What Is Knowledge

The question of what is knowledge is a very old philosophical question. What does it mean to “know” something? Certainly, we can say “I know this person” and by that we mean we have sufficient personal acquaintance or experience with them. Or “I know how to wire electricity”, denoting that we possess the technical know-how to perform the act in question. But what philosophy has struggled with is the question of propositions – how do we know a certain claim or belief is true?

One definition that has been very popular throughout history is “knowledge is justified true belief”. A person knows when they believe something that is true, and have adequate reasons for it. This view has been challenged in the past century. One of Bertrand Russell’s counter-examples was that a person may be justified in believing that it is two o’clock because the clock on the wall says so. But what if it just happens to be two o’clock and the clock stopped working exactly twelve hours ago? It may be argued that the person actually lacked justification, and that we should raise the bar for justification. But yet, few of us, when seeing a clock that matched our reasonable intuition of what time it was, would actually withhold judgment pending a thorough examination of the clock’s time-setting history and the manufacturer’s reliability?

Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus engages the Sophists view that knowledge is perception (as perceived by the senses or the mind), based on the principal that man is the measure of all things. Variants of this view have enjoyed revival in modern times, starting with Immanuel Kant’s claim that we can never know an object as it truly is, because of the limits to our perceptions. Rather than our minds needing to conform to the outside world, the outside world conforms to our mind instead. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “Perception is reality”, you are familiar with this concept. Indeed, today it is considered taboo in some circles to challenge a person’s perception of their experiences. But if perceptions can be wrong, sometimes horribly. Alcohol or narcotics may alter perception in ways that are false – or even fatal. They may lead me to perceive that it is safe to jump off of a 20 story building, when in fact it is not. Declines in cognitive ability in old age may yield similar results.

Socrates’ answer to the question was that the only thing we can know for certain is that we can’t know anything. But isn’t this claiming a certain exemption for itself?

Join us for another lively discussion and share what you know - or what you think you know!

Brent Hardaway is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

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Time: Mar 13, 2021 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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