Knowledge

For other uses, see Knowledge (disambiguation).

Knowledge is a familiarity or awareness, of someone or something, such as facts (descriptive knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge), often contributing to understanding. By most accounts, knowledge can be produced in many different ways and from many sources, including but not limited to perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific inquiry, education, and practice. The philosophical study of knowledge is called epistemology.

The term "knowledge" can refer to a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. It can be implicit (as with practical skill or expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); formal or informal; systematic or particular. The philosopher Plato argued that there was a distinction between knowledge and true belief in the Theaetetus, leading many to attribute to him a definition of knowledge as "justified true belief". The difficulties with this definition raised by the Gettier problem have been the subject of extensive debate in epistemology for more than half a century.

Definitions

Main article: Definitions of knowledge

Knowledge is the primary subject of the field of epistemology, which studies what we know, how we come to know it, and what it means to know something. Numerous definitions of knowledge have been suggested. The expressions "conception of knowledge", "theory of knowledge", and "analysis of knowledge" are sometimes utilized as synonyms. Most definitions of knowledge aim to determine the essential features of propositional knowledge, which is also referred to as knowledge-that. It is the paradigmatic form of knowledge and can be expressed using that-clauses as in "I know that Dave is at home". It contrasts with know-how expressing practical competence, as in "she knows how to swim", and knowledge by acquaintance, which refers to a familiarity with the known object based on previous direct experience. There is wide agreement that propositional knowledge is a form of true belief that can be characterized as a cognitive success or an epistemic contact with reality.

However, there are many deep disagreements about its precise nature despite the agreement on these general but vague characteristics. The traditionally dominant definition characterizes knowledge as justified true belief (JTB). However, it has been criticized in diverse ways and many alternative definitions have been suggested. These disagreements have various sources that belong to the goals and methods followed by the epistemologists or to differences concerning the standards of knowledge they intend to uphold. Some theorists focus on its most salient features in their attempt to give a practically useful definition. Others try to provide a theoretically precise definition by listing the conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. The term "analysis of knowledge" is often used for this approach. It can be understood in analogy to how chemists analyze a sample by seeking a list of all the chemical elements composing it. Methodological differences concern whether researchers base their inquiry on abstract and general intuitions or on concrete and specific cases, referred to as methodism and particularism, respectively. Another source of disagreement is the role of ordinary language in one's inquiry: the weight given to how the term "knowledge" is used in everyday discourse. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, there is no clear-cut definition of knowledge since it is just a cluster of concepts related through family resemblance. Different conceptions of the standards of knowledge are also responsible for various disagreements. Some epistemologists hold that knowledge demands very high requirements, like infallibility, and is therefore quite rare. Others see knowledge as a rather common phenomenon, prevalent in many everyday situations, without excessively high standards.

Traditional

The traditional definition of knowledge has a long philosophical tradition, starting with Plato's Theaetetus. It defines knowledge through three essential features: as (1) a belief that is (2) true and (3) justified. The most widely accepted feature is truth: one can believe something false but one cannot know something false. A few ordinary language philosophers have raised doubts that knowledge is a form of belief based on everyday expressions like "I do not believe that; I know it". Most theorists reject this distinction and explain such expressions through ambiguities of natural language. The main controversy surrounding the traditional definition concerns its third feature: justification. The motivation for including this component is that many true beliefs do apparently not amount to knowledge. Specifically, this covers cases of superstition, lucky guesses, or erroneous reasoning. The corresponding beliefs may even be true but it seems there is more to knowledge than just being right about something. The traditional account solves this problem by identifying proper justification as the additional component needed, which is absent in the above-mentioned cases. It is usually understood internalistically: a belief is justified if it is supported by another mental state of the person, such as a perceptual experience, a memory, or a second belief. This mental state has to constitute a sufficiently strong evidence or reason for the believed proposition. Some modern versions modify the traditional definition by using an externalist conception of justification instead. This means that justification depends not just on factors internal to the subject but also on external factors. They can include, for example, that the belief was produced by a reliable process or that the believed fact caused the belief.

Gettier problem and alternatives

The traditional dominance of the JTB account of knowledge was broken in the second half of the 20th century, when Edmund Gettier gave a series of counterexamples. They purport to present concrete cases of justified true beliefs that fail to constitute knowledge. The reason for their failure is usually a form of epistemic luck: the justification is not relevant to the truth. In a well-known example, there is a country road with many barn facades and only one real barn. The person driving is not aware of this, stops by a lucky coincidence in front of the real barn, and forms the belief that he is in front of a barn. It has been argued that this justified true belief does not constitute knowledge since the person wouldn't have been able to tell the difference without the fortuitous accident. So even though the belief is justified, it is a lucky coincidence that it is also true. The responses to these counterexamples have been diverse. According to some, they show that the JTB definition of knowledge is deeply flawed and that a radical reconceptualization of knowledge is necessary, often by denying justification a role. This can happen, for example, by replacing justification with reliability or by understanding knowledge as the manifestation of cognitive virtues. Other approaches include defining it in regard to the cognitive role it plays in providing reasons for doing or thinking something or seeing it as the most general factive mental state operator. Various theorists are diametrically opposed to the radical reconceptualization and either deny that Gettier cases pose problems or they try to solve them by making smaller modifications to how justification is defined. Such approaches result in a minimal modification of the traditional account.

Between these two extremes, various moderate departures have been suggested. They agree that the JTB definition is a step in the right direction: justified true belief is a necessary condition of knowledge. However, they disagree that it is a sufficient condition. They hold instead that an additional criterion, some feature X, is necessary for knowledge. For this reason, they are often referred to as JTB+X definitions of knowledge. A closely related approach speaks not of justification but of warrant and defines warrant as justification together with whatever else is necessary to arrive at knowledge. Many candidates for the fourth feature have been suggested. In this regard, knowledge may be defined as justified true belief that does not depend on any false beliefs, that there are no defeaters present, or that the person would not have the belief if it was false. According to Simon Blackburn, those who have a justified true belief 'through a defect, flaw, or failure' fail to have knowledge. Such and similar definitions are successful at avoiding many of the original Gettier cases. However, they often fall prey to newly conceived counterexamples. To avoid all possible cases, it may be necessary to find a criterion that excludes all forms of epistemic luck. It has been argued that such a criterion would set the required standards of knowledge very high: the belief has to be infallible to succeed in all cases. This would mean that very few of our beliefs amount to knowledge, if any. For example, Richard Kirkham suggests that our definition of knowledge requires that the evidence for the belief necessitates its truth. There is still very little consensus in the academic discourse as to which of the proposed modifications or reconceptualizations is correct.

Self-knowledge

Main article: Self-knowledge (psychology)

“Self-knowledge” usually refers to a person's knowledge of their own sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and other mental states. A number of questions regarding self-knowledge have been the subject of extensive debates in philosophy, including whether self-knowledge differs from other types of knowledge, whether we have privileged self-knowledge compared to knowledge of other minds, and the nature of our acquaintance with ourselves. David Hume expressed skepticism about whether we could ever have self-knowledge over and above our immediate awareness of a "bundle of perceptions", which was part of his broader skepticism about personal identity.

The value of knowledge

Los portadores de la antorcha (The Torch-Bearers) – Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington symbolizing the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next (Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain)

It is generally assumed that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. If so, what is the explanation? A formulation of the value problem in epistemology first occurs in Plato's Meno. Socrates points out to Meno that a man who knew the way to Larissa could lead others there correctly. But so, too, could a man who had true beliefs about how to get there, even if he had not gone there or had any knowledge of Larissa. Socrates says that it seems that both knowledge and true opinion can guide action. Meno then wonders why knowledge is valued more than true belief and why knowledge and true belief are different. Socrates responds that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief because it is tethered or justified. Justification, or working out the reason for a true belief, locks down true belief.

The problem is to identify what (if anything) makes knowledge more valuable than mere true belief, or that makes knowledge more valuable than a mere minimal conjunction of its components, such as justification, safety, sensitivity, statistical likelihood, and anti-Gettier conditions, on a particular analysis of knowledge that conceives of knowledge as divided into components (to which knowledge-first epistemological theories, which posit knowledge as fundamental, are notable exceptions). The value problem re-emerged in the philosophical literature on epistemology in the twenty-first century following the rise of virtue epistemology in the 1980s, partly because of the obvious link to the concept of value in ethics.

In contemporary philosophy, epistemologists including Ernest Sosa, John Greco, Jonathan Kvanvig, Linda Zagzebski, and Duncan Pritchard have defended virtue epistemology as a solution to the value problem. They argue that epistemology should also evaluate the "properties" of people as epistemic agents (i.e. intellectual virtues), rather than merely the properties of propositions and propositional mental attitudes.

Scientific knowledge

Main article: Philosophy of science

Sir Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is Power"

The development of the scientific method has made a significant contribution to how knowledge of the physical world and its phenomena is acquired. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning and experimentation. The scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. Science, and the nature of scientific knowledge have also become the subject of philosophy. As science itself has developed, scientific knowledge now includes a broader usage in the soft sciences such as biology and the social sciences – discussed elsewhere as meta-epistemology, or genetic epistemology, and to some extent related to "theory of cognitive development". Note that "epistemology" is the study of knowledge and how it is acquired. Science is "the process used everyday to logically complete thoughts through inference of facts determined by calculated experiments." Sir Francis Bacon was critical in the historical development of the scientific method; his works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry. His aphorism, "knowledge is power", is found in the Meditations Sacrae (1597).

Until recent times, at least in the Western tradition, it was simply taken for granted that knowledge was something possessed only by humans – and probably adult humans at that. Sometimes the notion might stretch to Society-as-such, as in (e. g.) "the knowledge possessed by the Coptic culture" (as opposed to its individual members), but that was not assured either. Nor was it usual to consider unconscious knowledge in any systematic way until this approach was popularized by Freud.

Situated knowledge

"Situated knowledges" redirects here. For the Donna Haraway essay, see Situated Knowledges.

Situated knowledge is knowledge specific to a particular situation. It was used by Donna Haraway as an extension of the feminist approaches of "successor science" suggested by Sandra Harding, one which "offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that makes up all positions." This situation partially transforms science into a narrative, which Arturo Escobar explains as, "neither fictions nor supposed facts." This narrative of situation is historical textures woven of fact and fiction, and as Escobar explains further, "even the most neutral scientific domains are narratives in this sense," insisting that rather than a purpose dismissing science as a trivial matter of contingency, "it is to treat (this narrative) in the most serious way, without succumbing to its mystification as 'the truth' or to the ironic skepticism common to many critiques."

Haraway's argument stems from the limitations of the human perception, as well as the overemphasis of the sense of vision in science. According to Haraway, vision in science has been, "used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere." This is the "gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation." This causes a limitation of views in the position of science itself as a potential player in the creation of knowledge, resulting in a position of "modest witness". This is what Haraway terms a "god trick", or the aforementioned representation while escaping representation. In order to avoid this, "Haraway perpetuates a tradition of thought which emphasizes the importance of the subject in terms of both ethical and political accountability".

Some methods of generating knowledge, such as trial and error, or learning from experience, tend to create highly situational knowledge. Situational knowledge is often embedded in language, culture, or traditions. This integration of situational knowledge is an allusion to the community, and its attempts at collecting subjective perspectives into an embodiment "of views from somewhere." Knowledge is also said to be related to the capacity of acknowledgement in human beings.

Even though Haraway's arguments are largely based on feminist studies, this idea of different worlds, as well as the skeptic stance of situated knowledge is present in the main arguments of post-structuralism. Fundamentally, both argue the contingency of knowledge on the presence of history; power, and geography, as well as the rejection of universal rules or laws or elementary structures; and the idea of power as an inherited trait of objectification.

Partial knowledge

The parable of the blind men and the elephant suggests that people tend to project their partial experiences as the whole truth

One discipline of epistemology focuses on partial knowledge. In most cases, it is not possible to understand an information domain exhaustively; our knowledge is always incomplete or partial. Most real problems have to be solved by taking advantage of a partial understanding of the problem context and problem data, unlike the typical math problems one might solve at school, where all data is given and one is given a complete understanding of formulas necessary to solve them (False consensus effect).

This idea is also present in the concept of bounded rationality which assumes that in real-life situations people often have a limited amount of information and make decisions accordingly.

Religious concepts of knowledge

Christianity

In many expressions of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Anglicanism, knowledge is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

"The knowledge that comes from the Holy Spirit, however, is not limited to human knowledge; it is a special gift, which leads us to grasp, through creation, the greatness and love of God and his profound relationship with every creature." (Pope Francis, papal audience May 21, 2014)

Gnosticism

In Gnostic beliefs, everyone is said to possess a piece of the highest good or Ultimate God deep within themselves that had fallen from the spiritual world into the bodies of humans, sometimes called a divine spark. It is trapped in their material bodies created by the inferior God or Demiurge unless secret knowledge from the outside universe called gnosis is achieved. The one who brings such knowledge is considered the savior or redeemer.

Hinduism

विद्या दान (Vidya Daan) i.e. knowledge sharing is a major part of Daan, a tenet of all Dharmic Religions. Hindu Scriptures present two kinds of knowledge, Paroksh Gyan and Prataksh Gyan. Paroksh Gyan (also spelled Paroksha-Jnana) is secondhand knowledge: knowledge obtained from books, hearsay, etc. Pratyaksh Gyan (also spelled Pratyaksha-Jnana) is the knowledge borne of direct experience, i.e., knowledge that one discovers for oneself. Jnana yoga ("path of knowledge") is one of three main types of yoga expounded by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. (It is compared and contrasted with Bhakti Yoga and Karma yoga.)

Islam

In Islam, knowledge (Arabic: علم, ʿilm) is given great significance. "The Knowing" (al-ʿAlīm) is one of the 99 names reflecting distinct attributes of God. The Qur'an asserts that knowledge comes from God (2:239) and various hadith encourage the acquisition of knowledge. Muhammad is reported to have said "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave" and "Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets". Islamic scholars, theologians and jurists are often given the title alim, meaning "knowledgeble".

Judaism

In Jewish tradition, knowledge (Hebrew: דעת da'ath) is considered one of the most valuable traits a person can acquire. Observant Jews recite three times a day in the Amidah "Favor us with knowledge, understanding and discretion that come from you. Exalted are you, Existent-One, the gracious giver of knowledge." The Tanakh states, "A wise man gains power, and a man of knowledge maintains power", and "knowledge is chosen above gold".

The Old Testament's tree of the knowledge of good and evil contained the knowledge that separated Man from God: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil..." (Genesis 3:22)

See also

Main category: Knowledge

• Omniscience
• Outline of knowledge – guide to the subject of knowledge presented as a tree structured list of its subtopics.
• Outline of human intelligence - list of subtopics in tree structure
• Analytic-synthetic distinction
• Decolonization of knowledge
• Desacralization of knowledge
• Descriptive knowledge
• Epistemic modal logic
• Gnosticism
• Inductive inference
• Inductive probability
• Intelligence
• Knowledge transfer
• Metaknowledge
• Procedural knowledge
• Rushda
• Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

External links

• Knowledge at PhilPapers
• "Knowledge". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "The Value of Knowledge". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "The Analysis of Knowledge". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Knowledge by Acquaintance vs. Description". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Knowledge at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project