Unjustified true belief

[simont]

I looked up at the beautifully clear night sky yesterday, and noticed that the stars actually looked to me as if they were different distances away.

Now I know perfectly well that human binocular vision can't possibly resolve distances of that magnitude. It therefore struck me as odd that I was perceiving something which I knew to be both an optical illusion, and true!

Comments

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

Only true up to a point... the ones you thought looked further away might have been the nearer ones :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Although presumably the stars which looked further away were not typically the ones which were. (I assume, though I don't know.)

I saw my old post about Signs this morning, and nearly linked you to it, but i saw you'd commented on it at the time :)

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Famous example: consider someone who hasn't noticed the Blair -> Brown transition. S/he believes that the prime minister's surname begins with B, and is correct, and even has something like a justification ("I remember seeing the announcement of the prime minister's election, and the name began with B, and I haven't seen any change of power since then").

(The original form of this objection, or at least the earliest one I've seen, involves a different pair of prime ministers whose names begin with B. Balfour and (Campbell-)Bannerman, perhaps.)

[(Anonymous)]

Though of course that's precisely an example of something else.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Well, kinda, but actually I think it's very similar. In each case, you have something that looks like a justification and has the right sort of general form to be one, but isn't really. The only difference is that Simon noticed and Bannermanman didn't.

[writinghawk.livejournal.com]

Er oops, that was me.

[gerald_duck]

However, history shows that you probably wouldn't have perceived the optical illusion had you not known it to be true: the ancients tended to perceive the stars as a different-sized glowing dots on a big velvety sphere of some kind.