What is knowledge? An introduction to analytic philosophy

Listen to Philosophical Investigations

Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Google Podcasts • Podbean• RadioPublic • Stitcher • Castbox • TuneIn Radio

Hi, and thank you for tuning in to the first episode of the Philosophical Investigations podcast, a podcast presented by me, Daniel Fair, exploring a new philosophical idea every month. I’ll aim for each episode to be around 30 minutes or under, and we’ll be exploring these topics the same way we would at A-level, which is to say with no prior knowledge required.

Before we begin this episode, all about knowledge, a brief bit about me, my credentials, and my interests. Since I was young, I’ve always been interested in asking (and trying to answer) the big questions. I began studying philosophy at A-level and completed my bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Heythrop College in London in 2017. My main philosophical interests are the philosophies of science, politics, and personal identity, with particular emphasis on the metaphysical ramifications of these topics. (If that makes no sense to you, the next few episodes will explore the various branches of philosophy.)

In this podcast, we will be referencing our sources as would be expected in any academic endeavour, and the whereabouts of those resources will be made available at the end of each episode. Now, without any further ado, what is knowledge?

[INTRO THEME]

Pretty simple question, right? Look it up in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say on the matter: “Facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.” That seems to suffice well enough for most day-to-day use. But below it has another definition, a sub-definition, marked Philosophy: “True, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion.”

Of course, you can have homonyms — words that are spelt the same but have two different meanings — but how can a word have two definitions that are essentially the same? And why is it marked philosophy?

The answer to both of those questions begins nearly two and half millennia ago in Ancient Athens, where a man named Plato asked huge, important questions about the world and tried to answer them as best he could. He was engaging in a practice today known as philosophy. Analytic philosophy to be precise.

One of Plato’s interests was the philosophy of knowledge — which we now call epistemology. (Note before we go on that we are talking about knowledge of facts, such as “The sky is blue.” There is a commonly held distinction in philosophy between knowing how and knowing that, as in “I know that the sky is blue.” “I know how the sky is blue,” refers to a different kind of knowledge.) He wanted to know how knowledge works, and what makes a statement, such as “the sky is blue”, into knowledge. His answer is the one the OED used above: knowledge is a justified true belief. If you believe something to be the case, and it is true, and you have a justification for believing it, then you are, essentially, allowed to say you know it.

What he is doing here is very important, and is the basis of all of analytic philosophy: he is not redefining the word ‘knowledge’, but rather, as the name suggests, analysing the concept to discover how to correctly understand it. In the same way a physicist might look at a drop of water under an microscope to see that it is formed of molecules, which are formed themselves of atoms and so on, Plato is putting the concept of knowledge under a microscope to see what it is formed of.

So, let’s investigate that a bit more: a justified true belief. Starting at the end, belief seems simple enough: a belief is a statement a persons thinks is true. I believe the sky is blue, meaning I think it is true that the sky is blue. It seems obvious that to know something, you must first believe it; imagine someone said they knew a quiz answer after it had already been answered despite it being clear that they hadn’t believed the given answer to be true when it was said — we would not say they knew.

The next word is “true”, which again seems simple enough. But is it? Think how you would define truth. I’ll give you a moment to think, and if you want any more time, pause the podcast.

[PAUSE]

It’s difficult to define truth without giving a circular definition. “Truth is what is true.” For our purposes, we needn’t get deep into the weeds of what truth is, as there are many conflicting viewpoints on what exactly makes statements true or false, so much so that it can sometimes feel like playing 5D chess while talking about it. For our first episode, we’ll be using a simple correspondence theory of truth, which is to say that a statement is true if its meaning corresponds to the state of affairs in the world.

Is truth a vital component of knowledge? It seems so. If I were to say “I know my cat is in the next room,” but my cat is actually outside, it seems wrong to say that I do know where my cat is. I certainly think I know, but I don’t really.

So, there we have our first two conditions of knowledge: belief and truth. Because they are vital to the concept, we call them “necessary conditions” — they are needed for you to know something. We can also see how most analytic philosophy takes place, especially outside academia: you think about a concept and what makes it tick; if something seems to belong but you’re not sure, think of an example where it wouldn’t make sense for it not to be there; if something is traditionally thought of as being a part of a concept, think of an example that makes sense without that part. By doing this, we can really drill down into a concept without ever leaving our minds, which is why philosophy is so special: it is a field of study that requires no fancy tools or any special education — anyone can do it, and should.

Getting back to the matter at hand, where does justification come from? What makes justification a necessary condition of knowledge? Imagine, if you would, somebody goes to see a fraudulent psychic. The psychic tells the subject that he will win the lottery; of course, the psychic is just guessing, but the man believes it, buys a lottery ticket and purely by coincidence, wins. We have a belief that turns out to be true, so did this man have knowledge that he was going to win the lottery? Intuitively, we’d say no; the psychic made a lucky guess. So what’s the missing piece? Plato says he has no reason to believe it, no valid justification. “My psychic said so,” isn’t good enough to say he knew it, and so good justification is needed.

Thus, we have our three necessary parts of knowledge, according to Plato: truth, belief and justification. If only one of these was needed, we’d call it “necessary and sufficient,” but because there’s more than one condition, all of which are necessary, we call them “jointly sufficient.” If all three necessary conditions are present, they are jointly sufficient for you to say that you have knowledge of some fact.

Before we go on, some of you may be asking about why any of this matters, and that’s a fair question. Knowing what knowledge is can be vitally important to some fields of study and practises. Take for example science, which relies on this theory of knowledge for its scientific method: you take a belief, which scientists call a hypothesis, and then find evidence for or against it to prove whether or not it is true. Likewise, in law, there is the burden of proof, which in the UK requires someone accusing another of a crime to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt; essentially, it is up to a prosecutor to prove they know that the defendant did the crime, and every day fields of study such as psychology are investigating and updating what exactly constitutes justification for belief, and the various ways in which the senses can trick us and so on. In this way, philosophy is very multidisciplinary, by which we mean that it draws from many fields of study and has a great impact on many other fields of study.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to seeing whether or not Plato’s theory is correct. Prima facie, which is a philosophical term meaning “on first inspection”, Plato’s theory seems to make sense: we have our three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of knowledge and we have argued for each of them by giving examples in which not having them intuitively makes no sense. So let’s look at some counterexamples.

In philosophy, we can give counterexamples to test a theory: if you say all swans are white, I can hold up a black swan as a counterexample. One the biggest and most important counter examples to Plato’s theory of knowledge comes from a three-page essay published by Edmund Gettier, an American philosopher who coincidentally was born on Halloween. In this essay, entitled “Is justified true belief knowledge?” and published in 1963, nearly two and half thousand years after Plato’s theory was written, he gives two counterexamples, but we’ll be Duncan Pritchard’s case for simplicity’s sake.

Imagine a man named John who comes downstairs at 8:20 am and sees on his grandfather clock that it is 8:20. He forms the belief that it is 8:20 am, which is true, and he has good justification for the belief — his clock has never lied to him before, and it has worked for years; he also wakes up at exactly the same time each day because of his alarm clock, which wakes him at ten past eight every day. Unbeknownst to him, however, his grandfather clock stopped working 24 hours earlier; as a result, he has a true belief with good, albeit faulty, justification. Does he know the time? Intuitively, we’d say no, despite his belief satisfying all three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of knowledge. After all, imagine that he came down a minute before or a minute later, then he’d have a justified false belief, which doesn’t qualify as knowledge; the only thing separating that event from this one is that he was lucky enough to come downstairs today 24 hours to the minute after his clock stopped.

This is called a Gettier case, and there are an infinite number of them. You can think of some yourself by following this formula. First, think of a justified false belief: “I can see my wife in that room because that woman looks exactly like her,” but unbeknownst to me, my wife is secretly an identical twin, making my justified belief false — it is her twin sister I see in the room. Then, add a twist that makes the belief, in fact, true: my wife is actually in that same room, talking to her sister, but hidden from view by the door. Now we have a justified true belief that intuitively would not be called knowledge — a Gettier case.

The popular belief is that, after over two thousand years of Plato’s theory reigning supreme as the definition of knowledge, it’s now dead in the water. There have been attempts to save the theory, but the consensus among philosophers is that they have all failed, and we won’t go into them here for the sake of brevity. If you’d like to learn more about Gettier cases, a great place to start is the Wikipedia page about them, which is well-written and informative. Alternatively, you can read “What is this thing called knowledge?” by Duncan Pritchard, the details for which will be in the episode notes.

In this episode of Philosophical Investigations, we have learned about knowledge and the most fundamental way of doing philosophy: analysing a concept with examples and counterexamples. We have also learned some philosophical terms, such as necessary, sufficient, jointly sufficient, correspondence theory and prima facie.

In the next episode we will be doing basic logic, looking at different ways of reaching a conclusion, and exploring the various branches of philosophy. Subscribe to be notified of the next episode when it is released, and visit the website philosophical-investigations dot podbean dot com for episode notes and sources.

Thank you for listening.

Bibliography

[1] “Knowledge”, from Lexico, an online dictionary provided by the Oxford University Press. Accessed 2020–06–08. URL: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/knowledge

[2] Duncan Pritchard, “What is this thing called knowledge?” 3rd Edition, published by Routledge, 2014, pp. 4–5.

[3] Glanzberg, Michael, “Truth”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/truth/