Help with a philosophy question: How can we know something that has not yet been proven true?

Question

I dont need an answer but maybe a philosopher or someone who has some quotes i could use for a paper.
Thanks for any input.

It can involve religion.

Answer 1

One might just as easily approach this question from the other side. How can you know something that IS proven true? Or you can go step step further than that - how can you prove anything true?

A lot of the things that people THINK are proven true are nothing of the kind. We can perform experiments which support one idea or another, but all this really proves indisputably is that our experiments turned out one way (and sometimes not even that). If you see the sun rise every day of your life, does that prove it's going to rise tomorrow? Not even vaguely.

And that is the point. Absolute proof lives only in the world of ideas, in mathematics and logic. It does not and can not apply to the actual real world we live in. The real world is messy. Rules are hard to find and even when we do find them they don't always work.

So that means that in the real world, we have to form ideas and theories based on limited evidence. We have to make guesses and fill in the gaps. Study of the human brain reveals that this, above all things, is its specialty.

In summary, we know things that aren't proven because irrefutable iron-clad proof is all but impossible. The choice, then, is between knowing things which may be wrong or knowing nothing. There you go.

Answer 2

We can imagine, then suspect, then deduce that something is true, but we can't know it's true without proof.

If you're interested in thinking more deeply on this subject, consider the following:

Statement 1. It is impossible to prove a negative hypothesis.

Statement 2. Prove statement 1.

Answer 3

Look up articles by Edmund Gettier, Laurence BonJour, Ernest Sosa, David Kellogg Lewis, and maybe W.V.O. Quine. I think one of them will have something helpful to say

Answer 4

Truth, like existence itself, is not a problem that we solve or a theorem that we prove, rather it is a mystery that in every one of its epiphanies, becomes ever more mysterious and strange. And in the end, the fullest realization of truth that we experience is not that we have grasped it, but that truth has grasped hold of us.

Answer 5

I think my professor was discussing Plato when he said that if something weren't true, a person couldn't know it.

Good luck.

Answer 6

It is immense faith and trust that you need to have to believe in something that has not yet been proven.

Answer 7

you will have to go towards the definition of the words
know
proven
true
as it is all about what these words mean.

Answer 8

So why don't you look up Friedrich Nietzsche or Confucius?