INSTRUCTIONS:

1. All knowledge (and indeed reality itself) is relative. I define knowledge as both my spoken word and yours. I need only speak it, and thus it is. Just like in Genesis! Subsequent statements over-ride prior ones of course.

2. Faith is magical (supernatural). It's different from belief. When I don't have evidence or good reasons to believe what I want, I can have faith, which is even better!

3. Massively parallel neurons can only make Bayesian approximations based on degraded electrochemical signals. Because of these and other perceptual inaccuracies, symmetries with properties of external matter and energy cannot be calibrated empirically.

4. Although etymologically the word “knowledge” is KNOWN to have been vernacular from 1250–1300 (ME knouleche), as colloquially used, it implies a gross estimation of probability based on acceptable risk of error. It is correct then to say that most people know many things, and that often what they know is incorrect.

5.
I don’t need your fancy kind of knowledge. Common sense will help me know to a level of certainty ‘good enough’ to get through mundane activities like planning a dinner (because I believe the stove or oven will work correctly when I turn it on). When planning major life decisions (whether to exploit the helpless and get rich, or to devote myself in service to others), I simply use the motto ‘go with the flow’ (like a cork on the waves). Intuition, cultural tradition, family values, and my own mood are good enough knowledge for me.

6. I fortunately have a perfect and infallible authority I rely upon, humbly admitting my own fallibility. I KNOW that this authority (holy book, pope, science, etc.) is infallible. I KNOW I have picked the correct one. I KNOW that its errors, and any conflicts with other “authorities” or any need for reinterpretation over time do not detract from it’s reliability.

7. A first principle is to believe that something exists. Next, that truth exists. And lastly, that however accidentally, and possibly even unacknowledged by the beholder, that such a truth could be held (though not fully plumbed) by a human. If you exist, and if you believe you exist, then you know something true, even if you can’t explain it, can’t defend it, and really aren’t even that sure you are correct. The conditions that you believe it, and that it is also true, satisfies the definition of real knowledge. Whether you are insane or on drugs is irrelevant.

8. The shaman who correctly states you have cancer, doesn’t know it anymore than to say that the epistemic luck of the ‘accidental’ good deed earns you additional jewels in your moral crown. JTB implies justification is necessary for knowing THAT (propositional knowledge, vice knowing how, or knowing people/places). This is why it’s morally OK to eat UNKNOWING creatures who can’t reason.

9. Contextualists can ONLY merely explain why we think skepticism (such as, whether you are a brain in a vat, but live in “The Matrix”) is both egg-headed stupidity and logically sound. Even using reliable cognitive processes (like sense perception, or logic) what we believe to be our world could be merely what we were born into, as a time “period” chosen by the architect. Fallibilist knowledge is basically just belief without necessity and without elimination of alternatives. Yet we still book airplane flights, we still function OK, and don’t need false claims of certainty to self-actualize.

10. Here is what I believe: There may be truth, but ultimately, no perfect knowledge of it. When you hold a rock (or possess truth), if you are unaware of what it is, you cannot KNOW what it is. Believing that it is gold because someone told you may only add confidence. Confidence may only be asymptotic to certainty, as you conduct chemical analysis yourself. As greater REASONS (cognitive and empirical evidence) are held for your belief, so does your awareness of whether your belief is true. Where do you stand?