Knowledge and justification
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Believing that and knowing that
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Firstly, believing and knowing in the sense we are using the terms are terms that express an attitude of a conscious subject (the person who believes or knows) and a proposition (or statement) – what that person believes or claims to know. We make this clear by saying that we are consider what believing-that and knowing-that mean. This point needs to be made clear because there are contexts in which we use the words believe and know in a different way. Especially, know – we say, for example, "I know how to drive". This expresses mastery of a skill, and not the conscious grasp of an idea. One could know how to do something without being able to speak; for example, cats know how to eat, but they do not know what their cat food is made of. We are here dealing with knowing that and not knowing how. The second point is that, once again, knowing that seems to imply a stronger condition than believing that. It makes sense to say that one can be not sure about something one nonetheless believes, but does not appear to make sense to say that one is uncertain about something one knows. However, it should be made very clear at the outset that this conclusion is not accepted by every philosopher, and, indeed, we shall later find some very good reasons for rejecting the claimed distinction between believing and knowing. If the statement, "I believe it, but I am not sure that it is true," is an acceptable statement in English (or any language), then it seems to suggest that believing and doubting are not incompatible states of mind. For example, suppose I am in a restaurant and I consider the location of my car. I say to myself, "I believe that my car is in the garage," but, of course, it is a very real possibility that someone has stolen my car, and this is a practical possibility that we consider on a daily basis – it is so practical that we take out insurance against its occurrence. This again seems to suggest that believing occupies some middle ground between mere opinion, or speculation on the one hand, and knowledge and certainty on the other. This brings us on to a third point which concerns the relationship between knowing something and certainty. Does it make sense to say that someone really knows something that turns out to be false? We consider this next.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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