen? It would then seem, with hindsight, that he had a true belief, but can we say that he was justified in making the claim at the time that he made it? What would count as an acceptable justification for such a belief NOW (not after what happens happens!)? Would it make sense to say that he was "right"? The author of this piece is saying that, as things stand, there can be no acceptable justification for this claim, and that we cannot be "right" about it. This seems to suggest that being right about something entails having good grounds for claiming it in the first place.

This matters because we are presently bombarded with claims in the media and from other people about this issue, and we need to be able to evaluate what they are saying. What do you think about all of this?

This is a second really good current example of the problems of knowing the future - the other one that comes immediately to mind is the economic recession. These sorts of examples illustrate what we sometimes call "knowledge at work in the world", and I hope that they show how TOK is really important to real-life situations.