Name: Chou Wing Yi Student ID: 3035062930 Tutor: Ms Kelly Inglis
PHIL 1012 Mind and Knowledge: an Introduction to Philosophy
Paper 2
What is knowledge? This has been questioned since a very long time ago. Many philosophers have attempted to give a definition of knowledge. Yet, none of them is convincing to everyone. All of them encounter objections. In this paper, I will give an account of knowledge which I think closest to my belief. However, I admit this cannot be the whole story. This is only the best one which I can think of.
Nevertheless, before attempting to answer this question, we must in the first place clarify what the essence of the question is. What we have to clarify here is what philosophers are interested to know when they ask ‘what is knowledge?’
First of all, it is obvious that philosophers are not interested in knowing the examples of knowledge. One may say that ‘knowledge is physics, philosophy, psychology…’ However, giving examples is meaningless in solving a problem. For instance, to know what festivals are, we would say something like ‘festivals are events in which people celebrate the unique aspects of certain community’, instead of saying that ‘festivals include Lunar New Year, Christmas, Mother’s Day…’. This is because giving examples is not helpful in knowing the essence of something, hence supporting further study in it. Therefore, philosophers want to obtain a definition of knowledge, which enables us to know the essence of knowledge and then promote further study in it.
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Second, there are many kinds of knowledge. We should clarify the essence of what kind of knowledge philosophers are interested to know. According to Lehrer (1974), there are three senses of knowledge. First, we have ‘know-how’. It means to have some special form of competence, such as to know the guitar or to know riding a bicycle. Second, knowledge can refer to something acquainted. Examples include ‘I know John’ and ‘I know the city’. The third sense of knowledge is to apprehend that something is information. This is what we call propositional knowledge, which can always be expressed in the structure of ‘S knows that p’.
According to Ichikawa and Steup (2012), the objective of the analysis of knowledge is to state conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for propositional knowledge. From this, we know that in the philosophic question of ‘what is knowledge’, the word ‘knowledge’ is referred to propositional knowledge. So, in the rest of the paper, unless otherwise specified, the word ‘knowledge’ refers to propositional knowledge.
Now, we have had a clearer mind of what the essence of the problem of knowledge is. But before moving on to the discussion of my account of knowledge, let us look at some common problems related to the analysis of knowledge.
The mainstream of epistemologists do their work of analyzing knowledge based on the idea of knowledge=justified true belief (JTB).
However, this definition faces numerous objections. Some argue that JTB is not necessary for knowledge. That is, one can know something without believing in it. But the more serious obstacle to the knowledge=JTB theory is the idea that JTB is insufficient to knowledge. One example of this view is the famous Gettier problem, which shows that a justified true belief can be the result of luck, which we, intuitively, do not consider as knowledge.
Despite of these objections, advocates of the knowledge=JTB theory still feel sympathetic to it. So, many of them have attempted to amend the theory so that it can get rid of the objections. There are two strategies of amendment, one is to add a fourth condition, i.e.knowledge=JTB+X. The other is to amend the justification, so as to ensure the justified true belief cannot be the result of luck. Nevertheless, all of them can only solve the problem partially. None of them is able to accommodate all examples of the Gettier problem. It is even proposed by Zagzebski (1994) the rules to construct Gettier-style counterexamples. She concludes that the definition of knowledge=JTB+X will always fall into the Gettier problem.
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In my opinion, there may be a fourth-condition to be added to the knowledge=JTB theory, which can solve the objections mentioned above and does not fall into the cycle of the Gettier problem. My proposed definition is knowledge=JTB + specific appropriateness. Here, specific refers to the specificity of the belief which the subject of knowing has. For example, there are a red apple and a green apple on the table. When Mary says ‘I want the apple’, John thinks that she wants the red one. However, to Mary, it is known that she wants the green one. Yet, due to the insufficient information she gives when she expresses her belief, to John, Mary wants the red apple. So, the specificity of Mary’s belief is not conveyed to and considered by John. Here, what I want to say is that when we talk about a belief, we should include the specific meaning of it in the subject’s mind, instead of interpreting it solely according to the semantics of the language in the subject’s expression. The concept of appropriateness will be introduced in the following paragraphs.
In fact, my definition is highly inspired by the ‘AAA’ model of evaluation proposed by Sosa (2007).
This model is the one supporting knowledge=JTB. In his model, Sosa makes a comparison between an archer shooting a target and a person having knowledge. In the analogy, a shoot is accurate if and only if it hits the target. It is adroit if and only if it is produced skillfully. For the shot to be apt, it has to have its accuracy manifest its adroitness. When this analogy is applied to the analysis of knowledge, the following argument will be generated:
(1) A belief is accurate if and only if it is true.
(2) A belief is adroit if and only if it is produced skillfully.
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(3) A belief is apt if and only if it is true in a way manifesting the believer’s skill.
Obviously, knowledge is understood as apt belief. Although this model puts forward the condition of justification which is applicable in area beyond epistemology, it is still problematic in the Gettier problem (how it suffers will be discussed later).
To prevent this from happening, I would like to propose the ‘4A’ model in which another criterion is added to the model. That is, the shot should be appropriate. A shot is appropriate if and only if it hits the right target. Suppose there are numerous identical targets in the field. It is possible for the archer to produce a skillful shot which is manifested by its accuracy of hitting the target. Yet, the target hit is the one next to the one which he should aim at. This is not regarded as an apt shot. When applied to knowledge, the argument will be like this:
(1) A belief is accurate if and only if it is true.
(2) A belief is adroit if and only if it is produced skillfully.
(3) A belief is appropriate if and only if it aims at the truth.
(4) A belief is apt if and only if it is true in a way manifesting the believer’s skill and is appropriate.
Appropriateness is highly related to specificity. In the ‘AAA’ theory, it leaves no discussion in the possibility of a number of targets to exist. If it does, what the ‘AAA’ model entails is very likely that it does not matter which target the shot hits for it to be an apt shot. However, in my ‘4A’model, the shot must hits the appropriate target in order to be apt. So, whether a shot is apt depends on the specificity of the shot. Similarly, whether a justified true belief is knowledge depends on the specificity of that belief.
In the following paragraphs, I will examine the soundness of some counterarguments of the knowledge=JTB(+X) theory, and elaborate how my definition is not vulnerable to the problems mentioned above.
The first objection is that belief is not necessary for knowledge. Some philosophers argue that one can know something without believing in it. For example, Peter knows he is a boy, but he does not believe in it. This seems plausible. Nevertheless, the word ‘believe’ here refers to Peter’s belief only partially. In fact, for him to know that he is a boy, there must be another set of justified true beliefs which drives him to do so. For example, he has male sex organ, his parents, whom he highly trusts in, told him he is a boy, he learnt it at school, etc. So, although Peter does not intend to believe that he is a boy, he actually holds beliefs that he is a boy, thus he knows it.
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Another counterexample we discussed in class is that one may know the answer in class, but he is too self-doubting to believe what he knows. In this case, I would say that either he does not know the answer, or he actually believes in it. It depends on the reasons for him to be self-doubting.
For the former approach, it happens when he is self-doubting since his belief is not justified. Since he does not have evidence to support his answer, he doubts whether he will be correct. As he does not have evidence, he is actually making a guess, but, intuitively, not knowing it. In this scenario, it is not an example of knowing without believing.
For the latter approach, it happens when his belief is justified. He is self-doubting because of other reasons, such as lack of self-confidence. In this sense, he actually has the set of beliefs which supports his answer. He does hold belief in his answer. As a result, it again shows that the counterexample fails to work in arguing that one can know something without believing in it.
The second objection is that justified true belief is insufficient to knowledge. This is supported by the famous Gettier problem. Most examples of the Gettier problem involve the inference from a false premise. For example, suppose Smith has a justified false premise that ‘Jones owns a Ford’. Then, Smith infers from this the disjuction of ‘either Jones own a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona’. Accidentally, Brown is in Barcelona. So, Smith has a justified true belief of ‘either Jones own a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona’, but there is no evidence that Smith knows it (Gettier, 1963).
According to this, JTB does not guarantee knowledge.
In this case, Smith produces a ‘skillful shot’ in which he makes use of the cognitive process to infer the disjunction skillfully. However, his belief would not be accurate, i.e. true, if Brown was not accidentally in Barcelona. This means the accuracy of his belief is not manifested from his adroit, but by luck. As a result, it can be concluded that his belief is not apt, hence not knowledge.
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Examples of Gettier problem which involves false premise can easily be disproved by the ‘AAA’ model of Sosa. Nevertheless, Carl Ginet has proposed another example of the Gettier problem, which involves no false premise. This is where the ‘AAA’ model fails to work.
In Ginet’s example called the Barn Facades, Henry is in the Barn Facades County where a lot of barn-like constructions are built. In Henry’s perspective, all these constructions look identical to barns, so Henry develops the belief that there are barns in the county. His belief is justified and true as he really looks at one of the very small proportion of real barns in the county. However, Henry does not know there are barns even he has the justified true belief of it. More importantly, there is no false premise as Henry does look at a real barn. So, it seems that his accurate belief is manifested from his skillful justification, i.e. perception of the eyes, but the cause for its truthfulness is still luck (Temple, 2012).
The ‘4A’ model may be successful to disprove this Barn Facades counterexample. It is obvious that Henry’s belief is accurate as it is true that there are barns in the county. Also, Henry’s belief is adroit as it is justified with his optical perception, which is assumed normal. Nevertheless, his belief is not appropriate. As Henry sees the real barn, there is actually the thought process in his mind that compares the barn with all the other barns in the county. As all of them are perceived the same to him, he induce that all the constructions are barns. This implies that when Henry has the belief that there are barns in the county, he actually means that all constructions in the county are barns. This is different from the truth that there are, in small proportion, barns in the county. So, the specific meaning of Henry’s belief is not appropriate, hence not apt. Therefore, it is not knowledge.
We have also come across another counterexample to the knowledge=JTB definition, which is the stopped clock scenario. In this scenario, ‘I’ walk past a clock that has been accurate for 100 years. But last night, it was struck by lightning and stopped at 8:00pm. When ‘I’ walk past it today exactly at 8:00am, ‘I’ see the clock and believe that it is 8:00am. In this example, ‘My’ belief is true as it is really 8:00am. Also, it is justified as the clock is known to be accurate for such a long period of time. Yet, ‘I’ don’t know it is 8:00am. In this case, JTB, again, fails to guarantee knowledge.
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“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? ” (The Gettier Problem) Background Epistemology: A theory of _____________ What do we mean when we claim to know something? What kinds of conditions must be satisfied in order for a claim to become knowledge? Note: we are interested in __________________ knowledge here (S knows that p), not knowledge of how to do things (e. g. , knowing how to ride a bike) The ...
Nevertheless, the problem can be solved by the ‘4A’ model. As mentioned above, the belief of the time is 8:00am is accurate and adroit. However, it is not appropriate. ‘My’ belief is not merely ‘it is 8:00am’ but it should be ‘the clock is accurate today and it is 8:00am now’. The justification ‘I’ use actually involves ‘my’ belief. Obviously, the specific belief is different from the truth, which is ‘the clock is not accurate and it is 8:00am now’. So, it can be concluded that the belief is not appropriate, hence not apt. Again, it is not knowledge.
To conclude, defining knowledge is an all-time tough work of philosophers. I attempt to define knowledge as justified true belief + specific appropriateness. It is helpful in solving the Gettier problem. Nevertheless, it is never a whole story of knowledge. I believe knowledge is infinite and there must be infinite progress for philosophers to approach the essence of knowledge.
Citation:
Gettier, Edmund. (1963).
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins & Steup, Matthias, (2012).
The Analysis of Knowledge, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition) Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/knowledge-analysis
Lehrer, Keith, (1974).
Knowledge. Ely House, London, Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2007).
A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Volume I), New York: Oxford University Press.
Temple, Colin. (2012).
Barn Facades Counterexample, Philosophy Index. Retrieved from http://www.philosophy-index.com/ginet/barns/
Zagzebski, Linda, (1994).
The Inescapability of Gettier Problems, The Philosophical Quarterly, 44(174): 65–73.
