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Knowledge

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Main article: Knowledge

Knowledge is an awareness, familiarity, understanding, or skill. Its various forms all involve a cognitive success through which a person establishes epistemic contact with reality.[1] Knowledge is typically understood as an aspect of individuals, generally as a cognitive mental state that helps them understand, interpret, and interact with the world. While this core sense is of particular interest to epistemologists, the term also has other meanings. Understood on a social level, knowledge is a characteristic of a group of people that share ideas, understanding, or culture in general.[2] The term can also refer to information stored in documents, such as "knowledge housed in the library"[3] or knowledge stored in computers in the form of the knowledge base of an expert system.[4]

Knowledge contrasts with ignorance, which is often simply defined as the absence of knowledge. Knowledge is usually accompanied by ignorance since people rarely have complete knowledge of a field, forcing them to rely on incomplete or uncertain information when making decisions.[5] Even though many forms of ignorance can be mitigated through education and research, there are certain limits to human understanding that are responsible for inevitable ignorance.[6] Some limitations are inherent in the human cognitive faculties themselves, such as the inability to know facts too complex for the human mind to conceive.[7] Others depend on external circumstances when no access to the relevant information exists.[8]

Epistemologists disagree on how much people know, for example, whether fallible beliefs about everyday affairs can amount to knowledge or whether absolute certainty is required. The most stringent position is taken by radical skeptics, who argue that there is no knowledge at all.[9]

Types

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Photo of Bertrand Russell
The distinction between propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance plays a central role in the epistemology of Bertrand Russell.[10]

Epistemologists distinguish between different types of knowledge.[11] Their primary interest is in knowledge of facts, called propositional knowledge.[12] It is a theoretical knowledge that can be expressed in declarative sentences using a that-clause, like "Ravi knows that kangaroos hop". For this reason, it is also called knowledge-that.[13][a] Epistemologists often understand it as a relation between a knower and a known proposition, in the case above between the person Ravi and the proposition "kangaroos hop".[15] It is use-independent since it is not tied to one specific purpose. It is a mental representation that relies on concepts and ideas to depict reality.[16] Because of its theoretical nature, it is often held that only relatively sophisticated creatures, such as humans, possess propositional knowledge.[17]

Propositional knowledge contrasts with non-propositional knowledge in the form of knowledge-how and knowledge by acquaintance.[18] Knowledge-how is a practical ability or skill, like knowing how to read or how to prepare lasagna.[19] It is usually tied to a specific goal and not mastered in the abstract without concrete practice.[20] To know something by acquaintance means to be familiar with it as a result of experiental contact. Examples are knowing the city of Perth, knowing the taste of tsampa, and knowing Marta Vieira da Silva personally.[21]

Another influential distinction is between a posteriori and a priori knowledge.[22] A posteriori knowledge is knowledge of empirical facts based on sensory experience, like seeing that the sun is shining and smelling that a piece of meat has gone bad.[23] Knowledge belonging to the empirical science and knowledge of everyday affairs belongs to a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge of non-empirical facts and does not depend on evidence from sensory experience. It belongs to fields such as mathematics and logic, like knowing that .[24] The contrast between a posteriori and a priori knowledge plays a central role in the debate between empiricists and rationalists on whether all knowledge depends on sensory experience.[25]

Portrait of Immanuel Kant
The analytic–synthetic distinction has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.[26]

A closely related contrast is between analytic and synthetic truths. A sentence is analytically true if its truth depends only on the meaning of the words it uses. For instance, the sentence "all bachelors are unmarried" is analytically true because the word "bachelor" already includes the meaning "unmarried". A sentence is synthetically true if its truth depends on additional facts. For example, the sentence "snow is white" is synthetically true because its truth depends on the color of snow in addition to the meanings of the words snow and white. A priori knowledge is primarily associated with analytic sentences while a posteriori knowledge is primarily associated with synthetic sentences. However, it is controversial whether this is true for all cases. Some philosophers, such as Willard Van Orman Quine, reject the distinction, saying that there are no analytic truths.[27]

Analysis

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Main article: Definitions of knowledge

The analysis of knowledge is the attempt to identify the essential components or conditions of all and only propositional knowledge states. According to the so-called traditional analysis,[b] knowledge has three components: it is a belief that is justified and true.[29] In the second half of the 20th century, this view was put into doubt by a series of thought experiments that aimed to show that some justified true beliefs do not amount to knowledge.[30] In one of them, a person is unaware of all the fake barns in their area. By a coincidence, they stop in front of the only real barn and form a justified true belief that it is a real barn.[31] Many epistemologists agree that this is not knowledge because the justification is not directly relevant to the truth.[32] More specifically, this and similar counterexamples involve some form of epistemic luck, that is, a cognitive success that results from fortuitous circumstances rather than competence.[33]

Diagram of components of knowledge
The so-called traditional analysis says that knowledge is justified true belief. Edmund Gettier tried to show that some justified true belief do not amount to knowledge.

Following these thought experiments, philosophers proposed various alternative definitions of knowledge by modifying or expanding the traditional analysis.[34] According to one view, the known fact has to cause the belief in the right way.[35] Another theory states that the belief is the product of a reliable belief formation process.[36] Further approaches require that the person would not have the belief if it was false,[37] that the belief is not inferred from a falsehood,[38] that the justification cannot be undermined,[39] or that the belief is infallible.[40] There is no consensus on which of the proposed modifications and reconceptualizations is correct.[41] Some philosophers, such as Timothy Williamson, reject the basic assumption underlying the analysis of knowledge by arguing that propositional knowledge is a unique state that cannot be dissected into simpler components.[42]

Value

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The value of knowledge is the worth it holds by expanding understanding and guiding action. Knowledge can have instrumental value by helping a person achieve their goals.[43] For example, knowledge of a disease helps a doctor cure their patient and knowledge of when a job interview starts helps a candidate arrive on time.[44] The usefulness of a known fact depends on the circumstances. Knowledge of some facts may have little to no uses, like memorizing random phone numbers from an outdated phone book.[45] Being able to assess the value of knowledge matters in choosing what information to acquire and transmit to others. It affects decisions like which subjects to teach at school and how to allocate funds to research projects.[46]

Of particular interest to epistemologists is the question of whether knowledge is more valuable than a mere opinion that is true.[47] Knowledge and true opinion often have a similar usefulness since both are accurate representations of reality. For example, if a person wants to go to Larissa, a true opinion about how to get there may help them in the same way as knowledge does.[48] Plato already considered this problem and suggested that knowledge is better because it is more stable.[49] Another suggestion focuses on practical reasoning. It proposes that people put more trust in knowledge than in mere true beliefs when drawing conclusions and deciding what to do.[50] A different response says that knowledge has intrinsic value, meaning that it is good in itself independent of its usefulness.[51]

References

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Notes

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  1. ^ Other synonyms include declarative knowledge and descriptive knowledge.[14]
  2. ^ The accuracy of the label traditional analysis is debated since it suggests widespread acceptance within the history of philosophy, an idea not shared by all historians.[28]

Citations

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  10. ^ Brown 2016, p. 104
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  14. ^ Hetherington, "Knowledge", § 1b. Knowledge-That
  15. ^ Hetherington, "Knowledge", § 1b. Knowledge-That
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  17. ^ Pritchard 2013, p. 4
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  26. ^ Juhl & Loomis 2009, p. 4
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  35. ^ Crumley II 2009, pp. 67–68
  36. ^ Ichikawa & Steup 2018, § 6.1 Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge
  37. ^ Ichikawa & Steup 2018, § 5.1 Sensitivity
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  39. ^ Crumley II 2009, p. 69
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  42. ^ Ichikawa & Steup 2018, § 7. Is Knowledge Analyzable?
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  45. ^ Pritchard 2013, pp. 11–12
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  50. ^ Pritchard, Turri & Carter 2022, § 6. Other Accounts of the Value of Knowledge
  51. ^

Sources

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