What Is Knowledge? Flashcards
What are the three types of knowledge?
- ability knowledge
- acquaintance knowledge
- propositional knowledge
What is ability knowledge?
Knowing ‘how’ to do something, e.g. ‘I know how to ride a bike’.
What is Propositional knowledge?
Knowing ‘that’ some claim – a proposition – is true or false, e.g. ‘I know that Paris is the capital of France’.
What is acquaintance knowledge?
Knowing ‘of’ someone or some place. For example, ‘I know the manager of the restaurant’, or ‘I know Oxford well’.
What is the Reliablism definition of knowledge?
- p is true
- you believe that p
- your belief is the result of a reliable cognitive process
What is the Virtue Epistemology definition of knowledge?
S shows that p if and only if p is true, S believed that p and S’s belief that p is the result of S exercising their epistemic/ intellectual virtues.
What is the nature of definition (Zagzebski)
Zagzebski claims that some different views of knowledge arise from different aim people have for knowledge. Definitions can serve many purposes.
What are some types of definitions?
-Practical definition
Defining knowledge in order to recognise instances of knowledge and learn more about how to get it.
-Theoretical definition
Understanding the concepts of Knowledge and how it relates to other related concepts: truth, evidence etc
-Real definition
Breaking down concepts into other concepts to try to say something about the nature of that thing: H2O is water.
-conceptual definition
Reliabilist definition of knowledge
(and one problem)
The theory that you know p if p is true, you believe that p and your belief is caused by a reliable cognitive process.
A reliable cognitive process is just one that produces a high percentage of true beliefs. It’s not always true.
Outline what the fake barn county issue shows us
According to JTB and no false lemmas definitions of knowledge, Henry’s belief is knowledge.
But barn county shows us that these definitions are false. Henry’s belief is clearly NOT knowledge he’s simply lucky in the last instance.
What is fake barn county?
Fake barn county is a county full of fake barns.
Henry us driving through fake barn county but he doesn’t know that they’re fake.
As he drives he points at each fake barn and says “a barn”, after 99 fake barns there is one real barn.
Henry points and says “a barn”.
This time the belief is true and justified by his visual perceptions and it’s not inferred from anything false.
Is this knowledge? no.
JTB and no false lemmas
(how does it survive the Gettier cases)
- p is true
- you believe that p
- your belief in p is justified
- you did not infer p from anything false
Whilst the tripartite says that Smith’s belief is knowledge when it’s clearly not, JTB + NFL rightly explains that Smith’s belief is not knowledge.
What do both the Gettier cases show us?
They show us that despite being a JTB, it is wrong to say that Smith’s belief counts as knowledge because it was luck that led him to be correct.
This shows that the tripartite is not sufficient for knowledge.
Gettier case 1
Smith and jones are interviewing for the same job.
Smith hears the interviewer say “Jones will get the job”.
Smith also sees Jones count 10 coins from his pocket.
Smith thus forms the belief that “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket”
But Smith then gets the job.
Then Smith looks in his pocket and by coincidence, he also has 10 coins in his pocket.
Therefore Smith was right that whoever will get the job will have 10 coins in his pocket but he didn’t know that he was going to get the job or that he had 10 coins in his pocket.
Gettier Case 2
Smith has a JTB that “Jones owns a ford.”
Using the principle of disjunction introduction, Smith says “Either Jones owns a ford or Brown is in Barcelona”.
Smith thinks that this is true because the first statement is true.
But it turns out that Jones acctually does not own his ford (he’s renting it).
However by coincidence, Brown is in Barcelona so the belief is true.
But we wouldn’t say that Smith knew it.
