Lecture 2

Question 1

What are three forms of knowledge?

Answer 1

• Knowledge by acquaintance: you know something because you have seen it before (knowledge about friends/family), you can recall what it looks like (I know the Hague, i can recognise it)
• ‘How to’ knowledge: Skills knowledge, how to do something (i know how to ride a bike, skill that i have); subtle and complicated: teaching through trying but hard to explain in words how to ride a bike)
• Propositional knowledge: knowledge of facts; told in verbal form, sentence or utterance in the form: “I know that P” , where P is a proposition.

Question 2

What is knowledge?

Answer 2

• Knowledge is a justified true belief

Question 3

What are the conditions that must be fulfilled for ‘A knows that P’ (where A is a person, and P is knowledge) in the JTB account of knowledge?

Answer 3

A knows that P, if and only if:

1. P is true (we are at wijnhaven)
2. A believes that P (we believe that we are at wijnhaven)
3. A is justified in believing that P (we saw the sign when we walked into the building)

If conditions 1-3 hold, then A knows that P

Question 4

What does the JTB account do?

Answer 4

• Stipulates what circumstances have to obtain for “A knows that P” to apply
• Determines how difficult it is to attain knowledge
• Goes some way to telling up how to recognise cases of knowledge

Question 5

The JTB account appeals to the concept of ‘truth’, what does truth mean?

Answer 5

• Truth is a property only of propositions (facts just are or are not)
• Other components of knowledge have success predicates of their own
• Correspondence theory of truth

Question 6

What is the correspondence theory of truth?

Answer 6

• Truth amounts to correspondence to facts
• A proposition is true only if there is a fact corresponding to it
• Facts make our utterances true/false

Question 7

What are two factors of the correspondence theory of truth, that determine whether proposition P is true:

Answer 7

1. Content of P (needs to be true)

2. Structure of the world (relation between P and the world; does it correspond?)

Question 8

What does ‘truth’ not depend on, according to the correspondence theory?

Answer 8

1. Who asserts P
2. The date or time
3. Any other factor

If P is true, then it has and always will be true. Our assignments of truth change in time, but is P is true, then it always has been so, even if we have not always believed it.

Question 9

What is a fact?

Answer 9

• A state of affairs in the world
• It makes a proposition true (correspondence theory)
• Facts are not propositions; but we use propositions to identify facts
• Facts are not true or false, facts just are or are not.