Truth, strike two

[ciphergoth]

Thanks for some interesting and surprising responses to the JFK question. At the risk of creating more heat than light, let me try another example, one that I think might be a little less comfortable to be neutral about.

It seems that many people believe that on the morning of September 11, 2001, four thousand or more Israelis who were working at the World Trade Center did not show up for work.

Are those people wrong?

(Update: amended as per ajva's caveat)

Comments

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Irrelevant for what purpose? Matters for what purpose?

If you're looking for a good, reliable system for forming beliefs that will help you in your life, I'd say that true beliefs *are* important, but not the be-all and end-all.

Beliefs which are justified - which here means that they stem from some reliable system of forming them (which may or may not include complex logical reasoning, depending on the nature of the belief) - are also important.

Beliefs which randomly hit on truth (e.g. your horoscope turns out to be accurate this month) are, I suppose, more useful than false beliefs - but they do not make a good cornerstone of a reliable belief-forming system.