Analyzing the Word “Knowledge”: Why Bother?
Philosophers have spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for a subject, S, to “know” a propostition, p. Once upon a time, the Justified True Belief theory was ascendent. JTB says that S knows p iff (1) p is true, (2) S believes p, and (3) S is justified in believing p. Then, in 1963, Edmund Gettier published a very short paper giving a pair of counter-examples, wherein conditions (1), (2), and (3), hold, but it is nonetheless very strange to say that “S knows p“.
Gettier sparked a era of open warfare, with philosophers developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of “knowledge”, and increasing sophisticated counter-examples. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for some of the highlights. These skirmishes never came to any very satisfactory conclusion.
As for myself, I’ve never understood why this was such a big issue. I don’t think we should be too surprised or worried if, upon close analysis, some words turn out to embody concepts which are fundamentally imprecise, murky, or confused. If and when we make such an unpleasant discovery, I see two possible courses of action: either give a more precise, technical definition of the problematic word, thereby cutting away the murky mess, or abandon the word in question, and conduct our research using words that don’t have these problems.
Philosophers have expended a lot of effort on the first approach and haven’t found much success, as far as I can tell. Why not abandon the word “knows” and simply talk about “beliefs” and “justification of belief”? Is there any reason that the study of epistemology could not proceed this manner?
I agree! It seems very silly for the philosopher’s to develop a precise, technical definition of the word “know”, and then get all upset when it doesn’t conform to our murky preconceptions of what the word ought to mean!
But it isn’t clear to me you can just abandon the word “knows”, since I think your suggestions for replacement concepts can also be problematic. Like “belief”: one example I heard in some class was something along these lines “Lois believes Superman can fly. (unbeknowst to Lois), Superman is Clark Kent. Does this mean Lois belives Clark Kent can fly?” I don’t know if this “problem” has been resolved or not, but it seems like any technical definition of “belief” might be shaky as well.
Maybe we should abandon the English language.
Let’s be precise about this. Let P1, P2, and P3 be given by
P1: Superman can fly.
P2: Superman is Clark Kent.
P3: Clark Kent can fly.
and let LB(P) denote the proposition “Lois believes proposition P”.
I think it’s pretty clear that (P1 & P2) does not imply LB(P3). This is demonstrated by your hypothesized world, wherein P1, P2, P3, LB(P1), LB(~P2), LB(~P3) are all true.
Lois’s beliefs are internally consistent, even though they aren’t consistent with the true state of the world. Non-omniscience sucks.
Hmm, yes, I agree with that. I think I was miss remembering things slightly: the superman example was acutally a “counterexample” in the realm of what it means to refer to something. (like what do you mean when you say “Superman”?) I don’t remember why, but one author we read argued that when you say “Superman”, it is equivalent to pointing at a real, flesh and blood person (err, alien), and saying “I’m talking about him!” But this is problematic, because then your P1 and P3 are the same statement, which is ridiculous since Lois can readily believe P1 without believing P3. Anyway, the conclusion that must be drawn is that “Superman” refers to something more complicated than a flesh and blood person, or refers to different things in different contexts, or something.
I’ll try to come up with a proper counterexample to the unshakiness of the definition of belief =).