definition of knowledge essay

September 22, 2011

The Knowledge Problem

Studying knowledge is one of those perennial topics—like the nature of matter in the hard sciences—that philosophy has been refining since before the time of Plato. The discipline, epistemology, comes from two Greek words episteme (επιστημη) which means knowledge and logos (λογος) which means a word or reason. Epistemology literally means to reason about knowledge. Epistemologists study what makes up knowledge, what kinds of things can we know, what are the limits to what we can know, and even if it’s possible to actually know anything at all.

Coming up with a definition of knowledge has proven difficult but we’ll take a look at a few attempts and examine the challenges we face in doing so. We’ll look at how prominent philosophers have wrestled with the topic and how postmodernists provide a different viewpoint on the problem of knowledge. We’ll also survey some modern work being done in psychology and philosophy that can help us understand the practical problems with navigating the enormous amounts of information we have at our disposal and how we can avoid problems in the way we come to know things.

Do We Know Stuff?

In order to answer that question, you probably have to have some idea what the term “know” means. If I asked, “Have you seen the flibbertijibbet at the fair today?” I’d guess you wouldn’t know how to answer. You’d probably start by asking me what a flibbertijibbet is. But most adults tend not to ask what knowledge is before they can evaluate whether they have it or not. We just claim to know stuff and most of us, I suspect, are pretty comfortable with that. There are lots of reasons for this but the most likely is that we have picked up a definition over time and have a general sense of what the term means. Many of us would probably say knowledge that something is true involves:

Certainty – it’s hard if not impossible to deny
Evidence – it has to based on something
Practicality – it has to actually work in the real world
Broad agreement – lots of people have to agree it’s true

But if you think about it, each of these has problems. For example, what would you claim to know that you would also say you are certain of? Let’s suppose you’re not intoxicated, high, or in some other way in your “right” mind and conclude that you know you’re reading an article on the internet. You might go further and claim that denying it would be crazy. Isn’t it at least possible that you’re dreaming or that you’re in something like the Matrix and everything you see is an illusion? Before you say such a thing is absurd and only those who were unable to make the varsity football team would even consider such questions, can you be sure you’re not being tricked? After all, if you are in the Matrix, the robots that created the Matrix would making be making you believe you are not in the Matrix and that you’re certain you aren’t.

What about the “broad agreement” criterion? The problem with this one is that many things we might claim to know are not, and could not be, broadly agreed upon. Suppose you are experiencing a pain in your arm. The pain is very strong and intense. You might tell your doctor that you know you’re in pain. Unfortunately though, only you can claim to know that (and as an added problem, you don’t appear to have any evidence for it either—you just feel the pain). So at least on the surface, it seems you know things that don’t have broad agreement by others.

These problems and many others are what intrigue philosophers and are what make coming up with a definition of knowledge challenging. Since it’s hard to nail down a definition, it also makes it hard to answer the question “what do you know?”

What is Knowledge?

As with many topics in philosophy, a broadly-agreed-upon definition is difficult. But philosophers have been attempting to construct one for centuries. Over the years, a trend has developed in the philosophical literature and a definition has emerged that has such wide agreement it has come to be known as the “standard definition.” While agreement with the definition isn’t universal, it can serve as a solid starting point for studying knowledge.

The definition involves three conditions and philosophers say that when a person meets these three conditions, she can say she knows something to be true. Take a statement of fact: The Seattle Mariners have never won a world series.  On the standard definition, a person knows this fact if:

The person believes the statement to be true
The statement is in fact true
The person is justified in believing the statement to be true

The bolded terms earmark the three conditions that must be met and because of those terms, the definition is also called the “tripartite” (three part) definition or “JTB” for short. Many many books have been written on each of the three terms so I can only briefly summarize here what is going on in each. I will say up front though that epistemologists spend most of their time on the third condition.

First, beliefs are things people have. Beliefs aren’t like rocks or rowboats where you come across them while strolling along the beach. They’re in your head and generally are viewed as just the way you hold the world (or some aspect of the world) to be. If you believe that the Mariners never won a world series, you just accept it is as true that the Mariners really never won a world series. Notice that accepting that something is true implies that what you accept could be wrong. In other words, it implies that what you think about the world may not match up with the way the world really is. This implies that there is a distinction between belief and truth . There are some philosophers—notably postmodernists and existentialists—who think such a distinction can’t be made which we’ll examine more below. But in general, philosophers claim that belief is in our heads and truth is about the way the world is. In practical terms, you can generally figure out what you or someone else believes by examining behavior. People will generally act according to what they really believe rather than what they say they believe—despite what Dylan says .

Something is true if the world really is that way. Truth is not in your head but is “out there.” The statement, “The Mariners have never won a world series” is true if the Mariners have never won a world series. The first part of that sentence is in quotes on purpose. The phrase in quotes signifies a statement we might make about the world and the second, unquoted phrase is supposed to describe the way the world actually is. The reason philosophers write truth statements this way is to give sense to the idea that a statement about the world could be wrong or, more accurately, false (philosophers refer to the part in quotes as a statement or proposition ). Perhaps you can now see why beliefs are different than truth statements. When you believe something, you hold that or accept that a statement or proposition is true. It could be false that’s why your belief may not “match up” with the way the world really is. For more on what truth is, see the Philosophy News article, “ What is Truth? ”

Justification

If the seed of knowledge is belief, what turns belief into knowledge? This is where justification (sometimes called ‘warrant’) comes in. A person knows something if they’re justified in believing it to be true (and, of course, it actually is true). There are dozens of competing theories of justification. It’s sometimes easier to describe when a belief isn’t justified than when it is. In general, philosophers agree that a person isn’t justified if their belief is:

a product of wishful thinking (I really wish you would love me so I believe you love me)
a product of fear or guilt (you’re terrified of death and so form the belief in an afterlife)
formed in the wrong way (you travel to an area you know nothing about, see a white spot 500 yards away and conclude it’s a sheep)
a product of dumb luck or guesswork (you randomly form the belief that the next person you meet will have hazel eyes and it turns out that the next person you meet has hazel eyes)

Because beliefs come in all shapes and sizes and it’s hard to find a single theory of justification that can account for everything we would want to claim to know. You might be justified in believing that the sun is roughly 93 million miles from the earth much differently than you would be justified in believing God exists or that you have a minor back pain. Even so, justification is a critical element in any theory of knowledge and is the focus of many a philosophical thought.

People-centered Knowledge

You might notice that the description above puts the focus of knowing on the individual. Philosophers talk of individual persons being justified and not the ideas or concepts themselves being justified. This means that what may count as knowledge for you may not count as knowledge for me. Suppose you study economics and you learn principles in the field to some depth. Based on what you learn, you come to believe that psychological attitudes have just as much of a role to play in economic flourishing or deprivation as the political environment that creates economic policy. Suppose also that I have not studied economics all that much but I do know that I’d like more money in my pocket. You and I may have very different beliefs about economics and our beliefs might be justified in very different ways. What you know may not be something I know even though we have the same evidence and arguments in front of us.

So the subjective nature of knowledge partly is based on the idea that beliefs are things that individuals have and those beliefs are justified or not justified. When you think about it, that makes sense. You may have more evidence or different experiences than I have and so you may believe things I don’t or may have evidence for something that I don’t have. The bottom line is that “universal knowledge” – something everybody knows—may be very hard to come by. Truth, if it exists, isn’t like this. Truth is universal. It’s our access to it that may differ widely.

Rene Descartes and the Search for Universal Knowledge

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that there isn’t universal knowledge. Philosopher Rene Descartes (pronounced day-cart) was one of them. When he was a young man, he was taught a bunch of stuff by his parents, teachers, priests and other authorities. As he came of age, he, like many of us, started to discover that much of what he was taught either was false or was highly questionable. At the very least, he found he couldn’t have the certainty that many of his educators had. While many of us get that, deal with it, and move on, Descartes was deeply troubled by this.

One day, he decided to tackle the problem. He hid himself away in a cabin and attempted to doubt everything of which he could not be certain. Since it wasn’t practical to doubt every belief he had, Descartes decided that it would be sufficient to subject the foundations of his belief system to doubt and the rest of the structure will “crumble of its own accord.” He first considers the things he came to believe by way of the five senses. For most of us these are pretty stable items but Descartes found that it was rather easy to doubt their truth. The biggest problem is that sometimes the senses can be deceptive. And after all, could he be certain he wasn’t insane or dreaming when he saw that book or tasted that honey? So while they might be fairly reliable, the senses don’t provide us with certainty—which is what Descartes was after.

Unfortunately, this left Descartes with no where to turn. He found that he could be skeptical about everything and was unable to find a certain foundation for knowledge. But then he hit upon something that changed modern epistemology. He discovered that there was one thing he couldn’t doubt: the fact that he was a thinking thing. In order to doubt it, he would have to think. He reasoned that it’s not possible to doubt something without thinking about the fact that you’re doubting. If he was thinking then he must be a thinking thing and so he found that it was impossible to doubt that he was a thinking being.

This seemingly small but significant truth led to his most famous contribution to Western thought: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Some mistakenly think that Descartes was implying with this idea that he thinks himself into existence. But that wasn’t his point at all. He was making a claim about knowledge. Really what Descartes was saying is: I think, therefore I know that I am.

The story doesn’t end here for Descartes but for the rest of it, I refer you to the reading list below to dig deeper. The story of Descartes is meant to illustrate the depth of the problems of epistemology and how difficult and rare certainty is, if certainty is possible—there are plenty of philosophers who think either that Descartes’ project failed or that he created a whole new set of problems that are even more intractable than the one he set out to solve.

Postmodernism and Knowledge

Postmodern epistemology is a growing area of study and is relatively new on the scene compared with definitions that have come out of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Generally, though, it means taking a specific, skeptical attitude towards certainty, and a subjective view of belief and knowledge. Postmodernists see truth as much more fluid than classical (or modernist) epistemologists. Using the terms we learned above, they reject the idea that we can ever be fully justified in holding that our beliefs line up with the way the world actually is. We can’t know that we know.

Perspective at the Center

In order to have certainty, postmodernists claim, we would need to be able to “stand outside” our own beliefs and look at our beliefs and the world without any mental lenses or perspective . It’s similar to wondering what it would be like to watch ourselves meeting someone for the first time? We can’t do it. We can watch the event of the meeting on a video but the experience of meeting can only be had by us. We have that experience only from “inside” our minds and bodies. Since its not possible to stand outside our minds, all the parts that make up our minds influence our view on what is true. Our intellectual and social background, our biases, our moods, our genetics, other beliefs we have, our likes and dislikes, our passions (we can put all these under the label of our “cognitive structure”) all influence how we perceive what is true about the world. Further, say the postmodernists, it’s not possible to set aside these influences or lenses. We can reduce the intensity here and there and come to recognize biases and adjust for them for sure. But it’s not possible to completely shed all our lenses which color our view of things and so it’s not possible to be certain that we’re getting at some truth “out there.”

Many have called out what seems to be a problem with the postmodernist approach. Notice that as soon as a postmodernist makes a claim about the truth and knowledge they seem to be making a truth statement! If all beliefs are seen through a lens, how do we know the postmodernists beliefs are “correct?” That’s a good question and the postmodernist might respond by saying, “We don’t!” But then, why believe it? Because of this obvious problem, many postmodernists attempt to simply live with postmodernist “attitudes” towards epistemology and avoid saying that they’re making claims that would fit into traditional categories. We have to change our perspective to understand the claims.

Community Agreement

To be sure, Postmodernists do tend to act like the rest of us when it comes to interacting with the world. They drive cars, fly in airplanes, make computer programs, and write books. But how is this possible if they take such a fluid view of knowledge? Postmodernists don’t eschew truth in general. They reject the idea that any one person’s beliefs about it can be certain. Rather, they claim that truth emerges through community agreement. Suppose scientists are attempting to determine whether the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. This is a complex question and a postmodernist might say that if the majority of scientists agree that the earth is warming and that humans are the cause, then that’s true. Notice that the criteria for “truth” is that scientists agree . To use the taxonomy above, this would be the “justification condition.” So we might say that postmodernists accept the first and third conditions of the tripartite view but reject the second condition: the idea that there is a truth that beliefs need to align to a truth outside our minds. 

When you think about it, a lot of what we would call “facts” are determined in just this way. For many years, scientists believed in a substance called “phlogiston.” Phlogiston was stuff that existed in certain substances (like wood and metal) and when those substances were burned, more phlogiston was added to the substance. Phlogiston was believed to have negative weight, that’s why things got lighter when they burned. That theory has since been rejected and replace by more sophisticated views involving oxygen and oxidation.

So, was the phlogiston theory true? The modernist would claim it wasn’t because it has since been shown to be false. It’s false now and was false then even though scientists believed it was true. Beliefs about phlogiston didn’t line up with the way the world really is, so it was false. But the postmodernist might say that phlogiston theory was true for the scientists that believed it. We now have other theories that are true. But phlogiston theory was no less true then than oxygen theory is now. Further, they might add, how do we know that oxygen theory is really the truth ? Oxygen theory might be supplanted some day as well but that doesn’t make it any less true today.

Knowledge and the Mental Life

As you might expect, philosophers are not the only ones interested in how knowledge works. Psychologists, social scientists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have been interested in this topic as well and, with the growth of the field of artificial intelligence, even computer scientists have gotten into the game. In this section, we’ll look at how work being done in psychology and behavioral science can inform our understanding of how human knowing works.

Thus far, we’ve looked at the structure of knowledge once beliefs are formed. Many thinkers are interested how belief formation itself is involved our perception of what we think we know. Put another way, we may form a belief that something is true but the way our minds formed that belief has a big impact on why we think we know it. The science is uncovering that, in many cases, the process of forming the belief went wrong somewhere and our minds have actually tricked us into believing its true. These mental tricks may be based on good evolutionary principles: they are (or at least were at some point in our past) conducive to survival. But we may not be aware of this trickery and be entirely convinced that we formed the belief in the right way and so have knowledge. The broad term used for this phenomenon is “cognitive bias” and mental biases have a significant influence over how we form beliefs and our perception of the beliefs we form. 1

Wired for Bias

A cognitive bias is a typically unconscious “mental trick” our minds play that lead us to form beliefs that may be false or that are directed towards some facts and leaving out others such that these beliefs align to other things we believe, promote mental safety, or provide grounds for justifying sticking to to a set of goals that we want to achieve. Put more simply, mental biases cause us to form false beliefs about ourselves and the world. The fact that our minds do this is not necessarily intentional or malevolent and, in many cases, the outcomes of these false beliefs can be positive for the person that holds them. But epistemologists (and ethicists) argue that ends don’t always justify the means when it comes to belief formation. As a general rule, we want to form true beliefs in the “right” way.

Ernest Becker in his important Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death attempts to get at the psychology behind why we form the beliefs we do. He also explores why we may be closed off to alternative viewpoints and why we tend to become apologists (defenders) of the viewpoints we hold. One of his arguments is that we as humans build an ego ( in the Freudian sense; what he calls “character armor”) out of the beliefs we hold and those beliefs tend to give us meaning and they are strengthened when more people hold the same viewpoint. In a particularly searing passage, he writes:

Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man [N.B. by ‘man’ Becker means ‘human’ and uses masculine pronouns as that was common practice when he wrote the book], and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula. . . in matters of immortality everyone has the same self-righteous conviction. The thing seems perverse because each diametrically opposed view is put forth with the same maddening certainty; and authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views! (Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death, pp. 255-256. Free Press.)

In other words, being convinced that our viewpoint is correct and winning converts to that viewpoint is how we establish ourselves as persons of meaning and significance and this inclination is deeply engrained in our psychological equipment. This not only is why biases are so prevalent but why they’re difficult to detect. We are, argues Becker and others, wired towards bias. Jonathan Haidt agrees and go so far as to say that reason and logic is not only the cure but a core part of the wiring that causes the phenomenon.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. (Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 104). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.)

Biases and Belief Formation

Research in social science and psychology are uncovering myriad ways in which our minds play these mental tricks. For example, Daniel Kahneman discusses the impact emotional priming has on the formation of a subsequent idea. In one study, when participants were asked about happiness as it related to their romantic experiences, those that had a lot of dates in the past would report that they were happy about their life while those that had no dates reported being lonely, isolated, and rejected. But then when they subsequently were asked about their happiness in general, they imposed the context of their dating happiness to their happiness in general regardless of how good or bad the rest of their lives seemed to be going. If a person would have rated their overall happiness as “very happy” when asked questions about general happiness only, they might rate their overall happiness as “somewhat happy” if they were asked questions about their romantic happiness just prior and their romantic happiness was more negative than positive.

This type of priming can significantly impact how we view what is true. Being asked if we need more gun control or whether we should regulate fatty foods will change right after a local shooting right or after someone suffers a heart scare. The same situation will have two different responses by the same person depending on whether he or she was primed or not. Jonathan Haidt relates similar examples.

Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on ‘motivated reasoning,’ showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach. When subjects are told that an intelligence test gave them a low score, they choose to read articles criticizing (rather than supporting) the validity of IQ tests. When people read a (fictitious) scientific study that reports a link between caffeine consumption and breast cancer, women who are heavy coffee drinkers find more flaws in the study than do men and less caffeinated women. (Haidt, p. 98)

There are many other biases that influence our thinking. When we ask the question, “what is knowledge?” this research has to be a part of how we answer the question. Biases and their influence would fall under the broad category of the justification condition we looked at earlier and the research should inform how we view how beliefs are justified. Justification is not merely the application of a philosophical formula. There are a host of psychological and social influences that are play when we seek to justify a belief and turn it into knowledge. 2 We can also see how this research lends credence to the philosophical position of postmodernists. At the very least, even if we hold that we can get past our biases and get “more nearer to the truth,” we at least have good reason to be careful about the things we assert as true and adopt a tentative stance towards the truth of our beliefs.

In a day when “fake news” is a big concern and the amount of information for which we’re responsible grows each day, how we justify the beliefs we hold becomes a even more important enterprise. I’ll use a final quote from Haidt to conclude this section:

And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief. You’ll find partisan websites summarizing and sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies. Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that’s right for you. (Haidt, pp. 99-100)

Making Knowledge Practical

Well most of us aren’t like Descartes. We actually have lives and don’t want to spend time trying to figure out if we’re the cruel joke of some clandestine mad scientist. But we actually do actually care about this topic whether we “know” it or not. A bit of reflection exposes just how important having a solid view of knowledge actually is and spending some focused time thinking more deeply about knowledge can actually help us get better at knowing.

Really, knowledge is a the root of many (dare I say most) challenges we face in a given day. Once you get past basic survival (though even things as basic as finding enough food and shelter involves challenges related to knowledge), we’re confronted with knowledge issues on almost every front. Knowledge questions range from larger, more weighty questions like figuring out who our real friends are, what to do with our career, or how to spend our time, what politician to vote for, how to spend or invest our money, or should we be religious or not, to more mundane ones like which gear to buy for our hobby, how to solve a dispute between the kids, where to go for dinner, or which book to read in your free time. We make knowledge decisions all day, every day and some of those decisions deeply impact our lives and the lives of those around us.

So all these decisions we make about factors that effect the way we and others live are grounded in our view of knowledge—our epistemology . Unfortunately few spend enough time thinking about the root of their decisions and many make knowledge choices based on how they were raised (my mom always voted Republican so I will), what’s easiest (if I don’t believe in God, I’ll be shunned by my friends and family), or just good, old fashioned laziness. But of all the things to spend time on, it seems thinking about how we come to know things should be at the top of the list given the central role it plays in just about everything we do.

Updated January, 2018: Removed dated material and general clean up; added section on cognitive biases. Updated March, 2014: Removed reference to dated events; removed section on thought experiment; added section on Postmodernism; minor formatting changes

While many thinkers have written on cognitive biases in one form or another, Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind and Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow have done seminal work to systemize and provide hard data around how the mind operates when it comes to belief formation and biases. There is much more work to be done for sure but these books, part philosophy, part psychology, part social science, provide the foundation for further study in this area. The field of study already is large and growing so I can only provide a thumbnail sketch of the influence of how belief formation is influenced by our mind and other factors. I refer the reader to the source material on this topic for further study (see reading list below). ↩
For a strategy on how we can adjust for these natural biases that our minds seem wired to create, see the Philosophy News article, “ How to Argue With People ”. I also recommend Carol Dweck’s excellent book Mindset . ↩

For Further Reading

Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses (Elements of Philosophy) by Laurence BonJour. One of the better introductions to the theory of knowledge. Written at the college level, this book should be accessible for most readers but have a good philosophical dictionary on hand.
Belief, Justification, and Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology (Wadsworth Basic Issues in Philosophy Series) by Robert Audi. This book has been used as a text book in college courses on epistemology so may be a bit out of range for the general reader. However, it gives a good overview of many of the issues in the theory of knowledge and is a fine primer for anyone interested in the subject.
The Theory of Knowledge: Classic and Contemporary Readings by Louis Pojman. Still one of the best books for primary source material. The edited articles have helpful introductions and Pojman covers a range of sources so the reader will get a good overview from many sides of the question. Written mainly as a textbook.
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature   by Steven Pinker. While not strictly a book about knowledge per se, Pinker’s book is fun, accessible, and a good resource for getting an overview of some contemporary work being done mainly in the hard sciences.
The Selections From the Principles of Philosophy by René Descartes . A good place to start to hear from Descartes himself.
Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto. This book is written as a history so it’s not strictly a philosophy tome. However, it gives the general reader some insight into what Descartes and his contemporaries were dealing with and is a fun read.
On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. One get’s the sense that Frankfurt was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the small, engaging tract. It’s more of a commentary on the social aspect of epistemology and worth reading for that reason alone. Makes a great gift!
On Truth by Harry Frankfurt. Like On Bullshit but on truth.
A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. A handy reference for constructing logical arguments. This is a fine little book to have on your shelf regardless of what you do for a living.
Warrant: The Current Debate   by Alvin Plantinga. Now over 25 years old, “current” in the title may seem anachronistic. Still, many of the issues Plantinga deals with are with us today and his narrative is sure to enlighten and prime the pump for further study.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The book to begin a study on cognitive biases.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. A solid book that dabbles in cognitive biases but also in why people form and hold beliefs and how to start a conversation about them.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. A neo (or is it post?) Freudian analysis of why we do what we do. Essential reading for better understanding why we form the beliefs we do.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck. The title reads like a self-help book but the content is actually solid and helpful for developing an approach to forming and sharing ideas.

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Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge

Thomas Metcalf Category: Epistemology Word count: 999

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Many people think that they have a lot of knowledge. They also believe that other people sometimes know what they claim to know. But what is knowledge anyway? And how do we come to have it? Is it important that we have knowledge? If so, why?

The branch of philosophy that attempts to answer these and related questions is known as ‘epistemology’ or ‘theory of knowledge.’ [1]

Books on shelves in the Library of Congress.

1. What is Knowledge? [2]

One historically popular definition of ‘knowledge’ is the ‘JTB’ theory of knowledge: knowledge is j ustified, t rue b elief. [3] Most philosophers think that a belief must be true in order to count as knowledge. [4] Suppose that Smith is framed for a crime, and the evidence against Smith is overwhelming. But Smith is innocent. Does the jury know that Smith committed the crime ? No, because knowledge requires truth; the jury believed it, but they didn’t know it. [5]

Also, most philosophers think that the belief must be justified . We don’t normally consider a lucky guess to be knowledge. (If you flip a coin but don’t look at the result yet, and just find yourself believing that it’s Heads, and in fact it is Heads, we don’t think you knew that it was Heads.) Yet there is substantial debate about what justification is.

2. Analysis of Justification

What would be required to transform the lucky guess that the coin came up Heads into knowledge ? One standard answer is ‘justification.’ [6]

Intuitively, you would have to acquire good reason to believe that the coin came up Heads: for example, you look at the coin. [7] In general, theories of justification either say that the factors that justify your belief must be available within your own first-person, conscious experience, or that they don’t need to be. We call the former theories ‘internalist’ and the latter ‘externalist.’ [8]

For example, some internalists are evidentialists : roughly, they say that your justification depends on the evidence you have, for example the awareness of the image of a president’s head on a coin. And some externalists are reliabilists : roughly, they say that whether you are justified depends on whether your belief was formed by a reliable belief-forming mechanism, for example, the physical process of vision. For evidentialists, the evidence you have seems “internal” to your first-person awareness: it’s what you’re aware of. And whether the process that formed your belief is reliable seems “external” to your first-person awareness: you might not even have any beliefs about photons and how they work.

3. Sources of Knowledge and Evidence

We’ve thought about what it means to have justified beliefs. [9] But when our beliefs are in fact justified, what is the source or explanation of that justification?

Surely we get some justification from empirical observation : using our five senses, the tools of science, and introspection (looking inside your own mind, for example learning that you believe that 2+2=4). [10] This justification is ‘ a posteriori ’ or ‘empirical,’ for example, looking at the coin-toss result.

Maybe there is some knowledge that we acquire through intuition, definitions, or some other putative non -empirical evidence. We call this ‘ a priori ’ knowledge or justification: justified but independently of any particular empirical observation or awareness of the evidence or justification required. [11] I seem to know, just by thinking about it, that there can be no coins that are both square and circular; I don’t need to consult scientists. [12]

Roughly speaking, rationalists (about justification) believe that we have important, valuable a priori knowledge about the world, knowledge that’s not merely about the meanings of our words or concepts. Empiricists , in contrast, believe that all of our important knowledge of the world is empirical. [13]

Beyond this, feminist epistemologists have argued that one’s knowledge, and whether one is taken seriously as a knower, can depend on one’s particular social position, including one’s gender. [14] To the traditional list of sources of knowledge, we might add one’s standpoint and situation, and also add emotion. [15]

4. The Structure of Knowledge, Justification, and Inference

Normally, we think we can infer new beliefs from our existing beliefs: we believe some propositions, and on the basis of those beliefs, conclude that some other propositions are true.

If someone asks you to justify a belief, you’re likely to cite other beliefs you have. I know that Antarctica exists because I believe that maps are generally trustworthy and that maps claim that Antarctica exists. But can this regress of inference go on forever? [16]

One popular position is foundationalism . Foundationalists say that the regress stops at justified beliefs and, since the regress has stopped, those beliefs aren’t justified by any inference from any other belief. [17]

Another popular position is coherentism , according to which one’s beliefs are justified by being part of a web or network of coherent beliefs. [18]

We think a set of inferences can give us justified beliefs. But it’s possible to acquire false or unjustified beliefs, which wouldn’t be knowledge after all.

5. Skepticism

In general, skeptics deny that we have some item of knowledge. There are skeptics about whether we have:

knowledge of the external world, i.e., the world beyond the contents of our conscious experiences; [19]
moral knowledge; [20]
religious knowledge; [21]
knowledge from memory or knowledge of the past; [22]
knowledge from induction; [23]
scientific knowledge; [24] and
knowledge of other minds. [25]

And some philosophers have endorsed global skepticism, according to which we have no knowledge or no justified beliefs at all. [26]

6. Other Issues

Epistemology is a broad field. Other issues include:

the nature of perception; [27]
the nature of understanding; [28]
whether we should trust our peers when they disagree with us; [29]
the relationships between epistemology, trust, and justice; [30]
how different reasons for belief (not just epistemic reasons) should affect us or determine whether we have knowledge; [31]
what value there is, if any, in having knowledge, especially in contrast to mere true belief; [32]
whether ‘knowledge’ means the same thing in all contexts. [33]
whether knowledge requires certainty; [34]
whether philosophy should be continuous with, or even replaced by, science. [35]

And many more. [36]

7. Conclusion

Some philosophers believe that epistemology is “first philosophy,” fundamental to the rest of philosophy and inquiry, since all areas of study and learning seek understanding, justified beliefs, and knowledge. If they are correct, an understanding of at least the basics of epistemology is important for all thinking people. [37]

[1] In constructing this overview, I roughly follow online encyclopedias such as in Steup 2019 and Truncellito 2019 and textbooks such as BonJour 2002, Huemer 2002, and Steup and Sosa 2005. ‘Epistemology’ comes from Greek roots meaning the study of, or discourse about, knowledge.

[2] Here, we are talking about what’s sometimes called ‘propositional’ knowledge or ‘knowledge-that.’ But there are other mental facts about you that may count as your having knowledge. Someone might know how to ride a bicycle, or know what it’s lik e to taste lemon. These aren’t obviously propositional knowledge, but they are natural enough ways of using the term ‘knowledge.’

[3] Gettier (1963) attributes this conception or something very much like it to Plato ( Theaetetus 20 I; Meno 98), Chisholm (1957: 16), and Ayer (1956). BonJour (2002: 27) attributes a similar conception to Descartes. Yet as Gettier argues, there may be examples of justified, true beliefs that don’t count as ‘knowledge.’ Suppose that your computer has an error and its internal clock is stuck at 11:49 am. It stays this way all morning and you don’t notice. Then you happen to wonder what time it is, look at your computer’s clock, and see ‘11:49 am.’ Suppose, however, that the time actually just happens to be 11:49 am right when you look at the clock. Your belief that it is 11:49 am might be justified (because you have no reason yet to doubt your computer’s clock), and true (because you happened to check the clock right at 11:49 am), but many would say it doesn’t count as ‘knowledge.’ Therefore, perhaps there is some fourth property that a belief must have to count as knowledge. For more, see Zagzebski 1994 and Chapman 2014 (“ The Gettier Problem ” in 1000-Word Philosophy ).

[4] Sometimes a person might say, ‘I just knew I wasn’t going to get that job–but I did!’ But arguably, that use of ‘knew’ is intended to emphasize the person’s certainty, not to say that they really knew something false. But see Hazlett 2010 which argues that knowledge doesn’t require truth.

[5] And see n. 4.

[6] For an introduction to the concept of epistemic justification, see Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long. Although the term of art for ‘whatever has to be added to true belief to create knowledge’ is ‘warrant.’ Cf. Plantinga 1993. Perhaps Gettier (1963) showed that warrant isn’t merely justification.

[7] See e.g. BonJour 2004: 5 on what epistemic justification is. Philosophers have described justification as occurring when a belief is likely to be true, or when a person who wants to have true beliefs ought to believe that belief, or when one has good reason to believe the belief, or when the belief is best-supported by the evidence. This question is actually fairly complex, however, because some (e.g. possibly Foley 1987: ch. 1; but see Kelly 2003 for critique) believe that epistemic justification is just a species of prudential or instrumental justification.

[8] I generally follow Pappas 2019; refer there for more information. In more detail: an internalist might say (as ‘accessibilists’ say) that justification depends on what you are aware of from the first-person perspective, or (as ‘mentalists’ say) on the current content of your mental states, or (as ‘evidentialists’ say) on the evidence available to you. Externalists might say (as ‘reliabilists’ say) that justification depends on one’s belief’s having been formed by a reliable belief-forming mechanism, or (as ‘proper functionalists’ say) by the proper functioning of your cognitive apparatus. Most generally, evidentialism, accessibilism, mentalism, and deontology are usually thought of as ‘internalist’ theories of epistemic justification, since they say your justification depends on factors internal to your mind or first-person awareness. And reliabilism, proper-functionalism, and virtue epistemology are normally thought of as ‘externalist’ theories of epistemic justification, since whether a belief was reliably formed, for example, may depend on factors you have no first-person access to. See e.g. Fumerton 1995 and BonJour and Sosa 2003, as well as Pappas 2019. One might also take the position that internalists and externalists are simply describing two different phenomena, both philosophically important, that are sometimes both referred to as ‘justification; cf. BonJour 2002: 233-7 and Pasnau 2013: 1008 ff. For more about specific internalist and externalist theories, see Conee and Feldman 2004 for evidentialism; Chisholm 1977: 17 for accessibilism; Conee and Feldman 2001 for mentalism; Alston 1989: 115-52 for deontology; Goldman 1979 for reliabilism; Plantinga 1993: 41 ff. and Bergmann 2006: ch. 5 for proper-functionalism; and Turri et al. 2019 for an introduction to virtue epistemology.

[9] One more note: There could be justified, false beliefs. For example, someone might do a really great job of framing you for a crime you didn’t commit, and so people would be justified in believing that you committed the crime, yet you really are innocent and so their justified belief is false. Such beliefs are part of the standard presentation of Gettier (1963) cases. Of course, a few philosophers have questioned whether justified or warranted false beliefs are possible (Sturgeon 1993; Merricks 1995).

[10] See for example Steup 2019: § 4.2. I assume that introspection is fundamentally empirical, at least in the sense necessary to make the a priori -empirical distinction most illuminating (BonJour 1998: 7).

[11] But not normally independent of any empirical observation at all. For example, we might need empirical observation to acquire the relevant concept in the first place. See e.g. BonJour 1998: 9.

[12] Perhaps moral knowledge, if it exists, is also a priori (cf. Huemer 2005). It’s difficult to imagine seeing, with my eyes , that stealing is wrong.

[13] Some famous rationalists include Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz; some famous empiricists include Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Yet these categorizations aren’t 100% neat; for example, Locke and Berkeley are normally counted among the empiricists, but they may have made some limited room for a priori knowledge as well. See Markie 2019: § 1.2. Also, strictly speaking, when I talk about these different types of sentences, what I’m referring to is the distinction between analytic sentences ( very roughly, sentences that are true by definition, e.g. ‘all red squares are red’) and synthetic sentences (sentences that are not merely true by definition, e.g. ‘all red squares are somewhere on Earth’), such that rationalists believe in the synthetic a priori and empiricists don’t. For a general introduction to this debate, see Markie 2019.

[14] See Anderson 2020 for an overview.

[15] Jaggar 1988.

[16] Infinitists (e.g. Klein 1998) say that the regress goes back forever, but that our beliefs can still be justified.

[17] One of the most-important historical presentations of foundationalism is in Descartes (cf. Newman 2019: § 2.1). More-recent defenders include Pryor (2000) and Huemer (2001). Foundationalists face the challenge of explaining what could justify a belief other than an inference from some other belief. One answer that has received much attention recently is to appeal to some principle of conservatism; see e.g. Huemer 2001. Perhaps, for example, if it appears to you as if something is true, that appearance is enough to justify the belief.

[18] To say that these beliefs are coherent might mean, for example, that they are all logically consistent and mutually supporting. Thus for coherentists, in some sense, the regress of inference “circles back” on itself. Influential coherentists include Lewis (1946); Quine and Ullian (1970) and the early BonJour (1985). A more recent example is Poston (2014). Coherentists face their own challenges, for example, why there needs to be any “input” from outside one’s own mind (cf. BonJour 1985: ch. 6) in order to have a set of justified beliefs. Why isn’t mere coherence with the rest of one’s beliefs enough?

[19] See e.g. Descartes 1984 [1641]: 13.

[20] Sinnott-Armstrong 2020.

[21] Forrest 2020.

[22] Cf. Russell 2019 [1921]: 71-84.

[23] Hume 1896 [1739-40]: bk. I, part III, § VI.

[24] See e.g. Chakravartty 2019 for an overview of scientific realism and anti-realism.

[25] Mill 1872: 243; Duddington 1919; Ayer 1953.

[26] Comesaña and Klein 2019: § 5.

[27] See e.g. Berkeley 1904 [1710]; Austin 1962; and Lyons 2019 for an overview.

[28] Gordon n.d.

[29] See e.g. Frances and Matheson 2019: § 5.

[30] Fricker 2007; Alcoff 2010.

[31] See e.g. Stanley 2005.

[32] Prichard et al. 2019.

[33] See e.g. Cohen 1986; DeRose 1992.

[34] Butchvarov 1970.

[35] Quine 1969; Kornblith 2002.

[36] For excellent overviews, see Steup 2019; Truncellito 2019; Steup, Turri, and Sosa 2013; BonJour 2002; and Huemer 2002.

[37] Perhaps in order to know whether one has acquired any knowledge, one must know what knowledge is and how we achieve it. This is the basis of Descartes’s 1984 [1641] strategy.

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Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus. shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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Overview – The Definition of Knowledge

The definition of knowledge is one of the oldest questions of philosophy. Plato’s answer, that knowledge is justified true belief , stood for thousands of years – until a 1963 philosophy paper by philosopher Edmund Gettier challenged this definition.

Gettier described two scenarios – now known as Gettier cases – where an individual has a justified true belief but that is not knowledge.

Since Gettier’s challenge to the justified true belief definition, various alternative accounts of knowledge have been proposed. The goal of these accounts is to define ‘knowledge’ in a way that rules out Gettier cases whilst still capturing all instances of what we consider to be knowledge.

A Level philosophy looks at 5 definitions of knowledge :

Justified true belief (the tripartite definition)
JTB + No false lemmas

Reliabilism

Virtue epistemology, infallibilism.

It’s important to first distinguish the kind of knowledge we’re discussing here. Broadly, there are three kinds of knowledge:

Ability: knowledge how – e.g. “I know how to ride a bike”
Acquaintance: knowledge of – e.g. “I know Fred well”
Propositional: knowledge that – e.g. “I know that London is the capital of England”

When we talk about the definition of knowledge, we are talking about the definition of propositional knowledge specifically.

Justified True Belief

The tripartite definition.

In Theaetetus , Plato argues that knowledge is “true belief accompanied by a rational account”. This got simplified to:

‘Justified true belief’ is known as the tripartite definition of knowledge.

Necessary and sufficient conditions

The name of the game in defining ‘knowledge’ is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions.

For example, ‘unmarried’ and ‘man’ are both necessary to be a ‘bachelor’ because if you don’t meet both these conditions you’re not a bachelor. Further, being an ‘unmarried man’ is sufficient to be a ‘bachelor’ because everything that meets these conditions is a bachelor. So, ‘unmarried man’ is a good definition of ‘bachelor’ because it provides both the necessary and sufficient conditions of that term.

The correct definition of ‘knowledge’ will work the same way. Firstly, we can argue that ‘justified’, ‘true’, and ‘belief’ are all necessary for knowledge.

For example, you can’t know something if it isn’t true . If someone said, “I know that the moon is made of green cheese” you wouldn’t consider that knowledge because it isn’t true.

Similarly, you can’t know something you don’t believe. It just wouldn’t make sense, for example, to say “I know today is Monday but I don’t believe today is Monday.”

And finally, justification . Suppose someone asks you if you know how many moons Pluto has. You have no interest in astronomy but just have a strong feeling about the number 5 because it’s your lucky number or whatever. You’d be right – Pluto does indeed have 5 moons – but it seems a bit of a stretch to say you knew Pluto has 5 moons. Your true belief “Pluto has 5 moons” is not properly justified and so would not count as knowledge.

So, ‘justified’, ‘true’, and ‘belief’ may each be necessary for knowledge. But are these conditions sufficient? If ‘justified true belief’ is also a sufficient definition of knowledge, then everything that is a justified true belief will be knowledge. However, this is challenged by Gettier cases .

Problem: Gettier cases

Gettier’s paper describes two scenarios where an individual has a justified true belief that is not knowledge. Both scenarios describe a belief that fails to count as knowledge because the justified belief is only true as a result of luck .

Gettier case 1

Smith and Jones are interviewing for the same job
Smith hears the interviewer say “I’m going to give Jones 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 gets the job, not Jones
Then Smith looks in his pocket and, by coincidence, he also has 10 coins in his pocket

Smith’s belief “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket” is:

Justified: he hears the interviewer say Jones will get the job and he sees that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket
True: the man who gets the job (Smith) does indeed have 10 coins in his pocket

This shows that the tripartite definition of knowledge is not sufficient : you can have a justified true belief that is not knowledge.

Gettier case 2

Gettier’s second example relies on the logical principle of disjunction introduction (or, more simply, addition ).

Disjunction introduction says that if you have a true statement and add “or some other statement” then the full statement (i.e. “true statement or some other statement”) is also true.

For example: “London is the capital of England” is true. And so the statement “either London is the capital of England or the moon is made of green cheese” is also true, because London is the capital of England. Even though the second part (“the moon is made of green cheese”) is false, the overall statement is true because the or means only one part has to be true (in this case “London is the capital of England”).

Gettier’s second example is as follows:

Smith has a justified belief that “Jones owns a Ford”
So, using the principle of disjunctive introduction above, Smith can form the further justified belief that “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona”
Smith thinks his belief that “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is true because the first condition is true (i.e. that Jones owns a Ford)
But it turns out that Jones does not own a Ford
However, by sheer coincidence, Brown is in Barcelona

So, Smith’s belief that “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is:

True: “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” turns out to be true. But Smith thought it was true because of the first condition (Jones owns a Ford) whereas it turns out it is true because of the second condition (Brown is in Barcelona)
Justified: The original belief “Jones owns a Ford” is justified, and so disjunction introduction means that the second belief “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is also justified.

But despite being a justified true belief, it is wrong to say that Smith’s belief counts as knowledge, because it was just luck that led to him being correct.

This again shows that the tripartite definition of knowledge is not sufficient .

Problem: Not necessary

The majority of this debate focuses on whether the tripartite definition is sufficient for knowledge, but you can potentially argue that one or more of the conditions are not necessary :

Justification: The fact that children and animals appear to possess knowledge suggests that justification is not necessary for knowledge because children and animals have knowledge even though they can’t justify it.
Truth: Zagzebski’s definition of knowledge does not explicitly include true as a condition but instead talks about acts of intellectual virtue (which kind of implies truth but anyway). Some philosophers reject the very idea of objective truth, but that’s getting a bit off-piste.
Belief: You can potentially imagine scenarios where someone knows something but doesn’t believe it. For example, you may have heard years ago that Pluto has 5 moons but forgotten it consciously . But when asked years later “how many moons does Pluto have?” you correctly answer “5” – even though you’re not sure about this answer and don’t really believe it.

Alternative definitions of knowledge

Gettier cases are a devastating problem for the tripartite definition of knowledge .

In response, philosophers have tried to come up with new definitions of knowledge that avoid Gettier cases.

Generally, these new definitions seek to refine the justification condition of the tripartite definition. True and belief remain unchanged.

JTB + no false lemmas

The no false lemmas definition of knowledge aims to strengthen the justification condition of the tripartite definition.

It says that James has knowledge of P if:

James believes that P
James’s belief is justified
James did not infer that P from anything false

So, basically, it adds an extra condition to the tripartite definition . It says knowledge is justified true belief + that is not inferred from anything false (a false lemma).

This avoids the problems of Gettier cases because Smith’s belief “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket” is inferred from the false lemma “Jones will get the job” .

The tripartite definition says Smith’s belief is knowledge, even though it isn’t
The no false lemmas response says Smith’s belief is not knowledge, which is correct.

So, in this instance, the no false lemmas definition appears to be a more accurate account of knowledge than the tripartite view: it avoids saying Gettier cases count as knowledge.

Problem: fake barn county

However, the no false lemmas definition of knowledge faces a similar problem: the fake barn county situation:

Justified True Belief and Knowledge Venn Diagram

In ‘fake barn county’, the locals create fake barns that look identical to real barns
Henry is driving through fake barn county, but he doesn’t know the locals do this
These beliefs are not knowledge , because they are not true – the barns are fake
This time the belief is true
It’s also justified by his visual perception of the barn
And it’s not inferred from anything false.

According to the no false lemmas definition, Henry’s belief is knowledge.

But this shows that the no false lemmas definition must be false. Henry’s belief is clearly not knowledge – he’s just lucky in this instance.

Reliabilism says James knows that P if:

James’s belief that P is caused by a reliable method

A reliable method is one that produces a high percentage of true beliefs.

So, if you have good eyesight, it’s likely that your eyesight would constitute a reliable method of forming true beliefs. If you have an accurate memory, it’s likely your memory would also be a reliable method for forming true beliefs. If a website is consistent in reporting the truth, that website would also count as a reliable method.

But if you form a belief through an unreliable method – for example by simply guessing or using a biased source – then it would not count as knowledge even if the resultant belief is true.

Children and Animals

An advantage of reliabilism is that it allows for young children and animals to have knowledge. Typically, we attribute knowledge to young children and animals. For example, it seems perfectly sensible to say that a seagull knows where to find food or that a baby knows when its mother is speaking.

However, pretty much all the other definitions of knowledge considered here imply that animals and young children can not have knowledge. For example, a seagull or a baby can’t justify its beliefs and so justified true belief rules out seagulls and young babies from having knowledge. Similarly, if virtue epistemology is the correct definition, it is hard to see how a seagull or a newly born baby could possess intellectual virtues of care about forming true beliefs and thus possess knowledge.

However, both young children and animals are capable of forming beliefs via reliable processes, e.g. their eyesight, and so according to reliabilism are capable of possessing knowledge.

You can argue against reliabilism using the same fake barn county argument above : Henry’s true belief that “there’s a barn” is caused by a reliable process – his visual perception. Reliabilism would thus (incorrectly) say that Henry knows “there’s a barn” even though his belief is only true as a result of luck.

There are several forms of virtue epistemology (we will look at two), but common to all virtue epistemology definitions of knowledge is a link between a belief and intellectual virtues . Intellectual virtues are somewhat analogous to the sort of moral virtues considered in Aristotle’s virtue theory in moral philosophy . However, instead of being concerned with moral good, intellectual virtues are about epistemic good. For example, an intellectually virtuous person would have traits such as being rational, caring about what’s true, and a good memory.

Linda Zagzebski: What is Knowledge?

Formula for creating gettier-style cases.

Philosopher Linda Zagzebski argues that definitions of knowledge of the kind we have looked at so far (i.e. ‘true belief + some third condition ’) will always fall victim to Gettier-style cases. She provides a formula for constructing such Gettier cases to defeat these definitions:

E.g. Henry’s belief “there’s a barn” when he is looking at the fake barns
E.g. Henry’s belief “there’s a barn” when he is looking at the one real barn
In the second case, the belief will still fit the definition (‘true belief + some third condition ’) because it’s basically the same as the first case
But the second case won’t be knowledge, because it’s only true due to luck

Zagzebski argues that this formula will always provide a means to defeat any definition of knowledge that takes the form ‘true belief + some third condition’ (whether that third condition is justification , formed by a reliable process , or whatever).

The reason for this is that truth and the third condition are simply added together, but not linked ( the belief is not apt , to use Sosa’s terminology ). The fact that truth and the third condition are not linked leaves a gap where lucky cases can incorrectly fit the definition.

Zagzebski’s definition of knowledge

The issues resulting from the gap between truth and the third condition motivate Zagzebski to do away with the ‘truth’ condition altogether. Instead, Zagzebski’s analysis of knowledge is that James knows that P if:

James’s belief that P arises from an act of intellectual virtue

However, in Zagzebski’s analysis of knowledge, the ‘truth’ of the belief is kind of implied by the idea of an act of intellectual virtues. This can be shown by drawing a comparison with moral virtue :

An act of moral virtue is one where the actor both intends to do good and achieves that goal. For example, intending to help an old lady across the road but killing her in the process is not an act of moral virtue because it doesn’t achieve a virtuous goal (despite the virtuous intent). Likewise, helping the old lady across the road because you think she will give you money is not an act of moral virtue – even though it succeeds in achieving a virtuous goal – because your intentions aren’t good.

Intellectual virtue is similar: You must both have the correct motivation (e.g. you want to find the truth) and succeed as a result of that virtue (i.e. your belief turns out to be true because you acted virtuously).

Virtues motivate us to pursue what is good. In the case of knowledge, good knowledge is also true. Secondly, virtues enable us to achieve our goals (in the same way a virtuous i.e. good knife enables you to cut) and so intellectual virtues would enable you to reliably form true beliefs.

Sosa’s virtue epistemology

Another virtue epistemology approach to knowledge is Ernest Sosa’s definition of apt belief .

Sosa uses the following analogy to argue that knowledge, like a virtuous shot in archery, has the following three properties: Accuracy , adroitness , and aptness .

Returning to the fake barn county example , Sosa’s virtue epistemology could (correctly) say Henry’s belief “there’s a barn” in fake barn county would not qualify as knowledge – despite being true and formed by a reliable method – because it is not apt . Yes, Henry’s belief is accurate (i.e. true) and adroit (i.e. Henry has good eyesight etc.), but he only formed the true belief as a result of luck, not because he used his intellectual virtues.

Problem: children and animals

As mentioned in more detail in the reliabilism section above , a potential criticism of virtue epistemology is that it appears to rule out the possibility of young children or babies possessing knowledge, despite the fact that they arguably can know many things.

Infallibilism argues that for a belief to count as knowledge , it must be true and justified in such a way as to make it certain .

So, even though Smith has good reasons for his beliefs in the Gettier case , they’re not good enough to provide certainty . Certainty, to philosophers like Descartes, means the impossibility of doubt .

In the Gettier case, Smith might have misheard the interviewer say he was going to give Jones the job. Or, even more extreme, Smith might be a brain in a vat and Jones may not even exist! Either of these scenarios – however unlikely – raise the possibility of doubt.

Problem: too strict

So, infallibilism correctly says Smith’s belief in the Gettier case does not count as knowledge.

But it also says pretty much everything fails to qualify as knowledge!

“I know that water boils at 100 ° c” – can this be doubted? Of course it can! Your science teachers might have been lying to you, you might have misread your thermometer, you might be a brain in a vat and there’s no such thing as water!

So, whereas Gettier cases show the tripartite definition to set the bar too low for knowledge, infallibilism sets the bar way too high – barely anything can be known! In other words, we can argue that certainty is not a necessary condition of knowledge.

Knowledge from Perception>>>

7.2 Knowledge

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify and explain the elements of Plato’s traditional account of knowledge.
Describe the Gettier problem.
Recall a Gettier case and explain how it is a counterexample to the traditional account of knowledge.
Identify and explain a way of thinking that attempts to solve the Gettier problem.

What does it mean to say that one knows something? Knowledge is an important concept in all areas of thought. Knowledge is the goal and therefore enjoys a special status. Investigating the nature of knowledge reveals the importance of other concepts that are key to epistemological theorizing—justification in particular.

Plato and the Traditional Account of Knowledge

Plato , one of the most important of the Greek philosophers, hypothesized that knowledge is justified true belief. Plato’s analysis is known as the traditional account of knowledge . Plato’s definition is that a person S knows proposition P if and only if

S believes P, and
S is justified in believing P (Plato 1997b).

Plato’s hypothesis on knowledge, often referred to as the JTB account (because it is “ justified true belief ”), is highly intuitive. To say “John knows P, but he does not believe P” sounds wrong. In order to know something, a subject must first believe it. And one also cannot say “Ali knows P, but P is false.” A person simply cannot have knowledge of false things. Knowledge requires truth. Last, someone should not claim to know P if they have no reason to believe P (a reason to believe being justification for P).

Problems with the Traditional Account of Knowledge

Amazingly, Plato ’s view that knowledge is justified true belief was generally accepted until the 20th century (over 2,000 years!). But once this analysis was questioned, a flurry of developments occurred within epistemology in the latter half of the 20th century. This section discusses the counterexample method at play in the dialectic concerning what knowledge is. Plato’s JTB analysis was the first to come under scrutiny.

In 1963, American philosopher Edmund Gettier (1927–2021) published a short paper titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” which upended the JTB canon in Western philosophy. Gettier presents two counterexamples to Plato’s analysis of knowledge. In these counterexamples, a person seems to have a justified true belief, yet they do not seem to have knowledge. While Gettier is credited with the first popular counterexample to the JTB account, he was not the first philosopher to articulate a counterexample that calls into question Plato’s analysis. But because Gettier published the first influential account, any example that seems to undermine Plato’s JTB account of knowledge is called a Gettier case . Gettier cases illustrate the inadequacy of the JTB account—a problem referred to as the Gettier problem .

Dharmakīrti’s Mirage

The earliest known Gettier case, long predating the term, was conceived by the eighth century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti . Dharmakīrti’s case asks one to imagine a weary nomad traveling across the desert in search of water (Dreyfus 1997). The traveler crests a mountain and sees what appears to be an oasis in the valley below, and so comes to believe that there is water in the valley. However, the oasis is just a mirage. Yet there is water in the valley, but it is just beneath the surface of the land where the mirage is. The traveler is justified in believing there is water in the valley due to sensory experience. Furthermore, it is true that there is water in the valley. However, the traveler’s belief does not seem to count as knowledge. Dharmakīrti’s conclusion is that the traveler cannot be said to know there is water in the valley because the traveler’s reason for believing that there is water in the valley is an illusory mirage.

Russell’s Case

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” The next case relies on this fact about broken clocks. In 1948, Bertrand Russell offered a case in which a man looks up at a stopped clock at exactly the correct time:

There is the man who looks at a clock which is not going, though he thinks it is, and who happens to look at it at the moment when it is right; this man acquires a true belief as to the time of day, but cannot be said to have knowledge. (Russell 1948, 154)

Imagine that the clock the man looks at is known for its reliability. Hence, the man is justified in believing that the time is, for example, 4:30. And, as the cases supposes, it is true that it is 4:30. However, given that the clock is not working and that the man happens to look up at one of the two times a day that the clock is correct, it is only a matter of luck that his belief happens to be true. Hence, Russell concludes that the man cannot be said to know the correct time.

Fake Barn Country

The last Gettier case we will look at is from American philosopher Carl Ginet (b. 1932) (Goldman 1976). Henry is driving through a bucolic area of farmland and barns. What he doesn’t realize, however, is that the area is currently being used as a movie set, and all the barns save one are actually barn facades. While looking at one of the barns, Henry says to himself, “That is a barn.” Luckily for Henry, the one he points to is the one true barn in the area. Again, all the conditions in Plato’s analysis of knowledge are met. It is true that Henry is looking at a real barn, and he believes it is a barn. Furthermore, he has come to this belief utilizing justifiable means—he is using his vision, in normal lighting, to identify a common object (a barn). Yet one cannot reasonably say that Henry knows the barn is a barn because he could have, by chance, accidentally identified one of the fake barns as a true barn. He fortunately happens to pick the one true barn.

Table 7.2 summarizes the Gettier cases discussed in this chapter.

Fixing Plato’s Traditional Account of Knowledge

Gettier cases demonstrate that Plato ’s traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief is wrong. Specifically, Gettier cases show that a belief being true and justified is not sufficient for that belief to count as knowledge. In all the cases discussed, the subject seems to have a justified true belief but not knowledge. Notice that this does not mean that belief, truth, or justification is not necessary for knowledge. Indeed, when speaking of propositional knowledge, all philosophers grant that belief and truth are necessary conditions for knowledge. A person cannot be said to know a proposition if they do not believe that proposition. And clearly, if a belief is to count as knowledge, then that believe simply cannot be false. Accordingly, attempts to solve the Gettier problem do one of two things: either they replace the justification condition with something more robust, or they add a fourth condition to JTB to make the account sufficient.

No False Premises

In Dharmakīrti’s case, the nomad believes there is water in the valley based on the false belief that a mirage is an oasis. And in Russell’s case, the man bases his true belief about the time on the false belief that the clock he’s looking at is working. In both cases, the inference that leads to the true belief passes through false premises. In response to this fact, American philosopher Gilbert Harman (1928–2021) suggested adding a condition to the JTB account that he termed “no false lemmas” (Harman 1973). A false lemma is a false premise, or step in the reasoning process. Harman’s fourth condition is that a person’s belief cannot be based on an inference that uses false premises. According to Harman, S knows P if and only if (1) P is true, (2) S believes P, (3) S is justified in believing P, and (4) S did not infer P from any falsehoods.

Harman theorized that many counterexamples to the traditional account share a similar feature: the truth of the belief is not appropriately connected to the evidence used to deduce that belief. Going back to Dharmakīrti ’s case, what makes the statement “There’s water in the valley” true is the fact that there is water below the surface. However, the nomad comes to believe that there is water based on the mistaken belief that a mirage is an oasis, so what makes the belief true is not connected to the reason the nomad believes it. If Harman’s condition that the reasoning that leads to belief cannot pass through false steps is added, then the nomad’s belief no longer counts as knowledge.

Harman ’s emendation explains why the nomad does not have knowledge and accounts for the intuition that the man in Russell’s case does not actually know what time it is. However, this cannot take care of all Gettier cases . Consider the case of Henry in fake barn country. Henry comes to believe he is looking at a barn based on his perceptual experience of the barn in front of him. And Henry does look at a real barn. He does not reason through any false premises, such as “All the structures on my drive are barns.” His inference flows directly from his perceptual experience of a real barn. Yet it is a matter of luck that Henry isn’t looking at one of the many barn facades in the area, so his belief still does not seem to count as knowledge. Because Harman’s account is vulnerable to the barn counterexample, it does not solve the Gettier problem.

Ruling Out Defeaters and Alternatives

While driving through fake barn country, Henry happens to form the belief “That is a barn” when looking at the only real barn in the area. While Henry’s belief is not based on false premises, there still seems to be something wrong with it. Why? The problem is that certain facts about Henry’s environment (that it is filled with barn facades), if known, would undermine his confidence in the belief. That the area is predominantly filled with barn facades is what is known as a defeater because it serves to defeat the justification for his belief. Contemporary American philosophers Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson Jr. suggest that justified true belief is knowledge as long as there are no existing defeaters of the belief (Lehrer and Paxson 1969). S has knowledge that P if and only if (1) P is true, (2) S believes P, (3) S is justified in believing P, and (4) there exist no defeaters for P. The added fourth condition means that there cannot exist evidence that, if believed by S, would undermine S’s justification.

The “no defeaters” condition solves all three Gettier cases discussed so far because in each case, there exists evidence that, if possessed by the subject, would undermine their justification. Henry cannot be said to know he’s looking at a barn because of the evidence that most of the barns in the area are fake, and Russell’s man doesn’t know the time because the clock is stopped. The “no defeaters” condition thus helps solve many Gettier cases. However, we now need a thorough account of when evidence counts as a defeater . We are told that a defeater is evidence that would undermine a person’s justification but not how it does this. It cannot be that all evidence that weakens a belief is a defeater because this would make knowledge attainment much more difficult. For many of our justified true beliefs , there exists some evidence that we are unaware of that could weaken our justification. For example, we get many beliefs from other people. Research indicates that people tell an average of one lie per day (DePaulo et al. 1996; Serota, Levine, and Boster 2010). So when someone tells you something in conversation, often it is true that the person has lied once today. Is the evidence that a person has lied once today enough evidence to undermine your justification for believing what they tell you?

Notice that because a defeater is evidence that would undermine a person’s justification, what counts as a defeater depends on what justification is. Of the theories of knowledge examined so far, all of them treat justification as basic. They state that a belief must be justified but not how to measure or determine justification.

The Problem with Justification

The traditional analysis of knowledge explains that knowledge is justified true belief. But even if we accept this definition, we could still wonder whether a true belief is knowledge because we may wonder if it is justified. What counts as justification ? Justification is a rather broad concept. Instead of simply stating that justification is necessary for knowledge, perhaps a thorough account of knowledge ought to instead spell out what this means. The next section looks more deeply at how to understand justification and how some theorists suggest replacing the justification condition in order to solve the Gettier problem.

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Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
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Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction
Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/7-2-knowledge

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Knowledge How

In introductory classes to epistemology, we are taught to distinguish between three different kinds of knowledge. The first kind is acquaintance knowledge : we know our mothers, our friends, our pets, etc., by being acquainted with them. The second kind is knowledge of facts, propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that : this is the sort of knowledge we acquire when we learn that, say, Ithaca is in New York State or that Turin is located in Italy. It is customary to add to the list a third kind of knowledge that is supposed to be distinct both from acquaintance knowledge and from propositional knowledge. One possesses this knowledge when one can be truly described as knowing how to do something: play the piano, make a pie, walk, speak, create, build, and so on.

The distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that was brought to scrutiny in analytic philosophy by Ryle in his seminal The Concept of Mind (1949), where he raised some of the now classical objections to the so-called “intellectualist legend”: the view that knowledge-how amounts to knowledge-that. Ryle instead advocated an “anti-intellectualist” view of knowledge-how according to which knowledge-how and knowledge-that are distinct kinds of knowledge, and manifestations of knowledge-how are not necessarily manifestations of knowledge-that. This anti-intellectualism has been the received view among philosophers for a long time. Even psychologists and neuroscientists have explicitly appealed to Ryle’s classical distinction when discussing their empirical findings (e.g., Cohen & Squire 1980; Anderson 1983). Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, a renewed interest by epistemologists in the nature of knowledge-how has brought new life to the debate, where new versions of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism have been developed and argued for. The debate is partly epistemological: is knowledge-how an altogether distinct kind of knowledge, different from knowledge-that? But it is also about a psychological question: what kind of psychological state is knowledge-how? The goal of this entry is to overview the debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists, while highlighting the implications of this debate for related questions concerning intelligence, cognition, language, and skills.

This entry starts by looking at some classical arguments against intellectualism about knowledge-how: the regress argument (section 1), the insufficiency argument (section 2), and the gradability argument (section 3). Then two motivating arguments for intellectualism are considered: the linguistic argument (section 4) and the action theory argument (section 5). Section 6 overviews the recent epistemological debate on whether knowledge-how and propositional knowledge have the same epistemic profile. Section 7 discusses the cognitive science argument against intellectualism. Section 8 surveys what forms anti-intellectualism about knowledge-how has taken in the recent literature. Section 9 looks at the relation between knowledge-how and skills. Section 10 discusses knowledge-how and other related topics.

1.1 The Contemplation Argument

1.2 the employment regress, 1.3 a revival of the regress argument, 1.4 lewis carroll’s regress, 2. the sufficiency argument, 3. the gradability argument, 4.1 the details of the intellectualist proposal, 4.2 first group of objections, 4.3 second group of objections, 4.4 third group of objections, 5. the action theory argument and the question of joint action, 6.1 knowledge-how and belief, 6.2 knowledge-how and gettier, 6.3 knowledge how, defeasibility, and testimony, 7.1 the argument, 7.2 improving the argument, 7.3 articulability, 7.4 knowledge-how in preverbal children and nonhuman animals, 8.1 revisionary intellectualism, 8.2 ability based anti-intellectualism.

8.3 Knowledge-How and Skill

9.1 Skill Across Cultures

9.2 intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about skill, 9.3 skills in epistemology, 9.4 the nature of skilled action, 10. knowledge-how and other related topics, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the regress argument.

Ryle’s most famous objection to intellectualist accounts of skills and knowledge-how is that they lead to a vicious regress:

The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle. (1949: 19)

Ryle concludes:

“Intelligent” cannot be defined in terms of “intellectual” or “knowing how” in terms of “knowing that”, (1949: 20)

on pain of a vicious regress (see also Ryle 1946: 22). Exactly how to reconstruct Ryle’s argument is a matter of controversy (Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011b; Bengson & Moffett 2011a; Cath 2013; Fantl 2011; Kremer 2020). The next sections discuss different possible ways of understanding the regress challenge and possible responses on behalf of intellectualism.

The contemplation argument assumes for reductio that for any action to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation of “contemplating” has to be performed first :

Contemplation premise (CP): In order to employ one’s knowledge that p , one must contemplate the proposition p .

Assume in addition the following definition of intellectualism:

Strong intellectualism (SI) : For an action Φ, knowing how to Φ consists in knowing some proposition p .

And assume further that in performing an action Φ, one employs one’s knowledge-how to Φ:

Action premise (AP) : For an action Φ, if one Φs, then one employs one’s knowledge-how to Φ.

With these premises the regress goes as follows. Suppose that one performs an action Φ:

By AP, one employs one’s knowledge-how to Φ.
By SI, one employs the knowledge that p , for some p .
So, by CP, one contemplates p .
But contemplating p is an action.
So by AP, if one contemplates p, one employs one’s knowledge-how to contemplate p .
By CP, one ought to contemplate another proposition q , for some q .

The contemplation argument aims at showing the falsity of SI, by showing that its truth, together with the truth of AP and CP, triggers an infinite regress. If SI were true, then performing any action would require contemplating an infinite number of propositions of ever-increasing complexity. On the assumption that this cannot be done in a finite amount of time, the argument goes, accepting SI would lead to the clearly absurd conclusion that no agent could ever perform an action within a finite time (see Fantl 2011: 122).

The question is whether AP and CP are plausible premises. Following Ginet (1975), Stanley & Williamson (2001) argue that AP is plausible only if the relevant Φ is an intentional action. To use one of Ryle’s (1949: 33) own examples, if a clumsy person inadvertently tumbles, it does not follow that in doing so, they employ their knowledge-how to tumble. By contrast, the clown employs their knowledge-how when they tumble on purpose. Nevertheless, if we restrict AP to intentional actions, then the regress can be stopped by observing that contemplating a proposition might happen non-intentionally. For example, when I employ my knowledge that there is a red light ahead by applying the brakes, I need not intentionally contemplate the proposition that there is a red light ahead. Correspondingly, if contemplating a proposition can be done non-intentionally, such contemplation is not the kind of action that requires us to know how to perform it—therefore, it does not trigger the restricted AP and the regress is blocked altogether. Some object that the contemplation in this example might be intentional but unconscious (as suggested by Noë 2005: 282). But it is unclear what reasons there are for thinking that every time one employs one’s knowledge, one intentionally contemplates the relevant proposition (Cath 2013: 365–366).

The Contemplation Argument also assumes CP—i.e., that in order to employ propositional knowledge when acting, one ought to contemplate the relevant proposition. Against CP, Ginet (1975: 7) observes that one might manifest one’s knowledge that one can get the door open by turning the knob and pushing it (as well as my knowledge that there is a door there) by performing that operation quite automatically as one leaves the room; and one may do this without formulating (in one’s mind or out loud) that proposition or any other relevant proposition. Ginet concludes that Ryle’s original argument does not teach us that intellectualism about knowledge-how is false but only that knowledge can be acted upon and manifested without requiring any contemplation on the part of the agent. Indeed, some scholars think that this last weaker claim was the only goal of Ryle’s original argument (Rosefeldt 2004; Sax 2010).

However, CP is not needed in order to trigger a regress. Perhaps the argument can be salvaged by replacing contemplation with a weaker relation. Consider replacing CP with EP:

The Employment Premise (EP): If one employs knowledge that p , one employs knowledge-how to employ one’s knowledge that p (and one’s state of knowledge that p is distinct from one’s state of knowing how to employ one’s knowledge that p ). (Cath 2013: 367–8)

The regress is triggered as before. Suppose one Φs:

By SI, that amounts to employing one’s knowledge that p , for some p .
By EP, one needs to employ one’s knowledge-how to employ one’s knowledge that p .
But employing one’s knowledge-how is an action.
By AP, one employs one’s knowledge-how about employing our knowledge-how to employ one’s knowledge that p .
By SI, that amounts to employing one’s knowledge of q , for some q .

Intellectualists might object to EP in ways similar to how CP was resisted—i.e., that not every action requires for its performance the employment of one’s knowledge-how: only intentional actions do, as the clown example suggests. According to this line of reply, employing one’s propositional knowledge might be more like a reflex in response to stimuli, rather than an action. Further, this version of the regress challenge may be accused of assuming that knowledge-that is “behaviorally inert” and needs to be intentionally selected or employed in order to be manifested. Yet, intellectualists have independent reasons to resist this picture (Stalnaker 2012). On the other hand, if Ryleans insist that employments of knowledge-that are actions of sort, it seems there is no principled reason why employments of knowledge-how would not be subject to the same requirement. Therefore, it looks like any regress generated for the intellectualist is generated for Ryle as well (Stanley 2011b: 14, 26; though see Fantl 2011 for a possible difference between the regress generated for Ryle and the regress generated for intellectualism).

A variety of actions—say, remembering to check the car’s blindspot when reversing—can be intelligent even though they are not intentional. Or one might manifest intelligence through processes —e.g., by coming to understand a difficult proposition, without them even being actions. If one accepts that intelligent performances, whether intentional or not, are necessarily guided by knowledge-how, one might try to recast the regress argument by replacing AP with IPP (Weatherson 2017):

Intelligent performance premise (IPP): For a performance Φ, if one Φs intelligently, one manifests one’s knowledge-how to Φ.

Now it seems plausible that one’s manifestation of propositional knowledge can be intelligent in some cases but not in others. For example, one might manifest one’s knowledge intelligently by bringing to bear one maxim that is appropriate instead of any other that is not to the particular situation which the agent faces. By IPP, if one’s manifestation of knowledge-that in a particular situation is intelligent, it requires one’s manifesting one’s knowledge-how. If intellectualism is true, that would in turn require manifesting one’s knowledge-that. If this manifesting of propositional knowledge is intelligent too, though unintentional, it requires knowledge-how. And so on. We get an infinite regress if one accepts that manifesting propositional knowledge can be an intelligent performance, also when it is not an intentional action. (For similar lines of argument, see also Fridland 2013, 2015; Löwenstein 2016: 276–80; Small 2017: 62–3).

Intellectualists might respond by distinguishing two senses in which a performance can be intelligent and two corresponding senses of manifestation, only one of which gives rise to the regress. First, an intelligent action might manifest one’s knowledge-how in the case that it is guided by this knowledge-how. On this reading, the regress is triggered. But there is also another—epistemic—sense in which an intelligent action manifests knowledge-how as long as it provides evidence for that knowledge-how. For example, the rings on a tree provide evidence for the tree’s age (hence manifest its age in the epistemic sense) but the rings on a tree are not guided by its age. Crucially, the regress does not arise on the epistemic sense of manifestation. Checking the blindspot might be intelligent in this epistemic sense of manifesting —providing evidence of—knowledge-how. Yet, this epistemic manifestation itself is not something that qualifies as intelligent or unintelligent.

A less discussed regress that can be found in Ryle (1946: 6–7) is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s (1895) regress. Suppose a student understands the premises of an argument and also its conclusion but fails to see that the conclusion follows. In order to help him, the teacher teaches him another proposition P —i.e., if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. The student understands this and yet fails to see how from the premises and the additional premise P the conclusion follows. A second hypothetical proposition is added to his store, the proposition that if the premises is true, the conclusion is true too. The student still fails to see. And so on. Ryle concludes:

Knowing a rule of inference is not possessing a bit of extra information but being able to perform an intelligent operation. Knowing a rule is knowing how. It is realized in performances which conform to the rule, not in theoretical citations of it. (1946: 7)

One might respond (cf. Stanley 2011b) to this regress challenge that the student does not really understand the premises of an argument by modus ponens ( p , if p then q ), for that involves grasping the concept of a conditional, and on an inferentialist understanding (Boghossian 1996, 2003), that would dispose one to accept the conclusion of an inference by that rule. Inferentialism about meaning is, however, a controversial doctrine (for several criticisms, see Williamson 2011, 2012). Other replies might be available. Maybe the student does not represent the rule practically (see next section), or she is simply incapable of granting that the rule applies to this case, for that would explain her failure to be appropriately disposed to arrive at the conclusion, given the truth of the premises. (For yet other versions of the regress challenge, see Noë 2005: 285–6 and Hetherington 2006).

The claim that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that encounters an immediate incredulous stare: how could propositional knowledge be sufficient for knowing how to do something? Ryle (1946: 5) himself poses this challenge as a starting point for his argument:

Obviously there is no truth or set of truths of which we could say “If only the stupid player had been informed of them, he would be a clever player”, or “When once he had been apprised of these truths he would play well”.

Certainly, one might know all the propositions that are relevant to how to perform a task, and yet fail to know how to perform it: knowledge-that does not seem sufficient for knowledge-how (see also Ryle 1940: 38–9).

In order to assess this objection, it is helpful to start with a toy intellectualist theory, on which knowledge-how is a matter of knowing, for some way or method to perform a task w , that w is in fact a way to perform it. In section 4 , we will see in more detail a linguistic argument for identifying knowledge-how with this sort of propositional knowledge (Stanley & Williamson 2001; Snowdon 2004). How could, the insufficiency objection goes, one know how to perform a task just in virtue of knowing a proposition about a way to perform it? Consider the following counterexample to intellectualism:

Swimming : Suppose I look at a swimmer’s swimming, and my swimming instructor pointing to the swimmer says to me, “That is a way in which you could swim too”. I believe my instructor and we may suppose that what she said is in fact true. I may thereby come to know a true answer to the question “How could I swim?” However, in the relevant sense, I may not have come to know how to swim. If I took a swimming test, I might still fail it. If thrown in the swimming pool, I might still drown. I do not know how to swim in the relevant sense and yet I do know a true proposition about how to swim.

In response to this sort of counterexample, intellectualists often appeal to “practical modes of presentation”: knowing a proposition observationally or demonstratively is not the same as knowing it practically. Knowledge-how is, at least in part, a matter of representing propositions about tasks and ways of executing tasks in a distinctively practical fashion. For one to know how to swim, in the relevant sense, one must know of a way to swim represented under a distinctive practical mode of presentation, which is essentially different from the observational or demonstrative mode of presentation in Swimming . This kind of practically represented propositional knowledge is what (some) intellectualists call knowledge-how and is what is absent in the example above.

The notion of practical modes of presentation has received several criticisms (Schiffer 2002; Koethe 2002; Noë 2005; Fantl 2011; Glick 2015), on the ground that it seems excessively obscure or even question begging. Koethe (2002: 327) worries that practical modes of presentation smuggle in an antecedent notion of knowledge-how (though see Fantl 2008: 461 for a response). This widespread skepticism about practical modes of presentation has led some intellectualists to explore ways of responding to the insufficiency objection that do not appeal to practical modes of presentation. For example, Stanley (2011b: 126) considers answering the sufficiency challenge in Swimming by appealing to the context-sensitivity of the ability modal “could”. According to Stanley, depending on how the context for the modal is restricted, “That is how you could swim” could mean either that that is how you can swim given your current physical state or that that is how you could swim after training . But coming to know that that is how I could swim after training is clearly not enough for me to come to know how to swim now. Instead, the argument goes, what one needs to know is the former proposition: that that is a way to swim given my current physical state .

Yet, it is unclear that even this response works. Consider a variant of the previous scenario, where Mary is a skilled swimmer who is one day affected by memory loss and so forgets how she is able to swim (Glick 2015). Nothing has changed in Mary’s physical state: she is still able to swim but she just has forgotten how she is able to swim. Suppose she is told, by looking at a recording of her swimming the day before, that that is how she can in fact swim given her current physical state. She might come to know how she is in fact able to swim (just like that!). Yet, she would still fail to know how to swim in the relevant sense and still drown if thrown into the pool.

So, practical modes of representation are hard to escape if intellectualism is to be defended against the sufficiency objection. To assuage concerns about the intelligibility of practical modes of presentation, Pavese (2015b) proposes we think of them along the lines of practical senses, which in turn can be modeled after computer programs. Programs determine an output, just like Fregean senses determine a referent; and they are practical in that they break down a task into the smallest parts that the system can execute (the primitive operations of the system as well as into primitive ways of combining those parts) so they ground the ability to perform a complex task in terms of the ability to perform all of its parts. On this view, if one represents a task practically, one represents all of its parts, and the combination of those parts, through instructions that one has the ability to execute. So representing practically a task entails that one has the ability to perform the corresponding task. (For a critical discussion of practical ways of thinking, see Mosdell 2019. Habgood-Coote 2018c argues that the classical generality problem for reliabilism (Feldman 1985; Conee & Feldman 1998) arises for intellectualism.)

The notion of distinctively practical concepts is motivated by work outside the debate on intellectualism about knowledge-how. Other scholars have discussed concepts that are practical in that they dissociate from semantic and observational concepts and play a central role in explaining behavior. Peacocke (1986: 49–50) talks of “action-based ways of thinking”, Israel, Perry,and Tutiya (1993: 534) of “executable ideas”, and Pacherie (2000, 2006) of “action concepts”. Mylopoulous and Pacherie (2017) suggest that executable action concepts might be needed to overcome the interface problem—the problem of how cognitive representations (intentions) interact with motor representations (Butterfill & Sinigaglia 2014). Pavese (forthcoming-b) advances an empirical-functional case for practical concepts, arguing that they are needed to explain a distinctive sort of productive reasoning. Yet, other intellectualists argue we can dispense with practical modes of presentation altogether and instead appeal to ways of knowing that are distinctively practical or executive (Waights Hickman 2019; Cath 2020).

Levy (2017) argues that a form of intellectualism that only invokes practical ways of thinking and practical concepts might not be able to explain skillful motor behavior, for motor representations of the sort required for skilled action and posited by cognitive psychologists are non-conceptual. Along similar lines, Fridland (2014, 2017) argues motor control and motor representation cannot be countenanced by Stanley & Williamson’s (2001) and Stanley’s (2011b) forms of intellectualism. So, more promising forms of intellectualism might have to invoke, in addition to practical ways of thinking, non-conceptual practical representations (Pavese 2019; Krakauer 2020). Just like perceptual concepts are distinguished from non-conceptual perceptual representations, we might distinguish between practical conceptual representations and practical non-conceptual representations. Motor representations would fall under the latter heading. Nonconceptual motor representations also represent practically, as they break down a task in terms of the most basic operations that a system can perform.

Ryle (1949: 46) formulates the argument from gradability thus:

we never speak of a person having partial knowledge of a fact or truth … it is proper and normal to speak of a person knowing in part how to do something. Learning how or improving in ability is not like learning that or acquiring information. Truths can be imparted, procedures can only be inculcated, and while inculcation is a gradual process, imparting is relatively sudden.

As Kremer (2020: 102) points out, here Ryle is making two distinguishable points: (i) ascriptions of knowledge-how are gradable, whereas ascriptions of know-that are not; (ii) the gradability of these ascriptions is explained by the fact that knowledge-how must come in degrees, because learning-how brings improvement in knowledge-how. There is no parallel phenomenon in learning-that, and so no need for degrees of knowledge-that. Others have followed Ryle in thinking that the gradability argument shows intellectualism wrong. For example, Bengson and Moffett (2011b) argue that because knowledge-how is gradable, knowledge-how is more similar to acquaintance knowledge, which also comes in degrees (see also Ryle 1949: 46; Wiggins 2012; Santorio 2016; Kremer 2020: 102).

Pavese (2017) distinguishes between two kinds of gradability of knowledge-how ascriptions: one might know how to do something in part or entirely (quantitative gradability) or one might know how to do something better than somebody else (qualitative gradability). Crucially, these two kinds of gradability are also present more generally in other knowledge-wh (knowledge-when, who, why, where) ascriptions, which do seem to reduce to propositional knowledge. For instance, one might know in part who came to the party (Lahiri 1991, 2000; Roberts 2009) or know a better answer to that question than somebody else (see also Stanley 2011b: 31–5). If parts of an answer are propositions, then knowing an answer might still amount to knowledge of all of its parts. Knowing in part an answer would then amount to knowing at least one of the propositions that is part of that answer. Similarly, knowing a better answer amounts to knowing a proposition that better answers the relevant question. If this is true of other knowledge-wh ascriptions, it is certainly plausible that it is true for knowledge-how. One might know how to Φ in part by knowing only certain (propositional) parts of the answer to “how does one Φ?” and one might know a better answer to that question than someone else.

This response to the first part of the gradability objection inspires a further response to the second part concerning learning-how. Suppose that knowledge-how is a matter of knowing a practical answer, where a practical answer encompasses a practical representation for a task or a way to Φ ( section 2 ). As we have seen, practically representing requires possessing certain practical capacities and entails certain sorts of abilities. On this picture, one might gradually learn how to perform a task by gradually learning a practical answer to that question, for one requires time and practice to master a practical representation of how to perform the task. Thus, gradual learning may be compatible with the intellectualist picture, if it amounts to gradually coming to learn more parts of a practical answer.

4. The Linguistic Argument

Intellectualism has been motivated on the basis of a linguistic argument concerning knowledge-how ascriptions in English (Vendler 1972; Stanley & Williamson 2001; Snowdon 2004; Stanley 2011b, 2011c). Begin by noticing that (1) is remarkably similar to (2)–(3) (“finite knowledge wh ascriptions” as they embed a complement with a finitival verb) and to (4)–(5) (“infinitive knowledge-wh ascriptions” as they embed a complement with an infinitival verb):

According to the standard syntactic analysis, (2)–(5) have an interrogative as complement—“where is her piano located in the house?”, “who can play the piano?”, “what to do in case of an emergency?” are all interrogatives. Having said this, in broad outline, the linguistic argument for intellectualism has three steps. The first step is to follow the syntactic cues from (1)–(5) and identify the logical form of “ S knows how to Φ” with that of “ S knows + interrogative Q (= “how to Φ”). Call this premise Logical Form . The second step is to accept the orthodox semantics of knowledge-wh ascriptions, according to which in “ S knows + interrogative Q ”, Q denotes a question (C. Baker 1968) and according to which “ S knows + Q ” is true just in case S knows a proposition answering to the question expressed by Q . Call this premise Semantics for Knowledge-Wh (cf., among many others, Hamblin 1958, 1973; Hintikka 1976; Karttunen 1977; Heim 1994; Groenendijk & Stokhof 1982, 1997; and Higginbotham 1996). Finally, the third step is to extend this semantics to knowledge-how ascriptions, such that knowing how to Φ requires knowing a proposition that answers the question “how can one Φ?”

Next section (4.1) looks in some more detail to the intellectualist analysis of the truth conditions for knowledge-how ascriptions. The section after next ( 4.2 ) discusses several objections to the linguistic argument.

The linguistic argument concludes that Intellectualism is true:

Intellectualism about knowing how S knows how to Φ just in case S knows a proposition answering the question “how to Φ”.

But what is the proposition that one knows by knowing how to Φ?

First, note that the subject of the infinitival construction (“How to Φ”), or PRO, can either be interpreted de se ( de se PRO) or generically (generic PRO). According to the first interpretation, that an agent knows how to perform a ski stunt requires their knowing how to perform a ski stunt themselves . According to the latter interpretation, it requires knowing how one (as a generic agent or any other agent) would perform a ski stunt. When it comes to ascriptions of knowledge-how, we care about de se , and not generic, readings of knowing how. If an agent knows how to Φ in the relevant sense, they know how to Φ themselves.

Secondly, infinitival interrogatives such as “how to Φ” and “what to Φ” are ambiguous between a deontic reading ( how to Φ = how one should Φ; what to Φ = what one should do ) and an ability reading ( how to Φ = how one could Φ; what to Φ = what one could do ). The deontic reading does not seem relevant when we ascribe knowledge-how. Hence the relevant reading must be an ability reading. Joining these two disambiguations, the truth conditions of knowledge-how ascriptions are (cf. Schroeder 2012):

( Truth conditions ) “ S knows how to Φ” is true just in case S knows a proposition answering the question “How could they themselves Φ?”

Now, what counts as an answer to the question? Linguists distinguish between different kinds of answers that one might give to a question. An exhaustive answer to “How could S Φ?” would specify all the ways in which S could Φ; a mention-some answer , instead, would specify only one way in which S could Φ. For example, an exhaustive answer to the question “How could S make pasta?” would specify all different recipes for making pasta. A mention-some answer to the same question, instead, would specify (at least) only one recipe. When we ascribe knowledge-how, we don’t expect people to know all the possible ways of performing the relevant task. For example, “Mary knows how to make pasta” can be true, even if Mary only knows one recipe for pasta. This gives us the following truth conditions:

Intellectualism* “ S knows how to Φ” is true just in case S knows, for some way w of Φ -ing , that w is a way he himself could Φ.

As we have seen in section 2 , in addition to knowing that a way to Φ is a way to Φ, one needs to think of that way under a practical mode of presentation. Let Pr be a practical way of thinking of a way and let way of Φ -ing be a way of thinking of the property of being a way of Φ-ing; finally let ⦼ be a way of composing ways of thinking into a proposition. Then <Pr ⦼ way of Φ -ing > is the practical proposition that one comes to know when coming to know how to Φ. On how to implement Fregean senses in the compositional semantics, see Yalcin (2015).

Several philosophers have objected that intellectualists are giving undue weight to linguistic considerations and that other considerations, coming from the cognitive sciences, should be taken into account too, when thinking about the nature of knowledge-how (Noë 2005, 2011; Devitt 2011; Brown 2013; Johnson 2006; Glick 2011; Roth & Cummins 2011). It does not follow from this worry that the linguistic argument ought to be dismissed as lacking any evidential value. Consider an analogy. Arguably, the best theory of beliefs and desires is one on which these are propositional attitudes. This theory is compatible with how we ascribe beliefs and desires (i.e., ascriptions of beliefs are of the form “ S believes that p ”, where “ p ” is standardly taken to stand for proposition). But it is also compatible with folk psychology, according to which thinking of beliefs and desires as propositional attitudes helps explain behavior. By parity of reasoning, ideally, the best theory of knowledge-how should presumably be compatible both with our best psychological theory and our best linguistic theory of knowledge-how ascriptions (cf. Stanley 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Cath 2015a for a defense of the linguistic methodology).

Among those engaging with the linguistic argument, many have objected that it fails to adequately capture the truth conditions of knowledge-how ascriptions (Roberts 2009; Brogaard 2009, 2011; Michaelis 2011; Bengson & Moffett 2011a; Ginzburg 2011; Abbott 2013; Santorio 2016; Hornsby 2016). Some have argued against the claim that knowledge-wh is a matter of knowing a proposition that answers a question ( Semantics for knowledge-wh) . For example, Carr (1979, 1981) argues that when you know how to do something, you have an attitude that essentially takes an act as its object. But when you know that something is the case, you have an attitude that essentially takes a proposition as its object. Yet, intellectualists might reply that knowledge-how might be an attitude towards an act in virtue of being an attitude towards a proposition about that act.

Others have questioned whether the complement “which team is winning” in “ S knows which team is winning” is, semantically, just like an interrogative (Brogaard 2009, 2011; Ginzburg 1995a, 1995b, 1996, 2011; Ginzburg & Sag 2000). One argument against this assumption is that, if, e.g., “which team is winning” denoted a question, we would expect it to co-refer with “the question of which team is winning”. Yet we cannot substitute such expression-pairs salva veritate . Suppose Jenny knows/discovered/revealed an interesting question and suppose the interesting question discovered by Jenny is “who left yesterday?”. Even so, it does not follow that Jenny knows/discovered/revealed who left yesterday. A response to this objection might be that these examples exploit a subtle equivocation (Stanley 2011b: ch. 2, following King 2002). Consider “Jamaal discovered a new element”. In it, “discovered” denotes a relation between Jamaal and an object, a chemical element. On the other hand, in the sentence “Jamaal discovered who left yesterday”, “discovered” denotes a different relation, one that holds between Jamaal and something of a different sort, namely, the proposition answering the question expressed by “who left yesterday”. It is this second relation which is relevant for the intellectualist. This is supported by the fact that the “[t]he former relation would be expressed in German by ‘ kennen ’, and the latter by ‘ wissen ’” (Stanley 2011b: 66). (For more relevant discussion, see Parent 2014.)

Others have questioned Logical form —the claim that in knowledge-how ascriptions, the embedded complement is an interrogative. Objectualists claim that the complement of knowledge-how ascriptions (“how to Φ”) is not an interrogative but an “objectual” complement—one denoting ways to Φ instead of propositions representing these ways (Bengson & Moffett 2011a). Objectualism is motivated by the consideration that “knowing how to Φ” seems to be equivalent to “knowing a way to Φ” in pretty much every context and by the apparent gradability of “knows-how” ascriptions (cf. section 3 ). An objectual semantics is in a good place to explain the gradability of knowledge-how ascriptions, since objectual knowledge ascriptions also permit degree modifiers—one can have partial knowledge of Paris, or know Paris better than someone else. Along similar lines, Bach (2012) and Abbott (2013) argue that in knowledge-how ascriptions “how to Φ” might work as a free relative . A free relative is a wh-phrase that denotes an individual. So for example, “what I was given for dinner” can be used as an interrogative in “I asked what I was given for dinner” but also as a free relative in “I ate what I was given for dinner”. In the latter ascription, it denotes some food that was given to me for dinner. In that sense, “how to Φ” according to this proposal, in “ S knows how to Φ” should be interpreted as a free relative denoting a way to Φ, rather than an answer to the question “how to Φ?”

To this proposal, some respond that knowledge-how ascriptions do not pass the standard tests for detecting free relative complements (Schaffer 2009: 486–91; Habgood-Coote 2018a). Take the coordinated use of knowledge-how and other knowledge-wh ascriptions in “ S has always known how to swim and never has wondered how”. This coordination suggests that both kinds of ascriptions have an interrogative as a complement (Bresnan & Grimshaw 1978: 332; M. Baker 1996: 204–7). Further, knowledge-how ascriptions can be extended to embed a multiple interrogative, as in “Mark knows how to do what?” , whereas free relative complements do not tolerate multiple wh-phrases (C. Baker 1968; Bresnan & Grimshaw 1978: 335). Moreover, infinitival wh phrases, such as “what to do”, “how to do”, “who to ask” never allow for free relative reading (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1070–3). Finally, a standard test for telling apart free relatives and interrogatives is to see if they embed under “believe”, for “believe” does not take interrogatives as complements but it does tolerate free relatives. (For example, “Mark believed who was charged guilty” cannot mean “Mark believed the answer to the question “Who was charged guilty?””. Rather, it means that Mark believed the person who was charged guilty.) However, interestingly, “believe” can never embed infinitival constructions such as “what to do”, “how to do”, or “who to ask”.

Finally, some have questioned whether Semantics for knowledge-wh applies to ascriptions embedding infinitival complements, like knowledge-how ascriptions. Roberts (2009) argues that, as opposed to other wh complements, the meaning of “how” denotes a property rather than a proposition when embedded in infinitival clauses. Santorio (2016) defends a Gibbardian semantics for knowledge ascriptions embedding infinitive interrogatives, on which these ascriptions ascribe maximal performance plans compatible with an agent’s plans (for more objections to Semantics for knowledge-wh , see also Sgaravatti & Zardini 2008 and George 2013).

The perhaps most serious objection to the linguistic argument is that it ignores cross-linguistic evidence about how knowledge-how is ascribed in languages other than English (Rumfitt 2003; Roberts 2009; Glick 2012; Wiggins 2012; Abbott 2013; Douskos 2013; Ditter 2016). Rumfitt (2003) argues that the linguistic facts on behalf of intellectualism are overstated. Many languages—e.g., French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian—ascribe knowledge-how not just through ascriptions embedding interrogatives (“ S knows how to Φ”) but also through ascriptions embedding bare infinitivals (“ S knows + (bare infinitive) to Φ” (= “ S knows to Φ”)) as in “ Marie sait nager ” and “ Maria sa nuotare ”. Stanley (2011b, 2011c) responds that these ascriptions are to be analyzed as embedding an implicit interrogative—one where the question word “how” is not explicitly articulated. However, Abbott (2013), Hornsby (2016), and Ditter (2016) have observed that this response does not help with yet other languages, such as Russian, in which knowledge-how ascriptions—of the form “ S (attitude verb) V s + (infinitive) to Φ”—feature an embedding verb V (“ umetj ”) that never licenses an interrogative complement nor a declarative complement (i.e., a that -clause).

In order to assess what this cross-linguistic evidence really establishes, consider a new version of the linguistic argument. Let “ S V s Φ” be an ascription of knowledge-how in an arbitrary language L that is correctly translated in English by “ S knows + (interrogative) how ( de se ) to Φ”. Assuming that translation preserves at least truth conditions, “ S V s Φ” will be true in L just in case “ S knows + (interrogative) how ( de se ) to Φ” is true in English. Call this the Interpretation Premise. By the Disquotational Schema, “ S knows how to Φ” is true in English just in case S knows how to Φ; so, we have that “ S V s Φ” is true in L just in case S knows how to Φ. This conclusion, together with the Semantics for knowledge wh , the Logical Form , and the Interpretation Premise , yields that “ S V s Φ” is true in L just in case S bears a knowledge relation towards an answer to the question “How he himself could Φ”. Through this argument, the truth conditions of any knowledge-how ascription, whether in English or in any other language, are reduced to propositional knowledge, whether the relevant knowledge-how ascription has or not the interrogative form.

Proponents of the cross-linguistic argument might challenge Logical Form : the different ways of ascribing knowledge-how (through the infinitival form and through the interrogative form) in these languages indicate that knowledge-how ascriptions in English are ambiguous between two not truth-conditionally equivalent logical forms: an interrogative form and a bare infinitival form ( Ambiguity Hypothesis ) (Rumfitt 2003; Wiggins 2012; Setiya 2012; Glick 2012; Ditter 2016; Hornsby 2016). The main piece of evidence for the Ambiguity Hypothesis is that in languages employing both the interrogative form and the infinitival form, those different ascriptions can come apart in their truth conditions. For example, it is claimed that the Italian sentence “ Mario sa come nuotare ” (interrogative form = “Mario knows how to swim”) may be usedly true, while the sentence “ Mario sa nuotare ” (infinitival form = Mario knows to swim) is false. This would be the case, for example, if Mario lacks (in some sense) the ability to swim (so too for its French and Spanish translations). Similarly, Ditter argues that in Russian, the interrogative construction must ascribe a different state from the “ umetj ” ascription (+ infinitival), on the ground that one can coherently use in Russian sentences of the following form:

John znaet kak igrat’ na pianino, no on ne umeyet igrat.

John knows + (interrogative) how to play the piano, but he does not know (“ umetj ”) + (infinitival) to play the piano.

“John knows how to play the piano, but he doesn’t know how to do it”.

According to these authors, this difference between interrogative embedding constructions and infinitival embedding construction shows up also in English locally for the verb learn : “ S learnt to swim” differs from “ S learnt how to swim” in that the former, but not the latter, is ability-entailing (Rumfitt 2003; Glick 2012).

This argument for the Ambiguity Hypothesis might be in certain ways too quick. The only way to make (6) intelligible in English is to translate it as (7), where the generic interpretation of the first knowledge-how ascription and the de se interpretation of the second ascription are made explicit:

However, (6) cannot be interpreted as (8) on pain of contradiction:

If so, the fact that (6) is acceptable in Russian does not establish that the interrogative form in Russian cannot also have an interpretation (the de se interpretation) on which it is truth conditionally equivalent to the Russian’s infinitival form. Here is a competitive explanation of the available cross-linguistic evidence that does not commit us to the Ambiguity Hypothesis . Just like English’s ascriptions, the interrogative form in Russian is ambiguous between a de se interpretation, on which it is truth conditionally equivalent to the infinitival form, and a generic interpretation of the subject of the infinitival embedded verb, on which it comes apart from the infinitival form. This explains why (6) is felicitous and why it can be translated as (7) but not as (8). On this explanation, this evidence might be compatible with English knowledge-how ascriptions univocally having the same logical form (the interrogative form), even though the embedded interrogative can receive either the generic or the de se interpretation, depending on the subject of the infinitival embedded verb.

Ryle is often interpreted as claiming that knowledge-how ascriptions are nothing more than ascriptions of an ability or a complex of dispositions to act in a skilled or intelligent manner (though see Hornsby 2011: 82 and Waights Hickman 2019 for dissent). This interpretation is based on passages in the Concept of Mind , such as the following:

When a person is described by one or other of the intelligence epithets such as “shrewd” or “silly”, “prudent” or “imprudent”, the description imputes to him not the knowledge or ignorance of this or that truth, but the ability, or inability, to do certain sorts of things. (Ryle 1949: 27)

Early intellectualists argued that knowledge-how does not entail ability (Ginet 1975; Stanley & Williamson 2001; Snowdon 2004). For example, a pianist who lost their arms in a car accident may have lost her ability to play but still preserve her knowledge-how to play the piano (cf. Snowdon’s 2004: 8 expert omelette maker); or a ski instructor might know how to do a ski stunt and, according to Stanley & Williamson (2001), still fail to have the ability to do it. By contrast, anti-intellectualists argue that it is important to distinguish between knowing how to perform a task, which corresponds to a general ability, and being (actually and circumstantially) able to perform it (Noë 2005; Glick 2012; Setiya 2012). So the pianist might have both general ability as well as knowledge-how, though they lack circumstantial ability. By contrast, the ski instructor does not clearly have knowledge-how to perform the ski stunt themselves, while they know how one , in general, can do it. Recent intellectualist views also take knowledge-how to go together with abilities (understood along Hawley’s 2003 notion of counterfactual success) and argue that rightly construed intellectualism can vindicate this connection (Pavese 2015b; Cath 2020).

Yet, everybody agrees that while knowledge-how might entail ability, ability is not sufficient for knowledge-how, as demonstrated by an example from Hawley (2003):

Annoyance. Susie is attempting to annoy Joe; she thinks smoking will do the trick. Whenever she smokes, she unconsciously and inadvertently taps on her cigarette pack. Unbeknownst to Susie, Joe does not mind cigarette smoke, but finds her tapping obnoxious.

Susie has the ability to annoy Joe, since she has the disposition to annoy Joe whenever she attempts to do so. But, intuitively, she does not know how to annoy him. A natural explanation of this is that she cannot annoy him intentionally (for structurally similar cases, see Carr 1979, 1981 and Bengson, Moffett, & Wright 2009). Pretty much all sides of the dispute agree on the following claim (Ryle 1949; Stanley & Williamson 2001; Hawley 2003; Hornsby 2004, 2011; Stanley 2011b; Setiya 2012):

( Knowledge-how/Intentionality ): If S intentionally Φs, S knows how to Φ.

Many also endorse the biconditional ( Knowledge-how/Ability Intentional ) (Hawley 2003; Setiya 2012):

( Knowledge-how/Ability Intentional ): S has the ability to intentionally Φ if and only if S knows how to Φ.

Now, suppose that knowing how to Φ does require the ability to intentionally perform Φ. If so, whether knowledge-how requires a propositional attitude depends on whether or not one can intentionally Φ without having a propositional attitude about how to Φ. But according to many influential views of intentional action, intentionally Φ-ing does require a propositional attitude, namely a belief about how to Φ. In particular, intentionally Φ-ing requires having an action plan, which is characterizable in terms of a belief about how to perform Φ. For example, on Goldman’s (1970) view, one intentionally Φs when one has a plan to Φ, where a plan to Φ is a belief that specifies the means to Φ (see, also, e.g., Harman 1976; Audi 1986; Bratman 1987; Velleman 1989; Ginet 1990; Mele & Moser 1994; Gibbons 2001). From this, we get:

( Intentionality/Belief ): If S intentionally Φs, then there are some means \(m_1\), …, \(m_n\) to Φ such that S truly believes that \(m_1\), …, \(m_n\) are means for oneself to Φ.

Some intellectualists have argued on these bases that knowledge-how to Φ requires at least a propositional attitude about the means to Φ (Cath 2015b).

But is propositional knowledge of means to ends required for intentional action, over and above true belief? Gibbons (2001) provides several examples to buttress the necessity of knowledge for intentional action. For example, one cannot plausibly intentionally win a fair lottery , nor can one intentionally defuse a bomb if one unintentionally and fortuitously chooses the correct wire; in both cases, a plausible explanation for the lack of intentionality is that the subjects does not have the relevant propositional knowledge about how to accomplish those tasks. These cases buttress the claim that intentional action requires knowledge of the means to execute it:

( Intentionality/Knowledge ): If S intentionally Φs, then there are some means \(m_1\), …, \(m_n\) to Φ such that s knows that \(m_1\), …, \(m_n\) are means for oneself to Φ.

With these assumptions in the background, here is a non-linguistic argument for intellectualism. Start from ( Knowledge-how/Intentionality ): if S intentionally Φs, S knows how to Φ. Furthermore, suppose that ( Intentionality/Knowledge ) is true so that the intentionality of an action is to be explained at least in part in terms of propositional knowledge. Then, by these two premises, we get that if one intentionally Φs, one both knows how to Φ and one has propositional knowledge of the means to Φ:

( Knowledge-how, Intentionality, Knowledge ): If S intentionally Φs, S both knows how to Φ and for some means \(m_1\), …, \(m_n\), S knows that means \(m_1\) , …, \(m_n\) are means for oneself to Φ.

Now, according to standard formulations of intellectualism, one knows how to Φ only if, for some means m to Φ, one knows that m is a means for one to Φ:

( Intellectualism about Knowledge-How ): S knows how to Φ is at least in part of a matter of knowing, for some means m to Φ, S knows that m is a means for oneself to Φ.

So, the argument from intentional action for intellectualism maintains that the intellectualist picture provides the best explanation for why ( Knowledge-How, Intentionality, Knowledge ) should hold. According to this explanation, ( Knowledge-How, Intentionality, Knowledge ) is true not just because of a coincidental alignment of propositional knowledge and knowledge-how in intentional action. Rather, its truth is grounded on the very nature of knowledge-how: one knows how to Φ in virtue of knowing, for some means m to Φ, that m is a means for oneself to Φ.

The view that intentional action requires belief has been challenged for the particular case of basic actions . Setiya (2012) observes that one can perform a basic action of clenching one’s fist without even having the belief that one can succeed at doing it. For example, someone might have had a paralyzing injury, fail to believe they have healed, and still form the intention to clench their fist. Intellectualists might reply that, although that subject does not believe that one will succeed, they might have a sufficiently high credence and that credence can amount to knowledge too (Pavese 2020). (For other possible responses to the idea that intentional action requires knowledge or belief, see Elzinga forthcoming).

A further related question is how to think of knowledge-how in the case of joint actions. When two agents act jointly towards a goal, as when they row a boat together, they responsively coordinate and monitor each other’s movements in ways that produce a joint action. What kind of knowledge-how is manifested by successful joint action? It must be possible for the agents to coordinate without each having to know the different ways in which each must act to achieve their common goals: you and I can jointly make risotto even if I do not know how to season it and you do. Correspondingly, Birch (2019) suggests that joint knowledge-how must be accounted for distributively . If this is correct, then the agents can jointly know how to do something without each having a belief about how they jointly do it, but only in virtue of having a collective, or group, belief about how to do it. (For more discussion on group knowledge-how, see Palermos & Tollefsen 2018 and Strachan, Knoblich & Sebanz 2020)

6. The Epistemology of Knowledge-How

Some have observed that knowledge-how may differ from propositional knowledge in that, whereas the latter plausibly entails belief, knowledge-how does not (Dreyfus 1991, 2005; Wallis 2008; Brownstein & Michaelson 2016). For example, consider Brownstein & Michaelson (2016)’s example. When catching a ball, ball players make anticipatory saccades to shift their gaze ahead of the ball one or more times during the course of its flight towards them. These players know how to catch a ball, and their way of catching a ball requires making anticipatory saccades when watching the ball as it falls. Yet, the players do not believe that making anticipatory saccades is part of how they catch the ball. Rather they believe that they are tracking the ball the whole time. However, from the fact that the subject has false beliefs about how she catches the ball, it does not follow that the subject does not also have correct beliefs about it. So, a natural response is that there is some sense in which the player correctly believes that his manner of tracking the ball has a chance of resulting in success.

Whether this response is compelling might depend on what one takes beliefs to be. On this topic, philosophers widely disagree. On an “intellectualist” account of belief, on which believing that p requires the subject to acknowledge that p , it is implausible that the athletes have the relevant belief. But intellectualists about knowledge-how might advocate replacing this intellectual notion of belief with a less demanding one. According to a prominent functional characterization of belief, to believe that p entails being disposed to act in ways that would tend to satisfy one’s desires, whatever they are, in a world in which p (together with one’s other beliefs) are true” (cf. Stalnaker 1984: 15; Stalnaker 2012). Now, suppose that in game after game, Athena catches the ball using a certain method m , and that whenever she does so, her behavior is intentional. From this it seems to follow that Athena is disposed to perform the actions specified by m . Since, ex hypothesi , m is a way of catching the ball, it follows that in all the worlds where she performs these actions, she satisfies her desire of catching the ball (or at least is sufficiently likely to do so). By the previous functional characterization of belief, it follows that Athena believes that m is a way for her to catch the ball. The lesson of this debate might be, following Stalnaker (2012), that intellectualism about knowledge-how is best construed as a form of anti-intellectualism about knowledge, belief, and the mental.

Another way of challenging the intellectualist claim that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that is to question whether knowledge-how can be Gettiered. If knowledge-how survives Gettierization, that would be evidence that knowledge-how is not a species of knowledge-that, on the assumption that Gettiered justified true belief cannot constitute propositional knowledge (Gettier 1963). Stanley & Williamson (2001) argue that knowledge-how cannot be Gettiered. However, Cath (2011) responds by proposing the Lucky Light Bulb case, where Charlie wants to learn how to change a lightbulb, but he knows almost nothing about light fixtures or bulbs. Charlie consults The Idiot’s Guide to Everyday Jobs . Inside, he finds an accurate set of instructions describing the shape of a light fixture and bulb, and the way to change a bulb. Charlie grasps these instructions perfectly. And so there is a way such that Charlie now believes truly that that way is a way for him to change a light bulb, namely, the way described in the book. However, unbeknownst to Charlie, he is extremely lucky to have read these instructions, for the disgruntled author of The Idiot’s Guide filled her book with otherwise misleading instructions. Cath (2011) argues that intuitively Charlie still knows how to fix the light bulb, despite his belief being Gettiered (cf. also Poston 2009: 744).

Stanley replies that knowledge-wh in general seems to be Gettierable and that might be explained in terms of features having to do with knowing the answer . For example, consider Hawthorne’s (2000) example of a teacher giving each child in their class a note with the name of a city. “Vienna” is written only on one of the notes. In this context, it seems true that one child knows the correct answer to the question “what is the capital of Austria”, even though the child’s belief is true by luck. (Though see Carter & Pritchard 2015c for a reply that while knowledge-how is similar to knowledge-that and knowledge-wh in that it is incompatible with intervening luck, it differs with these kinds of knowledge in being compatible with environmental luck.) Others still have responded that intuitions are subtle and not all of them favor anti-intellectualism (Marley-Payne 2016; Pavese forthcoming-a). For a recent experimental study with mixed results, see Carter, Pritchard, and Shepherd (2019). Hawley (2003: 28) argues that knowledge-how, like propositional knowledge, requires “warrant” on the ground that success on the basis of a lucky guess does not seem to manifest one’s knowledge-how. A similar theoretical argument for thinking that lucky belief cannot suffice for knowledge-how starts from the thesis that knowledge-how enters in explanations of success and that satisfactory explanations must be “modally robust”. From this, the argument concludes that the sort of belief that robustly explains intentional success must be knowledge, for knowledge has the relevant modal profile (Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000; D. Greco 2016). Another line of argument starts from the observations that knowledge-how to Φ explains the ability to intentionally Φ (see section 4 ) and that only knowledge can explain intentional action (Gibbons 2001: 589–590). On these bases, some argue that knowledge-how cannot fall short of non-getteriable knowledge (Cath 2015b for objections to this line of argument).

Some object that while knowledge-that can be defeated by misleading evidence, not so knowledge-how (see Carter & Navarro 2017 for this line of argument and Pavese 2021 for a reply). Finally, some object that knowledge-how cannot be knowledge-that because the latter is acquirable by testimony and the former is not. While the following argument (A–C) is valid, the following (i–iii) is not (Poston 2016):

Mark knows that Turin is in Northern Italy.
Mark tells that to John, who believes him.
John comes to know that Turin is in Northern Italy.
Mark knows how John could swim.
Mark tells John.
John comes to know how to swim.

Following Stanley’s (2011b: 126) modal restriction proposal (cf. section 3 ), Cath (2017, 2019) responds that depending on how the context for the modal is restricted, (i) could mean either that Mark knows how John could swim given his current physical state or how John could swim after training . If only the latter, that is not the sort of proposition that John needs to know in order for (iii) to be true: for that, John ought to know that that is how he could swim under his current physical state. (Though see section 2 for qualms about this intellectualist strategy.) Another avenue for reply to the challenge from testimony may be to insist that not every propositional knowledge is transferable through testimony. A comparison: visual knowledge that Mark murdered Tina differs in content and mode of presentation from the knowledge that of the murder obtained by being told by his prosecutor. The former observational knowledge is not transferable through mere testimony but (exactly because of that!) it is more helpful for the purpose of convicting Mark than second-hand knowledge. That does not mean that observational knowledge is not propositional. Like in the case of perceptual knowledge, the proposition that one knows by knowing how to do something involves distinct modes of presentation of ways of doing things ( section 2 , section 3 ). We should not expect propositions under this mode of presentation to be transferable through testimony. (For a response to Poston 2016, see also Peet 2019).

7. The Argument from Cognitive Science

The argument from cognitive science against intellectualism starts by pointing out that cognitive scientists distinguish between different kinds of cognitive systems: It is often held that the declarative system is responsible for encoding propositional knowledge, whereas knowledge-how is encoded in the procedural system . Given empirical evidence that the declarative and procedural systems are separate (about which more below), it would seem to follow that knowledge-how is not reducible to propositional knowledge (Wallis 2008; Devitt 2011; Roth & Cummins 2011):

The Cognitive Science Argument

The usual evidence marshaled in favor of C1 relies on amnesiac case studies (Milner 1962; see Cohen & Squire 1980 for discussion). A typical example is HM. After bilateral removal of the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, entorhinal cortex, and most of the amygdala to relieve debilitating symptoms of epilepsy, HM was unable to form new memories of facts or events and he could no longer access memories he acquired in the few years leading up to his surgery. Nevertheless, it was found that over 10 trials, HM tuned his motor skill to trace the outline of a five-pointed star based only on looking at reflection in a mirror. Since he could not store new memories, HM’s declarative knowledge of the means of performing the task did not change from one trial to the next. But his performance improved. So, the reasoning goes, the improvement of motor skills is governed by a distinct cognitive system from that which governs the retention of declarative facts.

Many embrace C2 (e.g., Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Hoffman 1987: 523; Devitt 2011; Wallis 2008). But some object that a closer look at the details of HM’s case (as reported in Milner 1962) supports a different diagnosis, on which knowledge-how is realized by a combination of the procedural and the declarative system (Pavese 2013; Stanley & Krakauer 2013). At the beginning of each trial, prior to being given verbal instructions on how to perform the motor task, HM lacked the ability to intentionally perform it: HM was able to perform the motor task only after being reminded of what the task consisted in . This suggests, against C2, that there was an important declarative component to HM’s ability to perform the motor task (for the role of declarative knowledge in skillful action, see also Christensen, Sutton, & Bicknell 2019).

Here is a possible way to patch up the Argument from Cognitive Science (Fridland 2014, 2017; Levy 2017). Replace C2 with:

With C2*, the argument goes on as before. Stanley & Krakauer (2013) seems to accept this conclusion (for more discussion and critiques, see Krakauer 2019; Springle 2019; De Brigard 2019; Schwartz & Drayson 2019). Other intellectualists reply that this argument misses the intellectualist target. Cath (2020) argues that procedural representation might be a prerequisite for knowledge-how rather than a constituent. Pavese (2019) develops an account on which procedural representations, of the sort studied by motor scientists when giving an account of the procedural aspect of skill (Wolpert 1997; Jeannerod 1997), can be understood as practical, albeit nonconceptual, representations—the sort of representations that intellectualism independently requires for knowledge-how ( section 2 ).

According to C3, propositional knowledge corresponds to “declarative” knowledge—to a sort of knowledge that is, at least in principle, verbalizable. Opponents of intellectualism often uses C3 in a novel argument against intellectualism: if propositional knowledge has to be verbalizable, then knowledge-how cannot be propositional knowledge, for often subjects know how to perform tasks even though they cannot explain how they do it (Schiffer 2002; Devitt 2011; Adams 2009; Wallis 2008). On behalf of intellectualism, there do seem to be cases in which you come to know how to do something precisely by consulting a manual and learning some propositions (see, e.g., Snowdon 2004: 12; Bengson and Moffett 2011a: 8; and Katzoff 1984: 65ff). Moreover, it is not clear that the anti-intellectualist demand that propositional knowledge be always verbalizable is motivated. In fact, it seems to conflate knowing how to perform a task with knowing how to explain how the task is performed (cf. Fodor 1968: 634; Stalnaker 2012). Stanley (2011b: 161) points out that there is a sense in which knowledge-how is always verbalizable. A punch-drunk boxer who can at best demonstratively refer to his re-enactment of the way of boxing against southpaws, and says, “This is the way I fight against a southpaw” intuitively knows that this is the way he fights against southpaws. This knowledge has an essential demonstrative or indexical component. But the same goes for much other propositional knowledge like, for example, the knowledge we express by saying, “This is the tool for the job”, or “That is going to be trouble”. This reply assumes that ways to execute tasks are ostensible and as such can be picked up by a demonstrative. This does not need to be so: on any single occasion, one may only act on parts of a way. So, one will not thereby be able to pick up the general way one’s knowledge-how is about. Another reply on behalf of intellectualism is to point out that practical concepts for tasks differ from “semantic” concepts for the same tasks precisely in that, even if propositional, they are not necessarily verbalizable.

A final objection is that intellectualism overintellectualizes knowledge-how in a way that is incompatible with what we know about animals’ cognition (Noë 2005; Hornsby 2007; Dreyfus 2007; Elzinga forthcoming). According to this objection, unsophisticated and non- (or pre-) linguistic agents such as babies and non-human animals can know how to perform certain tasks, while lacking the concepts that are required for propositional knowledge. Some intellectualists respond that ordinary speakers routinely also ascribe propositional knowledge to animals and babies, as we say that Fido knows that its owner is arriving or that a baby knows that their mother is present (Stanley & Williamson 2001). Thus, while propositional knowledge may require concept possession, our ordinary knowledge ascriptions suggest that we regard relatively unsophisticated agents as possessing the relevant concepts. Comparative psychologists do routinely credit many non-human and non-linguistic animals with the possession of concepts. (See Allen & Bekoff 1999 for a comprehensive overview).

This response might be less plausible, though, when it comes to lower animals, or insects. Here too, we might describe ants as knowing how to carry food back to their nest. And yet, there is less evidence from cognitive science that insects are capable of concepts too (though see Gallistel & King 2009). In response, a different line of argument might be more promising (cf. McDowell 2007): it does not follow from the fact that we are disposed to ascribe knowledge-how to lower animals that what explains their goal-directed behavior is the same sort of psychological state that underlies human knowledge-how and human action. For from the fact that their behavior resembles humans’ in some respects (for example, in its goal-directedness) does not entail that it resembles humans’ skilled behavior in all respects that matter (for example, in the susceptibility of the relevant behavior to rational revision).

8. Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

According to orthodox intellectualism, knowledge-how is a species of propositional knowledge. Revisionary intellectualism, instead, contends that although knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that, the relevant knowledge is sui generis and differs from standard propositional knowledge in some important ways. For example, Brogaard (2009, 2011) argues that, in general, knowledge can have cognitive abilities or practical abilities as its justificatory grounds. In the latter case, agents know in virtue of ability states that are not subject to the usual epistemic constraints that characterize belief states generated by cognitive abilities. Correspondingly, knowledge-how fits the bill for this practically grounded knowledge. Cath (2015b) argues that we should distinguish between theoretical knowledge-that and practical knowledge-that. The former is subject to the usual epistemic constraints, like being sensitive to Gettierization (cf. also Zardini 2013). The latter, instead, is not sensitive to the usual epistemic constraints of theoretical knowledge-that—and can therefore constitute knowledge-that even if Gettierized. Waights Hickman (2019) suggests that knowledge-how is a distinct kind of knowledge-that relation, characterized by knowing something in “the executive way”, which requires

possession of (a) dispositions to attend to features of an action-context on which one’s knowledge (how) bears; and (b) dispositions to adjust one’s use of that knowledge accordingly. (2019: 333).

As we have seen ( section 4 ), Bengson & Moffett (2007, 2011b) defend Non-propositional (or Objectualist) Intellectualism . On this view, knowing how to Φ necessarily involves having objectual knowledge of a way of Φ-ing but having objectual knowledge of a way of Φ-ing is not sufficient to know how to Φ. For example, a tropical swimmer may be acquainted with a way of escaping an avalanche, namely making swimming motions. Yet, if this swimmer had no conception whatsoever of an avalanche or of snow, he would not know how to escape an avalanche. This suggests that there must be some propositional/representational aspect of knowing how to Φ. Hence, according to this view for one to know how to Φ, (i) one must have objectual knowledge of a way of Φ-ing and (ii) one must grasp a correct and complete conception of this way.

As we have seen, Ryle is often interpreted as claiming that knowledge-how ascriptions are nothing more than ascriptions of an ability or a complex of dispositions to act in a skilled or intelligent manner (Hornsby 2011). (For a recent defense of knowledge-how as an ability, see Markie 2015.) Anti-intellectualism of this sort has been voiced by Lewis (1990) and has been thought to undercut the so-called “knowledge-argument” in the philosophy of mind (see Jackson 1986 for a classic formulation. For further discussion, see Nemirow 1990 and Alter 2001). However, Cath (2009) argues that similar worries about the argument survive even on some prominent intellectualist views. For a survey of other consequences thought to follow from the various positions in the knowledge-how debate, see Bengson and Moffett (2011b: 44–54).

However, few theorists nowadays identify knowledge-how with bare abilities. Setiya (2012) holds that to have knowledge-how is to have the disposition to act guided by one’s intention; Constantin (2018) argues that knowing how to Φ is to have the disposition to have the ability to Φ. Neo-Rylean views are also developed by Craig (1990), Wiggins (2012), and Löwenstein (2016). Craig suggests that knowledge-how to Φ amounts to the ability to teach others how to Φ. Wiggins argues that genuine knowledge-how stems from a bundle of practical abilities that constitute the ethos of a practice and, while interrelated with propositional knowledge, cannot be reduced to it. In turn, Löwenstein argues that knowledge-how to Φ is the ability to Φ intelligently guided by the understanding of the activity of Φ-ing.

Carter and Pritchard (2015a,b,c) develop an alternative view which does not equate knowledge-how with an ability, but it still gives ability a central theoretical role. In their view, knowing how to Φ is a cognitive achievement, given our abilities to Φ: if one successfully Φs because of one’s ability, then one knows how to Φ. And if one knows how to Φ, then one is positioned to successfully Φ because of one’s ability. Therefore, for them, knowledge-how does not reduce to the mere possession of abilities but it essentially involves the successful enactment of these abilities. Habgood-Coote (2019) defends the view that knowing how to Φ just is the ability to generate the right answers to the question of how to Φ. Although on this view, knowledge-how is a relation an agent bears to a proposition—one that answers the relevant practical question—this relation to a proposition is not understood in epistemic terms but in terms of dispositions (see also Audi 2017 and Farkas 2017).

8.3 Radical Anti-Intellectualism: Practicalism

While the intellectualist holds that knowledge-how must be understood in terms of knowledge-that, radical anti-intellectualism holds that knowledge-that must be understood in terms of knowledge-how or skill. As Hetherington puts it:

Your knowing that p is your having the ability to manifest various accurate representations of p . The knowledge as such is the ability as such. (2011: 42, original emphasis)

An agent knows that, for instance, she is in France whenever she is able to produce the corresponding true belief, to assert that she is indeed in France, provide justification, answer related questions, etc. (see Hartland-Swann 1956; Roland 1958 for classic formulation and Hetherington’s 2006, 2011, 2020 “practicalism” for a more recent form of radical anti-intellectualism).

9. Knowledge-How and Skill

The most recent debate on knowledge-how has intertwined with a debate on the nature of skills. While there is no consensus on what counts as a skill, by and large people take skills to manifest in purposeful and goal-directed activities and to be learnable and improvable through practice (Fitts & Posner 1967; Stanley & Krakauer 2013; Willingham 1998; Yarrow, Brown, & Krakauer 2009). Skills are usually contrasted with knacks (or mere talents). Some contrast them with habits (Pear 1926; Ryle 1949) in that these are performed automatically, whereas the exercise of intelligent capacities involves self-control, attention to the conditions, and awareness of the task. Others, instead, argue that understanding skill requires a better understanding of what habits amount to (Gallagher 2017; Hutto & Robertson 2020).

The topic of skill and expertise is central since ancient philosophy through the notion of technē . Although both Plato and Aristotle took technē to be a kind of knowledge, there is significant controversy about their conceptions regarding the nature of this kind of knowledge and its relation to experience ( empeiria ) on one hand, and scientific knowledge ( epistēmē ) on the other (Johansen 2017; Lorenz & Morison 2019; Coope 2020). Annas (1995, 2001, 2011) develops an interpretation on which skill and virtue (or phronēsis ) are closer in Aristotle’s action theory than usually thought and they are both conceived along a broadly intellectualist model.

In contemporary times, the notion of skill is central to the philosophy of the twentieth-century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty (1945 [1962]) distinguishes between motor intentionality —the sort of intentionality relevant for motor skills—and cognitive intentionality . While the latter is conceptual and representational, Merleau-Ponty thought that motor intentionality is non-representational and non-conceptual. Central to Merleau-Ponty is the role of motor skills in shaping perceptual experience: in paradigmatic cases of perception, the flow of information taken in by perceivers is inseparable from the way they move through a scene. On this view, even superficially static perceptions engage motor skills, such as seeing the color of a table as uniform when different parts of it are differently illuminated (see Siegel 2020 for an helpful introduction).

This phenomenological tradition inspires Dreyfus’ (1991, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007) critique of standard action theory. According to Dreyfus, theories on which an action is intentional only if the agent is in a mental state that represents the goal of her action (cf. Searle 1980, 2001) or on which actions are permeated by conceptual rationality (cf. McDowell 2007) are not supported by the phenomenology of purposive activity. Paradigmatic examples of these purposive activities are, for Dreyfus, skillful activities like playing tennis or habitual activity like rolling over in bed or making gestures while speaking. In this sort of skillful coping, Dreyfus thought that the mind does not represent the world as detached from it. Rather, it is fundamentally embedded, absorbed, and embodied (see Gehrman & Schwenkler 2020 for an helpful introduction to Dreyfus on skills).

The notion of skill is central also in Eastern philosophy. Garfield and Priest (2020) examine the various roles that the notion of skill plays in the Indian school of Mahayana Buddhism, in Daoism, and in Chan/Zen thought. In Daoism as well as in Chan/Zen Buddhism, the emphasis on skill is also connected, fundamentally, to concerns about living a good and ethical life. Sarkissan (2020) argues that two prominent types of expertise often encountered in ancient Chinese thought from the sixth to third centuries BCE: The first is expertise at a particular craft, occupation, or dao , as is most famously presented in the Daoist anthology Zhuangzi . The second is ethical expertise in the Ruist (Confucian) and Mohist schools (cf. for more on skill in Buddhism, see also MacKenzie 2020).

What is the relation between knowledge-how and skill? For many tasks at least, it is intuitive that one cannot be skilled at it without knowing how to perform it. At first, it also seems as if knowledge-how entails skill: one does not really know how to swim if one does not have the skill to swim; and one cannot know how to tell apart birds without the skills of a bird watcher. One might object to the sufficiency of knowledge-how for skill on the grounds that it is natural to say things such as “John may know how to make risotto, but I would not say he is skilled at it”. However, knowing how to make risotto sufficiently well (relative to contextually determined standards) might entail being skilled at it (relative to the same standards) (Cath 2020).

Ryle (1946, 1949) used “skill” and “knowledge-how” interchangeably in his criticism of the “Intellectualist legend” (for discussion, see Kremer 2020). In fact, Ryle’s view of knowledge-how is stated, literally, as the view that “skill” is a complex of dispositions (Ryle 1949: 33; see also Ryle 1967, 1974, 1976 for his views on how skill as a form of knowledge is distinguished by the forms on how it is taught and learned through training). This discussion brings us to whether intellectualism about knowledge-how and intellectualism about skill stand or fall together. Should intellectualists about knowledge-how identify skill too with propositional knowledge? While Stanley and Williamson (2001) embrace the view that knowledge-how is propositional knowledge, in a recent paper (Stanley & Williamson 2017), they refuse to think of skill as a standing propositional knowledge state. Rather, they argue that skills are dispositions to know. One motivation for this view is that this addresses the novelty challenge raised by Dreyfus (1991, 2005). According to this challenge, propositional knowledge cannot explain the ability to respond intelligently to situations that have not been encountered by the agent before. If skills are dispositions to know, it is no mystery how novel situations can be handled by skillful agents. Stanley & Williamson (2017) claim that the resulting view is still broadly intellectualist in a sense, because on it, skillful action manifests propositional knowledge (for a criticism of this response to the novelty objection, see Pavese 2016 in Other Internet Resources ).

Some authors argue that while skills may be related to propositional knowledge, they do not reduce to it. Dickie (2012) suggests that an agent is skilled at Φ whenever her intentions to Φ are non-lucky selectors of non-lucky means to Φ; while, in turn, these means might manifest propositional knowledge. Some argue that control is necessary for skills, and control cannot fully be understood in terms of propositional knowledge (Fridland 2014, 2017a, 2017b). In order to provide a theory of skill that makes room for control, Fridland (2020) develops a “functional” account of skills. In this view, a skill is a function from intentions to action, implemented through certain “control structures”, which include attention and strategic control. Among these control structures, there is also propositional knowledge, which is required for strategic control. In contrast, intellectualists about skills argue that being in control is not intelligible unless it is understood in terms of knowing what one is doing in virtue of knowing how to perform that action. Therefore, they argue that agentive control itself is best understood in terms of the capacity for propositional knowledge.

Understanding the nature of skill and its relation with knowledge is of crucial importance for virtue epistemology—the view that knowledge is to be defined in terms of the success of our cognitive skills (Zagzebski 2003, 2008; Sosa 2007, 2009; J. Greco 2003, 2010; Pritchard 2012; Turri 2013, 2016; Beddor & Pavese 2020; Pritchard 2020). Nevertheless, if it turns out that skill must be explained in terms of knowledge, virtue epistemology would be trying to account for knowledge in terms of knowledge and so would be viciously circular (see Millar 2009; Stanley & Williamson 2017 for an argument in this spirit). Some virtue epistemologists have responded by offering an anti-intellectualist account of knowledge-yielding cognitive skills. Sosa and Callahan (2020) describe the relevant skills as dispositions to succeed when one tries—such that knowledge is obtained when agents in the right shape and in the right situation enact these skills appropriately.

Recent discussions on skill include a renewed debate on the nature of skilled action—i.e., on the sort of processes that are involved in the manifestation of skills. The most recent discussion on skilled action concerns the extent to which they are automatic or under conscious control. A long tradition has taken skilled action to be paradigmatically a matter of “absorbed coping” (Heidegger 1927; Merleau-Ponty 1945 [1962]; Dreyfus 1991)—characterized as immersion in the situation and intuitive response to its demands, with little awareness of the body, tools or even possibly the activity itself. Following Dreyfus and the phenomenological tradition, some enactivists (e.g., Noë 2004) highlight the analogies between skillful behavior and perception; other enactivists (e.g., Gallagher 2017; Hutto & Robertson 2020) argue that in order to understand the automaticity and unreflectiveness of skilled action, we ought to better understand habitual behavior. Even outside the phenomenological tradition, people have emphasized the unreflective aspect of skilled action. For example, Papineau (2013) argues that skilled actions are typically too fast for conscious control. One important argument for the unreflectiveness of skilled action starts from the phenomenon of choking under pressure, where an individual performs significantly worse than would be expected in a high-pressure situation. This phenomenon has been taken to be evidence that skillful action proceeds without conscious attention, because choking episodes are thought to arise from the fact that anxiety leads one to focus and direct one’s mind on the performance, which would proceed smoothly if mindless (Baumeister 1984; Masters 1992; Beilock & Carr 2001; Ford, Hodges, & Williams 2005; Jackson, Ashford, & Norsworthy 2006; Gucciardi & Dimmock 2008). Some argue that unreflectiveness also characterizes skillful joint action (Høffding 2014; Gallagher and Ilundáin-Agurruza 2020).

In recent years, however, some have emphasized the role of attention and consciousness in skillful performance (Montero 2016, 2020; Wu 2016, 2020). Montero argues against the Dreyfusian idea of skillful and mindless coping, by noting that online conscious thought about what one is doing is compatible with expertise and by surveying empirical evidence that suggests revisiting the choking argument. Christensen, Sutton and McIlwain (2016) and Christensen, Sutton, and Bicknell’s (2019) argue for the centrality of cognition in explaining the flexibility of skilled action in complex situations and advance a “mesh theory” of skilled action, according to which skilled action results for a mesh of both automatic and cognitively controlled processes (for a survey of some of these issues, Christensen 2019. See also Sutton 2007 and Fridland 2017b).

Knowledge-how is related to but distinct from practical knowledge (Anscombe 1957). Practical knowledge is occurrent during intentional action: when one intentionally acts, one knows what one is doing while knowing it. While being capable of practical knowledge might require knowledge-how, knowing how to perform an action does not entail performing that action, and so does not entail practical knowledge (Setiya 2008; Schwenkler 2019; Small 2020). Some have argued knowledge-how is the norm of intention (Habgood-Coote 2018b), so that one can properly intend to perform an act only if one knows how to perform it.

An important question is whether knowledge-how is connected to distinctive kinds of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Collins 1990, 1998; Medina 2011). Hawley (2011) discusses the phenomena whereby people ascribe less knowledge-how and ability to female musicians (Goldin & Rouse 2000) and whereby standards for judgments of success due to ability rather than luck or “instinct” tend to be higher for women and non-white men (Biernat & Kobrynowicz 1997). In these cases, agents may be transmitting knowledge by being direct sources of information, rather than by testifying to the truth of a proposition. If so, the harms that they suffer might call for a different account than standard cases of epistemic injustices like Fricker’s (2007), which focus on testimonial transmission of knowledge-that.

A final topic of interest is the relation between knowledge-how and faith. While most views on faith focus on its doxastic aspect, Sliwa (2018) argues that faith essentially involves agents acting in the right way with respect to the object of their faith. Having faith in a person, for instance, requires knowing how to interact with them so as to trust them, help them, and ensure their autonomy in general. Religious faith, similarly, requires faithful agents to know how to enact the relevant practices like going to mass, declaring one’s faith, and praying.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Weatherson, Brian, 2006, “Ryle on Knowing How ’, blog post at Thoughts Arguments and Rants.
Links in Phil Papers to recent work on knowledge-how , edited by John Bengson.
“ Know-how ,’ by Charles Wallis in Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind .
“ Knowledge ,” by Stephen Hetherington in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Pavese, Carlotta, 2016, “Comments on “ Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions ” by Joshua Habgood-Coote”, Minds Online (blog), 5 September 2016.
Fantl, Jeremy, “Knowledge How”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/knowledge-how/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of Alejandro Vesga to this entry. He brought to my attention recently published papers on knowledge-how; brainstormed with me about the structure of the entry and the order of the topics to be discussed; provided substantial criticisms of, and suggestions for, drafts of the content; contributed the idea of adding a final section that related knowledge-how to other related topics; and compiled the bibliography once the bulk of the entry was finished.

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Plato’s Theory Of Knowledge: The Most Comprehensive Review

by Antony W

January 4, 2024

Plato’s theory of knowledge is a massive challenge to most students because it involves a lot of introspection.

Not many modern students have the time to sit around brooding and meditating, given how fast-paced the academic life is today. So we're here to help you understand what this is all about.

This guide covers:

Plato's theory of knowledge
Plato's definition of knowledge
The cave theory
Plato's theory of forms
The divided line theory
Platos view on knowledge
Plato’s four levels of knowledge
Plato’s true knowledge

Among others. Let’s get to it.

Background: About Plato

Estimated to have been born in 428 or 427 BCE, Plato was a remarkable student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle who went on to become the most influential philosopher of all time. He was the son of a Greek aristocrat named Ariston, who claimed lineage going all the way to the god Poseidon; his mother was called Perictione.

As a student of Socrates, Plato was heavily influenced by the former’s instruction as well as the circumstances of his life and death. We know much about Socrates, who never wrote, through prolific students of his such as Plato.

Understand that Plato is different from Gettier . His style of reasoning and conversation is certainly Socratic, and in this manner he was able to deduce and develop his best known philosophical contributions. These include the theory of Forms, Platonic realism, ethics, philosophy of religion, and many more. He essentially gave us the definition of what we today know as philosophy. The writings of Plato are generally accepted to have been done in three distinct time periods: the early, middle, and late writings or dialogues, as they are known. Our excursion will start with Plato’s definition of knowledge.

What is Plato's Theory of Knowledge?

Plato believed that truth is objective and that it results from beliefs which have been rightly justified by and anchored in reason. Thus, knowledge is justified and true belief. We can draw several conclusions from this statement:

Beliefs and knowledge are distinctly different but related.
Truth is a result of logical reasoning, but itself may result from ideas or Forms beyond conscious understanding.
This idea, or proposition, must be believed, true, and supported by good reasons in order to be considered knowledge.
There must be a subject to apprehend this knowledge.

Plato also believed that true knowledge is buried deep within our subconscious, and that we draw upon this knowledge when knowing Forms such as Beauty, Equality, Justice, etc.

That’s because, according to him, these are things that cannot be taught but each man is born with. This is a direct consequence of his belief in:

A higher plane where all the Forms exist in a pure, eternal, non-immutable state.
Reincarnation. Upon death, a soul passes through the higher plane and has knowledge of Forms in their pure state. When that soul is reborn, it draws upon this knowledge to rediscover the image of the Forms as perceived in this world..

Plato loved to use allegories and stories to carry his ideas across. Consider this story where, when one of his disciples asked him to furnish proof of immortality, Plato used it as an allegory. Note that this doesn’t mean his reasoning was correct.

Plato’s Concept of Equality as Proof of Immortality

Imagine that you have two line segments. These line segments are equal - or rather, you believe them to be so. What is the basis of your belief that they are equal? He deduces correctly that you must first have some information about the size of the segments, which you acquire through evaluating information provided by your senses.

The problem, however, is how you know the concept of equality. Were you taught it? It cannot be, because senses are non-eternal, and prone to error. On the other hand, Equality, as one of the (good) forms, is eternal and cannot change. More about Plato’s Forms in a bit.

Thus, if the concept of Equality is changeless, the only way you can know it is if you have experienced it before in a plane where Equality as a Form is present, truthful, eternal, and changeless. Thus, the soul is immortal and passed through such a plane and retained knowledge, albeit unconscious and hidden, of the Forms.

While Plato believed in reincarnation at the time of the middle period of his writings, it is to be noted that he changed his mind on some of his fundamental beliefs as indicated in his later works. Having already mentioned Plato’s Forms of knowledge in passing, it is time to get an indepth look into the concept of Plato’s Forms.

Plato’s Knowledge and Forms

Plato’s philosophical doctrines rest upon a few distinct doctrines, one of the biggest being the concept of Forms. Knowledge is based on real things about which we come up with true propositions in the process of acquiring knowledge. These ideas or objects are universal in that they can be applied to a wide range of real objects to describe or characterize them.

The definition of the word form is “appearance” or “shape”. According to Plato, Forms are the real essences of what a substance or object really is, being the answer to the question, “what is that?” He further goes on to say that what we actually experience through the interaction of our senses is a mere image of the true essence of the substance. Taking this viewpoint, he goes on to say that this world is flawed and full of error, preventing us from really seeing and understanding the true Forms.

Take, for example, the concept of Beauty. Plato would say that Beauty in itself is a real, active, perfect, and eternal essence that isn’t just a characteristic of an object, but a quality it gains by interacting with the Form Beauty. Thus, Beauty is both a characteristic and an essence in itself capable of interaction. That is the concept of self-predication.

In this illustration, Beauty Itself is utterly and solely beautiful and exists apart from these other objects that partake of it. In the Phaedo, Plato's theory of knowledge emphasizes this nature of the Forms and calls them monoeides. Thus, all other objects are of a lesser degree of beauty than Beauty, which Itself is completely beautiful. However, there are differing opinions about whether beauty is a characteristic of Beauty itself, or that the Form and essence of Beauty are the same thing.

In any case, Plato solved the problem of universals, an ancient philosophical question about whether the characteristics of objects, such as color and shape, exist beyond the objects themselves.

In addition to Beauty, the other Forms are:

Changelessness

Plato would go on to dedicate significant effort to each of these Forms in his later dialogues, believing that the philosopher gains true knowledge by grasping the world of Forms with his mind despite the only evidence of reality being poor and perhaps erroneous copies of the Forms.

Today, we can define Plato’s Forms as unchanging abstract representations of the universe around us. These archetypes are the true nature of reality, or at least the little of it that we know. In other words, these images are a representation of the True Forms, though we see them in poor light. This concept is best understood through Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Plato’s Cave Theory

Suppose that there are people in a cave, chained to its wall. They are unable to turn their faces, and all they can see is the wall of the cave. There are shadows dancing on the walls because of a fire that burns behind them, illuminating various objects in passing. However, because they are unable to turn their faces, all the people can see are mere shadows.

This very basic illustration of the cave allegory services to describe the theories that follow. The prisoners - for that is what the people are - have no other reality except what they can see in the shadows on the cave wall. They can hardly perceive there being any other reality than the one they can see, thus mistaking appearance for reality.

Plato then posits a question: when the prisoners are talking about the things they see on the wall, what are they talking about? For example, were they to see a car in the shadows and said, there is a car. What does the word “car” refer to; the shadow on the wall or the real car illuminated by the fire? The former must be correct, because the prisoners can’t see the real car.

Thus, by extension, the names we attribute to objects in our worlds are not their actual names, but rather just the names of the shadows. Only by being released from our chains can our understanding be freed to see the real Forms behind the shadows.

The chained prisoners start a guessing game to predict what image will come next. If, by chance, one of them predicts correctly, he will be praised by the others as being clever and intelligent. Thus, empirical knowledge of the world around us is praised and desired.

Suppose that one prisoner is freed, so that he is able to turn around and see what is behind him. He would see the fire, and it’s intense light would initially blind him. However, as his eyes adjust to it, he would see and realize that what is on the cave wall are mere shadows of other objects. However, as you can see, he would first need to climb a steep incline to find the fire and the real objects, or Forms.

Just beyond the fire, the prisoner would see the light of the sun filtering into the cave. He would then realize that there is a much greater and better Light, and he might follow it to the outside of the cave where the whole world awaits. However, having been so long in the cave, the bright sunlight would dazzle him, perhaps even blind him temporarily. He might be forced to go back into the cave to which he is accustomed out of fear, in what is termed as The Return.

Plato then says that only the truly courageous philosopher makes it out of the cave to face the Light - the truth of reality, as it is. And, if by chance he were to attempt to free the other prisoners and show them this truth, they would think that he were “infected” or become sick because of going outside the cave, turn against him, and kill him. This is, of course, in reference to Socrate’s forced suicide after he was accused of “polluting the youth of Athens.”

Platos Four Levels of Knowledge

In his dialogue titled “The Republic,” Plato gives us another peek into his ontology and how he defines the various levels and types of knowledge in his divided line theory. The dialogue is held between Glaucon, Plato’s brother, and Socrates.

It comes immediately after the analogy of the Sun, where the freed prisoner has left the cave and seen the immediate world. Being illuminated by it, Plato then says that man has four levels of knowledge which he called affections of the psyche.

Think of them as increasing levels of reality to truth to belief and finally to the purest state of being. It is highly metaphysical in nature and is best described in the following ascending line imagery.

Plato’s Divided Line Theory

Take a line which has been divided into two unequal parts, then divide each of the parts again in the same proportions. Suppose that the two main divisions represent the visible and the intelligible parts of reality respectively. Now allocated each of the four sections by their clearness. Drawing the line, we come up with something like this.

The visible world consists of shadows and reflections of physical things and the things themselves. The form of knowledge in this world is the illusion of ordinary experience and the belief (pistis) of discrete physical entities, of which the natural sciences are a part of.

The intelligible world also has two parts. In the first, the soul of humans uses mathematics and figures to understand the eternal as guided by the physical objects. In the highest level, it understands and views the state of being without the need of any figures.

It is said that Plato interacted with students of the great mathematician Pythagoras, which apparently made a big impression on him. Thus, as he says, mathematical reasoning lies beyond the physical world and helps us understand the real nature of things. The highest world is one above all these hypotheses and figures, and which one attains upon death.

Plato’s Ethics, Virtue, and Happiness

Plato had a keen interest in ethics and justice, and many of his dialogues seem to have a direct bearing on them. For one, he believed that a happy soul is a moral soul, that is, one led by reason.

He also believed that the immortal soul is tripartite, consisting of the appetitive (appetites and urges), spirited (emotional), and rational parts. Each has to be in control and in harmony with the rest in order for good choices to be made. These good choices, in turn, result in happiness.

He also considered each of these parts of the soul to have excellences. These excellences are what forms virtue; the excellence of the soul as a whole is virtue.

The excellence of reason is wisdom
The excellence of passion is shown through attributes such as courage.
The excellence of spirit is temperance.

All three combined bring about an excellence called Justice, which arises from a harmonious relation of the three. He considered virtue to be a kind of knowledge of good and evil which all human desires aim to achieve. Plato named the ultimate good or virtue eudaimonia, bringing about Eudaimonism.

The Totalitarian State As Imagined By Plato

This virtuous individual had roles to play in society according to his/her greatest strengths. Those with strong appetites could produce more, thus were the Producers of the state. They are the farmers, labourers, merchants, service men, and similar others. Those with a strong spirit were the Protective/Warrior cadre, which includes soldiers and the police. Those with a strong reason/head are the Governing Rulers or Philosopher Kings, which are the intelligent, rational, and wise leaders of the community who make decisions on behalf of the others.

This perfect, totalitarian state was thus dictatorial. Historians can find the heavy inspiration drawn from the strict state of ancient Sparta. In his thinking, only a few are fit to rule on the basis of their virtue, education, and grasp of knowledge. It is to be noted that he was effectively rejecting the principles of democracy which ruled Athens at the time.

In line with this, Plato went on to describe an educational system which focuses on educating the rulers with the aim of producing Philosopher Kings who would have their reason, desires, and will in virtuous harmony to help decide objectively what’s best for the people of the state. Such a king would have a moderate love for wisdom and courage to enforce that wisdom.

Plato was effectively saying that it is better to be ruled by a tyrant, whether good or bad. That way, the evils of the state fell upon one person, instead of everybody as would be the case in a democracy. He also predicted that a tyrant state would decay into an aristocracy, to a timocracy, to an oligarchy, to a democracy, and back to a tyranny.

More About Plato

This brief summary on Plato's theory of knowledge covers only the most salient points that a student would have to cover in an essay about Plato. There is much more to say about this remarkable man and his extensive influence on modern science, mathematics, and even religion.

Plato’s concept of God as the One, the Good, and the Light is intricately linked to the Sun in his allegory of the cave and the divided line. Ancient religions, including Christianity, have close links between God and the sun, if only figurative ones.

Plato believed that just as the sun lights up, heats, and promotes the growth of everything in the visible world, so does Good illuminate the world beyond where the Forms exist in their richness and true nature. However, he believed that the creation was essentially an ordering of chaos into the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. These aggregated into the Body of the Universe.

Finally, Plato is of the idea that knowledge is not learned, but rather recollected. Thus, it comes from divine insight. He probably invented the word idea, which means “having seen.” Plato is credited with creating the first university called the Academy, which was just outside Athens. Above the entrance was written: “Let no one enter who is ignorant of geometry.”

Help With Plato Assignment

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Article Contents

Introduction, critical thinking and the role of knowledge—an empirically based discussion, conclusions and appeal.

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On the role of knowledge in critical thinking—using student essay responses to bring empirical fuel to the debate between ‘generalists’ and ‘specifists’

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Kristoffer Larsson, On the role of knowledge in critical thinking—using student essay responses to bring empirical fuel to the debate between ‘generalists’ and ‘specifists’, Journal of Philosophy of Education , Volume 55, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 314–322, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12545

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To develop students’ critical thinking is one of the primary goals of a modern democratic school system. However, what is to be developed has been the matter of long-standing debate. One particular area of conflict has been what role is played by the knowledge concerning the object to be critically thought about. The ‘specifists’ have asserted that knowledge about the object is the core. The ‘generalists’ have claimed that there is no need for any actual profound knowledge. Typically, this debate has been held at a theoretical and philosophical level. In this paper, I will make an empirically based contribution to the debate. In a unique approach, I will use a number of student essay responses to argue in favour of a specifist view, and at the same time to question some of the generalists’ basic assumptions. The paper ends with an appeal to the generalists to provide us with proper clarification regarding the questions I raise. This is important as they hold the dominant position in the field. If they are to continue to do so, we need to be clear about the accuracy of their basic assumptions. This becomes even more essential as the generalist research has been severely criticised for producing inconclusive results, as well as the fact that the generalist view on critical thinking has been adopted by major policymakers both in Europe and the United States.

Developing students’ critical thinking is often agreed upon as one of the most important assignments of a modern democratic school system, promoting personal as well societal progress (Behar-Horenstein and Niu, 2011 ; Beyer, 1995; European Commission, 2016 ; Facione, 2006 ; Martin, 2005 ; NGA/CCSSO, 2010; Paul & Elder, 2009 ; Elder & Paul, 2010 ; Tsui, 1998 ). However, what is actually to be developed by the students has been a matter of debate over the decades, since there has been no agreement on the actual definition or construct of critical thinking (Brodin, 2007 ; Johnson and Hamby, 2015 ; Petress, 2004 ). At the heart of the matter is the ongoing battle fought between the so-called ‘specifists’ 1 and ‘generalists’ (Davies, 2006 , 2013 ; Moore, 2004 , 2011 , 2013 ). The specifists have talked about critical thinking as something specific, not generalisable outside certain realms (Gardner & Johnson, 1996 ; McPeck, 1985a , 1985b , 1990a , 1990b ; Moore, 2004 , 2011 , 2013 ). The most radical of these is McPeck, claiming that there are ‘almost as many different kinds of critical thinking as there are different kinds of things to think about’ (McPeck, 1990a , p. 10). The generalists, on the other hand, have talked about critical thinking as something generic, an ability that can be applied to more or less every object of thought belonging to any discipline, subject etc. (Davies, 2006 , 2013 ; Ennis, 1987 , 1989 , 1990 ; Higgins & Baumfield, 1998 ; Paul, 1985 ; Quinn, 1994 ).

One particular controversy in this debate has been the role of knowledge about the object to be critically thought about (Ennis, 1989 , 1990 ; McPeck, 1985a , 1985b , 1990a , 1990b , 1990c , 1990d ; Paul, 1985 ).

The specifists have claimed that this kind of knowledge is the actual key to good critical thinking. McPeck ( 1985a , 1985b , 1990a , 1990b ) argues that critical thinking amounts to a reflective approach towards the knowledge one has about the object of thought, proclaiming that ‘one's abilities here are a function of one's knowledge’ ( 1985b , p. 51), and over the years he has offered several examples of what he means. In one of these, he sets himself in a situation where he is to think about what to believe concerning different descriptions of the status of the US economy. He concludes that it is impossible for him to make use of some toolbox of generic critical thinking to evaluate the different descriptions. What he needs is more knowledge about Laffer curves, zero-sum systems, monetary versus fiscal policy and so on, since such an evaluation would require ‘being in possession of, and comprehending, large amounts of complex information’ ( 1990b , p. 11).

The generalists, in contrast, have claimed that knowledge about the object, though necessary to some degree, is neither a sufficient nor the most prominent criterion for critical thinking; more important is one's ability to apply generic critical thinking (Davies, 2013 ; Ennis, 1989 ; Scriven, 1990 ; Siegel, 1991 ; Bailin & Siegel, 2003 ). Scriven ( 1990 , pp. x–xi) perhaps explicates this view in the most straightforward way, stating that when it comes to critical thinking about an object, there is no ‘need for delving into vast subject matters’; it is about ‘using a finite box of [generic] tools’. What these tools actually are has been described in several different taxonomies. One of the most renowned taxonomies is the Ennis ( 1993 ) taxonomy, with tools such as to: ‘identify assumptions’, ‘judge the quality of an argument’, ‘be open-minded’ and ‘draw conclusions when warranted, but with caution’.

To sum it up somewhat bluntly, the specifists equate the ability to think critically to one's knowledge about the object to be thought about, adding merely the reflective eye. The generalists see knowledge about the object to be thought about as a subordinate part of one's ability to think critically, the application of generic critical thinking abilities being the superior and decisive part.

The discussion on the matter among scholars has typically been held at a philosophical level, with close to nothing more than general praise, supported by purely theoretically founded arguments, of either knowledge as the demarcation of one's critical thinking ability or knowledge as being neither sufficient for nor vital to one's critical thinking ability (Bailin & Siegel, 2003 ; Davies, 2006 , 2013 ; Ennis, 1989 , 1990 ; Gardner and Johnson, 1996 ; McPeck, 1985a , 1985b , 1990a , 1990b , 1990c , 1990d ; Moore, 2004 , 2011 ; Scriven, 1990 ; Siegel, 1991 ). ‘Indeed, one has to admit to a lack of empirical evidence …’, as Moore ( 2011 , p. 264) puts it. However, both sides have stressed the need for further use of empirical data when discussing the topic (Ennis, 1989 ; Moore, 2004 , 2011 ). The aim of this paper is to make such an empirically founded contribution. In a unique approach, I will use a number of essay responses by students trying to think critically, in order to argue for a specifist point of view concerning the role of knowledge. In doing so, I will dispute some of the generalists’ basic assumptions and I will conclude my line of reasoning with a direct appeal to the generalists to properly clarify the questions raised at their expense.

To sort out the questions raised is actually of vital importance for the future of critical thinking. The generalists have over the years held a predominant position in the field. For instance, important policy documents describe critical thinking in terms of a transversal phenomenon. Examples include A New Skills Agenda For Europe, declared by the European Commission (the EU's executive body) (European Commission, 2016 ), and the Common Core State Standards set by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (Lai, 2011 ; NGA/CCSSO, 2010 ) and so far adopted by 43 of the states in the United States. The empirical research on improving critical thinking among students has also for the most part approved of this generic perspective: as Tiruneh et al. ( 2014 , p. 3) put it in their review of the field, the studies mainly consider critical thinking to be ‘clearly identifiable and definable thinking skills which are domain-independent’. If the generalist is to continue to hold this dominant position, we need to be absolutely clear about the accuracy of the assumptions underpinning their view, not least as reviewers of the field have continually and severely criticised the research conducted within this generalist perspective for arriving at inconclusive results (Behar-Horenstein & Nui, 2011; McMillan, 1987 ; Tsui, 1998 ). Behar-Horenstein and Nui (2011, p. 38) go as far as asking readers ‘to consider the trustworthiness of the publications and to critically analyse the substance of empirical studies on teaching critical thinking’.

Before going further into the discussion, I would like to make some clarifications. In the literature, there are several terms, such as being ‘informed’ and having ‘knowledge’, that are used when discussing how knowledgeable one ought to be about the object to be thought about. I will use the term ‘knowledge’ throughout this paper, with the exception of direct quotations.

It is also important to recognise that, in this paper, knowledge (about the object of thought) is seen as some kind of a progressive continuum. It stretches from having no knowledge or very sparse knowledge about the object of thought to having deep and profound knowledge, including such things as knowing the structure and the rationale behind the knowledge, that is, questions concerning the epistemic status of the knowledge involved (McPeck, 1985a ). 2

Moreover, it is important to stress that the phrase ‘knowledge about the object to be thought about’ amounts to knowledge about that specific object of thought. It is not knowledge in a discipline, domain or subject in a general sense, it is knowledge directly required or called for by the specific object of thought. This kind of knowledge could, of course, most often be obtained from a certain discipline, but it could also be obtained from several different disciplines or other domains of knowledge. This particular distinction might be especially important to notice, as many times when the role of knowledge in critical thinking is discussed, it is done with regard to having knowledge in a certain discipline , domain or subject . However, these concepts have been found to be vague and often not to the point when discussing what actual knowledge might come into play when thinking critically about a certain thing (Ennis, 1989 , 1990 ; McPeck, 1990a ). Therefore, McPeck has focused the discussion on the actual knowledge required by the specific object to be thought about, whichever domains etc. that particular knowledge needs to be retrieved from (McPeck, 1985b , 1990a ). Thus, in this paper I use the phrase ‘knowledge about the object to be thought about’ to describe that specific knowledge required by the problem at hand. The empirical examples and the arguments I use to further the discussion are to be viewed accordingly.

As stated, I will use essay responses as empirical data to put forward my argument. These essay responses are taken from a classroom setting, primarily because it is in these kinds of pedagogical contexts that the educational goal of developing students’ critical thinking is to be fulfilled. More specifically I will use three essay responses written by three 15-year-old students who, with nothing more than pen and paper, were asked individually to develop their thoughts on how a deontological ethicist 3 would argue concerning the case of the death penalty. I will discuss each of these three responses in turn and elaborate my thoughts on them. I will look at how a specifist would be likely to view the response but also how a generalist might view it. In doing so, I will argue for the specifist standpoint on knowledge in critical thinking, putting the pressure on the generalists. It is worth noting here that my purpose is to make a well-reasoned and empirically well-grounded interpretation of the students’ responses on behalf of the specifists and the generalists. I do not claim that my interpretations are the only ones, or that all specifists or generalists would agree on these interpretations (as that would be futile) but I argue that these interpretations are reasonable and plausible. Let us now consider the first response:

A deontological ethicist would say that the death penalty is wrong because you can use a rule that ‘it is always wrong to kill’, which says that the act is wrong regardless of consequences or intention. A deontological ethicist could also say that the death penalty is right and lean on rules like ‘an eye for an eye’, when he says that if someone committed a murder he should also be killed as punishment. The principle, however, would only justify the death penalty if the perpetrator committed a murder. 4

Viewed from a specifist perspective, I would like to put forward this response as a manifestation of critical thinking. The response displays accurate and sufficiently extensive knowledge on deontological ethics and the death penalty, and indicates a reflective dimension. If we look deeper into what knowledge could be claimed to be present in this response, I argue that the response exhibits basic knowledge of what rules and the death penalty are. In relation to the specific rules presented, the response further demonstrates knowledge concerning the circumstances under which the rules are applicable in relation to the death penalty (most profoundly evident in the third sentence). The response also shows knowledge about the fact that deontological ethics revolve around rules, and furthermore, that rules are to determine one's standpoint or action concerning an issue or a situation (for example, the first sentence). Moreover, I argue that the response displays knowledge about the role of the chosen rule in deontological ethics and the possibility of coming up with a different conclusion on an issue based on what rules are used to guide the decision (the first and second sentences). In sum, this exhibition of knowledge about deontological ethics and the death penalty amounts to a dimension of reflection on deontological ethics and the death penalty, i.e. critical thinking. Using this line of argument, I would claim that the critical thinking manifested is best described as a function of the knowledge displayed, opening the way for the specifist standpoint on the role of knowledge in critical thinking.

However, a generalist could problematise my way of reasoning. 5 For example, they could use the earlier mentioned Ennis taxonomy of generic abilities (Ennis, 1993 ) and argue that the response shows patterns linked to at least three of those. They could start by claiming a pattern linked to the ability to ‘be open-minded’ when engaging with an object of thought, indicated by the first and second sentences, when the student shifts from one rule and one standpoint to another rule and another standpoint. Using the same pattern of shifting, they could also claim an indication of the ability to ‘identify assumptions’, as these sentences could be said to show an identification of the role of rules in deontological ethics, that is, varying standpoints could be taken on the same issue depending on the rule favoured. The generalist could further assert the presence of a third pattern that it is possible to link to yet another generic ability. Looking at sentences two and three, they could argue that this ought to be seen as a display of a pattern linked to the ability to ‘draw conclusions when warranted, but with caution’, as sentence three states under which circumstances the conclusion made in sentence two is relevant, and thereby shows caution in terms of the conclusion reached. The generalist could even claim that another pattern is linked to this ability, as the shift in perspective between sentences one and two could be viewed as indicating a certain caution regarding which conclusion a deontological ethicist would come to, opening the way for at least two different conclusions, depending on the preferred rule. Based on this counterargument, the generalist can claim that the major explanatory factor behind the critical thinking displayed in the response is the application of the above-mentioned abilities, not the knowledge about the object of thought, its subordinate.

Even if this is seen as a thoughtful objection to the specifist standpoint, I have two concerns that would call its validity into question. Firstly, if the response is primarily explained in terms of the generic abilities in question, it implies that the response is not achievable without applying these generic critical thinking abilities. Looking at the response, it seems impossible, with any certainty, to put forward such an argument. In fact, everything in the response is satisfactorily explained as merely a display of knowledge about deontological ethics and the death penalty, nothing more, and this display is thorough enough to demonstrate a reflective stance. On the other hand, the patterns that could possibly be linked to generic critical thinking can only be used ad hoc to prove their own plausible existence. Secondly, if the generic abilities offer the cardinal explanation, and are to be of some true use, it also implies that some of the knowledge being displayed in the response ought to be derived by applying generic critical thinking, and not by knowledge about the object. That is, it ought to be possible to arrive at this response without having all the knowledge about the object being displayed, instead generating this knowledge by applying generic critical thinking abilities to the case. By looking at the response as it is, this kind of knowledge-generating process is in no way obvious; in fact, it is impossible to infer something even close to this from the response. Even if such a process were in theory possible, it seems both extremely far-fetched in any practical sense and paved with pitfalls that may lead to incorrect ‘knowledge’ about the object of thought being generated.

To continue the discussion, let's look at another of the student responses:

A deontological ethicist would probably say that we shouldn't have it [the death penalty] as it becomes wrong in our laws, but he could also say that we should have it [the death penalty], as it could be needed in some brutal cases (the absolute worst) for certain criminals.

From a specifist point of view, I argue that this response lacks manifestations of critical thinking, as it is tainted by a knowledge deficit concerning the object of thought. The only relevant knowledge that the response seems to contain is some vague knowledge about what the death penalty is and under which circumstances this is often discussed (the most brutal cases). Otherwise, there appears to be no obvious knowledge displayed concerning what a rule actually is and certainly no knowledge shown concerning deontological ethics. In sum, the response can be confidently argued to manifest deficient knowledge in relation to the object to be thought about, thereby making any display of relevant reflection on the knowledge impossible, as such a reflection is a function of pertinent knowledge about the object of thought.

What, then, could generalists say about this response? I think they would indeed agree that the response lacks manifestations of critical thinking, as there is no accurate reasoning concerning deontological ethics and the death penalty displayed in the response. However, if I shine a torch on the generalist standpoint, and use the same tactic as in the previous response, something interesting occurs. To be specific, even in this response, it is possible to argue for the presence of patterns that can be linked to generic critical thinking abilities. The shift in perspective between the first part of the sentence, before the first comma, and the second part of the sentence could be seen as an indication of a pattern that can be linked to the ability to ‘be open-minded’, as the response here states that a deontological ethicist could be both for and against the death penalty and presents reasons for this. This shift in perspective can also be seen as a pattern that can be linked to the ability to ‘draw conclusions when warranted, but with caution’, as it opens the way for deontological ethicists to be able to take different standpoints regarding the issue of the death penalty.

I would argue that this kind of situation paves the way for further questioning the generalist idea of the superiority of generic abilities over knowledge. To start, the presence of patterns linked to generic critical thinking, even though no actual critical thinking is evident in the response, contradicts the core of this idea. If the main force behind critical thinking is generic abilities, how could there be a presence of these abilities without any critical thinking taking place? This presence also entails another deceitful risk which should not be underestimated, namely, to mislead the interpretation, making what is corrupt critical thinking appear as critical thinking. A generalist would perhaps counter such a claim by arguing that this risk can be avoided by applying generic critical thinking abilities to discover the corruption. However, I would claim that this line of reasoning is crooked. The only way to see through this illusion ought to be by knowing more about the object to be thought about, as the actual problem with the response is knowledge deficit, nothing more, nothing less. Add to this the fact that the knowledge deficit in the response contradicts even the generalist implication of generic critical thinking as a generator of knowledge about the object to be thought about. Though there are patterns linked to generic critical thinking abilities, there is no sign of applicable knowledge being generated by this presence. If any such process (in theory) is at work, it is generating flawed knowledge.

Before closing this argument, let us look at one last response:

A deontological ethicist would probably say that the death penalty is wrong because you are not allowed to kill someone. That is a rule and the action must follow that rule.

As with the previous response, I would argue that from a specifist perspective, this response is not a representation of critical thinking. Comparatively though, there is more pertinent knowledge present in this response, as it would be reasonable to say that it displays basic knowledge about what rules and the death penalty are. Further, it is also fair to say that it contains some knowledge about deontological ethics, such as that deontological ethics concerns rules, and that rules determine the standpoint to be taken on an issue. Even so, I would claim that this response is mostly characterised by its knowledge deficit. It is of the utmost importance to recognise that a specifist view does not claim that every display of knowledge is to be considered as critical thinking. In fact, the basic idea of this view is the opposite. Critical thinking is a function of knowledge about the object of thought. If a response lacks critical thinking but displays some knowledge about the object, this would be considered as a lack of knowledge that is deep enough to manifest a reflective approach towards the object of thought, i.e. critical thinking. There is no way, as McPeck ( 1990d , p. 117) puts it, that ‘a minimal amount of understanding of that which is to be thought about’ can generate critical thinking about that object. If compared with the first response discussed (claimed to be characterised by critical thinking), this response, for example, lacks any display of knowledge about the role of the rule in deontological ethics and the possibility of coming up with diverse standpoints on an issue based on what rule is followed.

The argument put forward above may well seem fine from a specifist standpoint, but there might be a way for a generalist to attack the specifist standpoint based on this response and my line of reasoning. This attack would involve commencing with a claim that they also see this response as lacking any manifestation of critical thinking according to the Ennis taxonomy (1993), continuing by admitting that they too see that there is relevant knowledge on the object of thought displayed, and then consolidating these two into an argument by asserting that the problem is not a knowledge deficit as in my specifist claim—there is knowledge enough in the response—but that the crux of the matter is that there is a lack of generic critical thinking.

Yet, I would say that this is a fraudulent way for the generalist to travel. I would grant them that there are no patterns of generic critical thinking evident in the response as it is. I would also, as already articulated, grant them that relevant knowledge about the object to be thought about is present. But there is also an obvious knowledge deficit in the response compared to a response that displays critical thinking, such as the first one. This deficit cannot be explained away. The generalist claim that what is missing in the response is any application of generic abilities and that such an application could turn this response into critical thinking, once again, has to explain how these generic abilities can generate knowledge, such as the kind displayed in the first response discussed.

To sum this discussion up, I would claim that the type of empirically based argument presented here makes a strong case for the specifist's standpoint on the role of knowledge in critical thinking and quite a weak case for the generalist standpoint.

As the specifist standpoint seems to be applicable to all the instances I have presented in this paper, I would maintain that the argumentation presented sharpens the McPeckian assertion that knowledge about the object to be thought about is the vehicle for, and the only real explanatory factor for, critical thinking (McPeck, 1985a , 1985b , 1990a , 1990b , 1990c , 1990d ).

The generalist view that knowledge about the object is a subordinate part of critical thinking, is, as I have shown, on the other hand, flawed in several ways. The possible presence of generic critical thinking in a response perceived as a displaying critical thinking by both generalists and specifists cannot preclude the possibility that the response displays nothing more than knowledge. Nor can this presence explain which knowledge it is necessary to have about the object and which knowledge ought to be generated by applying generic critical thinking abilities (i.e. by means of the assumed immanent knowledge-generating capacity of generic critical thinking). Further, the fact that generic critical thinking abilities can be present in a response that both sides view as lacking any actual critical thinking, seriously brings into question the generalist view on generic critical thinking as the main driving force behind critical thinking. This also relates to the risk of creating an illusion of critical thinking in a response where there is none—an illusion that logically can only be dispelled by knowing more about the object to be thought about.

Based on the argument I have made in this paper, I urge the generalist side to come up with a proper reply to the questions raised here. They need to clarify:

how generic critical thinking actually adds something to the critical thinking that knowledge about the object cannot explain;

how generic critical thinking abilities are the driving force behind critical thinking (and not knowledge about the object), especially when these abilities can be present without any critical thinking taking place;

how generic critical thinking can generate knowledge about the object not already obtained; and

how to come to terms with the chimera of generic critical thinking posing as genuine critical thinking, and to do so in terms of the use of generic critical thinking rather than knowing more about the object to be thought about.

As stated in the introduction, a clarification on the matters concerned is, in fact, of the utmost importance, and not only for the sake of the argument made. The generalist side has over the years held a dominant position in the field of critical thinking. Major policymakers in Europe and in the United States have adopted a generalist view (European Commission, 2016 ; Lai, 2011 ; NGA/CCSSO, 2010 ). The lion's share of research on improving students’ critical thinking has been conducted from a generalist perspective (Tiruneh et al ., 2014 ). To this we need to add the continual and severe criticism by reviewers that this research has arrived at surprisingly inconsistent results and suffers from an overall lack of trustworthiness (Behar-Horenstein & Nui, 2011; McMillan, 1987 ; Tsui, 1998 ). If the generalists are to hold their predominant position in the future, we need to be absolutely clear about the adequacy of their basic assumptions. Otherwise, the risk is that we will go even further down a path that is destined to end in a blind alley.

Sometimes called ‘specificists’.

Although they are not investigated in this paper, it is worth noting that the epistemological properties of critical thinking per se have been part of the wider debate between generalists and specifists (e.g. McPeck, 1985a ; Moore, 2004 ; Norris, 1985 ; Siegel, 1991 ).

The normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules.

This student response, and those presented below, have been translated from Swedish to English by the author. An effort has been made to stay as close to the original written response as possible.

In fact, the generalist Quinn identified patterns linked to generic critical thinking abilities in a student response of similar kind (Quinn, 1994 , p. 110).

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Essay on Knowledge for Students and Children

500+ words essay on knowledge.

Knowledge is understanding and awareness of something. It refers to the information, facts, skills, and wisdom acquired through learning and experiences in life. Knowledge is a very wide concept and has no end. Acquiring knowledge involves cognitive processes, communication, perception, and logic. It is also the human capacity to recognize and accept the truth. Knowledge can be used for positive as well as negative purposes. Thus knowledge can create and destroy at the same time. One may use knowledge for personal progress as well as the progress of the community, city, state, and nation. Some may use it for negative purposes that may not only harm individuals but can also harm the community.

Importance of Knowledge

* Knowledge is a success – In today’s world without education and the power of knowledge, it is not possible to succeed in life or even keep up with the fast-paced life. It is not just enough to have knowledge on a particular subject to succeed but it is also important to have knowledge about how to use it effectively to succeed. One should have knowledge about various aspects of a subject.

* Personal Development- Knowledge can last for a lifetime and it impacts our growth which influences everything in our life from relationships to work. Knowledge is important for personal growth and development . We can gain knowledge on everything that we find interesting like any dance form, art, architecture, history or just about anything for our personal development. It makes us wise enough to independently make our decisions in life. But it is important to adopt a positive mindset to become a constant learner only then it helps us progress and achieve our goals.

* Knowledge solves problems – problems in life which can be solved with the power of knowledge. Knowledge sharpens our skills like reasoning and problem-solving . A strong base of knowledge helps brains function more smoothly and effectively. We become smarter with the power of knowledge and solve problems more easily.

* Everyday Life- Knowledge is important and useful in day to day events. For example, if I have to buy air tickets online, I need to have knowledge about the various sites and their discounts, their terms & conditions or like online banking. If I don’t have knowledge then I end up paying more. So gaining knowledge is a constant process and is useful every single day.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The process to increase knowledge

Open-Minded- We always learn something new by building on the knowledge that we have. We must always be open to accepting knowledge or information from anywhere we get. It may be from books, virtual media, friends, etc. To move on from one step to another we need to know more. Like in school we start from LKG, KG and then move on to 1st standard, 2nd standard and so on. It builds a strong base.

Reading Magazines- Reading helps to decode text and improves fluency to pronounce the speech sounds clear. Reading gives an idea about different topics and different views about them. One can get the actual global knowledge. Apart from that one can learn many new terms and phrase.

Communication- Shared knowledge allows you to communicate. Shared knowledge is important for communicating and understanding each other. When we discuss a certain topic with classmates, friends or relatives they have certain knowledge about it. So through communication, we get new ideas, facts and develops our knowledge. We can also identify what have we learned and what still we don’t know that helps us to clear our doubts later.

Watch documentaries or educational videos- Discovery Channel, for example, provides excellent documentaries that keep you engaged. If you don’t like reading, this is an excellent alternative to getting your daily dose of knowledge while still relaxing in your couch!

The more knowledge we have the more power we possess. It is important for our personal and professional development and leads us to achieve success in life. Knowledge helps us in several ways but the best part is that it helps us understand ourselves as well as those around us better. It also helps us act wisely in different situations

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

The tripartite view

AQA Philosophy Epistemology

The tripartite theory of knowledge

The tripartite definition of propositional knowledge can be derived from Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus . It holds that propositional knowledge is true justified belief:

s knows p iff (if and only if):

s believes p
s has justification for believing p

This definition of knowledge claims that these three criteria (truth, belief and justification) together are equivalent to knowledge. If and only if (iff) refers to the criteria/conditions being necessary and sufficient.

They are individually necessary, meaning that each one is essential for knowledge. In any particular case, if we lack any one of those criteria, we could not have knowledge.

They are jointly sufficient, meaning that if you have all three, you have knowledge, nothing more is needed.

Truth is thought to be a necessary condition of knowledge. Zagzebski, in her article, ‘What is knowledge’, claims that knowledge is a particular type of mental contact with reality. Since reality is ‘everything that is the case’ (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) i.e. what is true, and knowledge is supposed to be of reality, that provides reason for the criterion of truth.

Belief is thought to be a necessary condition of knowledge. The idea of the mind connecting with reality also provides reason for the criterion of belief since if your mind does not make contact with reality then it seems difficult to see in what sense your mental content might be connected to reality.

Justification

Justification is thought to be a necessary condition of knowledge. Justification is the reason or warrant for a belief. Reasons, and so justifications, can be good or bad. Seeing something with your eyes is a good reason, and so justification, for belief in it. Seeing something within a dream is not. There are a variety of types of bad justification such as irrationality, mistakes, logical errors & ignorance.

Zagzebski claims that we think knowledge is good, namely desirable. Having knowledge is difficult as it requires an apparatus of mental abilities but because knowledge is valuable to us, that makes the knower worthy of praise and esteem. It is possible to have a true belief which was not justified if it was gained due to luck/chance, e.g. horoscopes, reading tea leaves or palm reading. True belief can also be gained by irrationality, such as being convinced that someone is a librarian due to seeing them read a book. If they turned out to in fact be a librarian, that would be true belief but not justified because not all book readers are librarians. Luck and irrationality will occasionally produce a true belief, but philosophers would rather explain such events with the phrase ‘a broken clock is right twice a day’, rather than confer the praise and esteem of ‘knower’ to the believer in such cases. This provides reason for regarding justification as a criterion for knowledge.

The issue that the conditions are not individually necessary

Integration: A case where we have knowledge without one of those three criteria would be a counter-example to the tripartite view as it would show that the conditions are not individually necessary. This would mean that s would not know p iff s has justification, truth and belief for p, making the tripartite view of knowledge false.

Critiquing the individual necessity of truth:

Scientific knowledge is what we currently have most reason to believe based on the available evidence at the time. This means that it changes over time. E.g. In the early 1900’s Physicists believed the universe was static and eternal, whereas today most believe it is expanding and began at a point in time at the big bang. This is because more evidence has been gained. Perhaps yet more will be gained to change the current view of the origin of the universe. Scientific knowledge might therefore be false and so seems to be a case of knowledge without truth.

Scientific knowledge would be merely justified belief, where the justification is the scientific method.

If knowledge could be false, then arguably it cannot be knowledge. It seems self-contradictory to say we know something to be true, yet it could be false.

Science can make planes fly. It clearly works. There are some false assumptions because some planes crash, however there must be some knowledge.

Critiquing the individual necessity of belief:

A student learns an answer to a question and then forgets it. In an exam, the question comes up and the answer surfaces in their consciousness, seemingly from nowhere to them, though it happened to have triggered their memory without their realising it. They decide to write it down as they have no better idea, though as they thought that answer popped into their mind from nowhere, they do not believe it is right. Arguably this is knowledge without belief.

Having your memory associate an answer with a question is arguably not the same as truly knowing something. In order to know something, arguably you have to know that you know it.

Critiquing the individual necessity of justification:

Knowledge of our immediate perceptual awareness. E.g if I am looking at a red thing. To claim there really exists a red thing in an external world would require some justification, however merely to know that I am having an experience of redness arguably requires no justification since it is known immediately with no process of reasoning or inference.

If it is possible to doubt my existence (criticisms of the cogito) then that would cast doubt on the claim to know my immediate perceptual awareness.

The issue that the conditions are not sufficient: Gettier cases

Integration: Gettier cases attempt to show that we could have all three criteria, a justified true belief, because of epistemic luck. We wouldn’t want to call that knowledge because then that knowledge would be dependent on luck. In that case, a claim of the tripartite view, that J T and B are jointly sufficient, is incorrect. This would mean that s would not know p iff s has justification, truth and belief for p, making the tripartite view of knowledge false.

Original Gettier case 1: Smith and Jones are waiting for a job interview. Smith gains a justified belief that Jones will get the job, perhaps because the president of the company assures him of that. Smith then sees that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket and so formulates the proposition “the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket”. However, it then turns out that Smith gets the job and that smith happened to have 10 coins in his pocket. The proposition Smith formulated was true, he believed it and had justification for it. It seems he therefore had justified true belief and yet he only arrived at it due to the epistemic luck of happening to have 10 coins in his pocket. This means it is possible to have justified true belief and yet we wouldn’t want to say it was knowledge, therefore the joint sufficiency of the tripartite definition is undermined.

Original Gettier case 2: Smith has the justified belief ‘Jones owns a Ford (car)’ from which he justifiably, through disjunction introduction, concludes that “Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.”

A disjunctive proposition in philosophy involves the logical operator “or”.

“F or B” is a disjunctive proposition. The whole proposition is true if either A or B is true, or if both are true. It is only false if both A and B are false.

In the Gettier case, Smith has justification for believing F is true (that Jones owns a Ford). If we have a justified belief in a proposition like F, we can connect it through the “or” operator to any random thing we could imagine while still being justified in believing the whole proposition. This is because the whole proposition is true even if only F is true. “F or B” is true even if only F is true. So even if we only have a justified belief in F, we still have a justified belief in “F or B”.

So, Smith thinks “Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.” If, in fact, Jones does not own a Ford but due to luck Brown really is in Barcelona, then Smith had true justified belief. The whole proposition (“F or B”) is true, because B is true. However, we wouldn’t want to say it’s knowledge, because it was only true by luck. It was luck that Brown was in Barcelona. So again, the joint sufficiency of the tripartite definition is undermined.

Infalibilism

Infallibilism strengthens the justification criterion of the tripartite definition of knowledge to indubitable justification. Not any sort of justification will do. There must be no possibility of failure of the support it provides to the truth of the belief. The result is that knowledge must be certain.

Smith’s justification for his belief was not infallible because the president could have been wrong, lying, or a hallucination.

no false lemmas

The no false lemmas theory proposes adding a fourth criterion to the tripartite view. A false lemma is a false belief or step in reasoning.

This view of knowledge is that s knows p if and only if:

P is true S believes p S has justification for p S has not inferred their belief in p from any false lemmas

This can solve Gettier problems because it requires that we analyse the process involved in coming to believe a proposition. It allows us to make sure there are no false beliefs or invalid steps in reasoning involved.

Smith’s belief that the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket was inferred from his belief that jones will get the job. That was a false belief and therefore a false lemma.

Integration: Gettier cases work by showing that we can have the (jointly sufficient) conditions required for knowledge yet not have knowledge. The no false lemmas view can coherently claim that Smith did not have knowledge due to not satisfying the no false lemmas criterion, which seems to solve Gettier problems.

However, the no false lemmas theory assumes that all cases of epistemic luck leading to a justified true belief involve false lemmas. Zagzebski creates a Gettier case which she claims involves epistemic luck but no false lemmas.

Dr Jones has very good inductive evidence (symptoms and lab test) that their patient Smith has virus X. This provides justification on the basis of which Dr Jones forms the belief ‘Smith has virus X’. However, Smith’s symptoms and the lab results are due to an unknown virus Y. But, due to luck, after the lab tests were taken but before Dr Jones formed her justified belief, Smith caught virus X. This means that Dr Jones’ justified belief is true.

“ So while the evidence upon which Dr. Jones bases her diagnosis does make it highly probable that Smith has X, the fact that Smith has X has nothing to do with that evidence. In this case Dr. Jones’s belief that Smith has virus X is true, justified, and undefeated, but it is not knowledge.” – Zagzebski

By ‘undefeated’, Zagzebski is indicating that Dr Jones did not infer their justified true belief from a false belief. So the no false lemmas condition has been satisfied. Dr Jones has a justified true belief with no false lemmas. Yet, only because of luck. So, the no false lemmas condition cannot say that Dr Jones does not have knowledge.

Integration: this shows that JTBN are not jointly sufficient for knowledge and therefore cannot be the correct criteria for knowledge.

Reliabilism

Virtue epistemology.

Sosa’s Virtue epistemology replaces the justification criterion with ‘virtuously formed’. This involves intellectual ‘traits/virtues’ such as intellectual courage, attention to detail and desire for truth as virtuous in that they enable us to achieve knowledge.

S knows p iff

P is true S believes p S believes p because of the exercise of intellectual virtue

You have knowledge if you have truth, belief and the belief resulted from intellectual virtues.

Sosa creates an analogy to explain his theory of an archer shooting an arrow at a target.

Accuracy. An arrow accurately hitting a target is analogous to a true belief. This is not enough to be knowledge because accuracy can result from luck, as Gettier shows.

Adroitness. An arrow shot adroitly (skilfully) is analogous to having intellectual virtues. However, even if the arrow was shot well and was accurate – even if someone has intellectual virtues and a true belief, that still does not rule out luck. For example, the arrow could even be shot well, be blown off course, and then blown back onto course.

Aptness. An arrow accurately hitting a target because it was shot well (adroitly) is analogous to having a true belief because of intellectual virtue. This is called aptness. There must be a causal relationship between accuracy and adroitness to truly rule out the possibility of luck. If a person has a true belief because of their intellectual virtue, then they do not have it because of luck.

Barn county as a response to virtue epistemology. Henry is driving through Barn County, a countryside where there is one real barn and many fake barns that look real when viewed from the road. Whenever viewing a barn Henry thinks “there’s a barn”. Most of the time his beliefs are false but in the one case of the real barn his belief is true.

The problem is that in barn county this belief would be false most of the time. It was only luck that it was true in that one instance.

In the barn county scenario, Henry gains a true belief because of intellectual virtue. However, it was only luck that the exercise of intellectual virtue caused a true belief in that situation.

Definition Essay

Definition Essay - Writing Guide, Examples and Tips

14 min read

Published on: Oct 9, 2020

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

What is a Definition Essay?

Just as the name suggests, a definition essay defines and explains a term or a concept. Unlike a narrative essay, the purpose of writing this essay is only to inform the readers.

Writing this essay type can be deceivingly tricky. Some terms, concepts, and objects have concrete definitions when explained. In contrast others are solely based on the writerâs understanding and point of view.

A definition essay requires a writer to use different approaches when discussing a term. These approaches are the following:

Denotation - It is when you provide a literal or academic definition of the term.
Connotation - It is when the writer provides an implied meaning or definition of the term.
Enumeration - For this approach, a list is employed to define a term or a concept.
Analogy - It is a technique in which something is defined by implementing a comparison.
Negation - It is when you define a term by stating what it is not.

A single or combination of approaches can be used in the essay.

Definition Essay Types

There are several types of definition essays that you may be asked to write, depending on the purpose and scope of the assignment.

In this section, we will discuss some of the most common types of definition essays.

Descriptive Definition Essay

This type of essay provides a detailed description of a term or concept, emphasizing its key features and characteristics.

The goal of a descriptive definition essay is to help readers understand the term or concept in a more profound way.

Stipulative Definition Essay

In a stipulative definition essay, the writer provides a unique definition of a term or concept. This type of essay is often used in academic settings to define a term in a particular field of study.

The goal of a stipulative definition essay is to provide a precise and clear definition that is specific to the context of the essay.

Analytical Definition Essay

This compare and contrast essay type involves analyzing a term or concept in-depth. Breaking it down into its component parts, and examining how they relate to each other.

The goal of an analytical definition essay is to provide a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the term or concept being discussed.

Persuasive Definition Essay

A persuasive definition essay is an argumentative essay that aims to persuade readers to accept a particular definition of a term or concept.

The writer presents their argument for the definition and uses evidence and examples to support their position.

Explanatory Definition Essay

An explanatory definition essay is a type of expository essay . It aims to explain a complex term or concept in a way that is easy to understand for the reader.

The writer breaks down the term or concept into simpler parts and provides examples and analogies to help readers understand it better.

Extended Definition Essay

An extended definition essay goes beyond the definition of a word or concept and provides a more in-depth analysis and explanation.

The goal of an extended definition essay is to provide a comprehensive understanding of a term, concept, or idea. This includes its history, origins, and cultural significance.

How to Write a Definition Essay?

Writing a definition essay is simple if you know the correct procedure. This essay, like all the other formal pieces of documents, requires substantial planning and effective execution.

The following are the steps involved in writing a definition essay effectively:

Instead of choosing a term that has a concrete definition available, choose a word that is complicated . Complex expressions have abstract concepts that require a writer to explore deeper. Moreover, make sure that different people perceive the term selected differently.

Once you have a word to draft your definition essay for, read the dictionary. These academic definitions are important as you can use them to compare your understanding with the official concept.

Drafting a definition essay is about stating the dictionary meaning and your explanation of the concept. So the writer needs to have some information about the term.

In addition to this, when exploring the term, make sure to check the termâs origin. The history of the word can make you discuss it in a better way.

Coming up with an exciting title for your essay is important. The essay topic will be the first thing that your readers will witness, so it should be catchy.

Creatively draft an essay topic that reflects meaning. In addition to this, the usage of the term in the title should be correctly done. The readers should get an idea of what the essay is about and what to expect from the document.

Now that you have a topic in hand, it is time to gather some relevant information. A definition essay is more than a mere explanation of the term. It represents the writerâs perception of the chosen term and the topic.

So having only personal opinions will not be enough to defend your point. Deeply research and gather information by consulting credible sources.

The gathered information needs to be organized to be understandable. The raw data needs to be arranged to give a structure to the content.

Here's a generic outline for a definition essay:

Are you searching for an in-depth guide on crafting a well-structured definition essay?Check out this definition essay outline blog!

6. Write the First Draft

Drafting each section correctly is a daunting task. Understanding what or what not to include in these sections requires a writer to choose wisely.

The start of your essay matters a lot. If it is on point and attractive, the readers will want to read the text. As the first part of the essay is the introduction , it is considered the first impression of your essay.

To write your definition essay introduction effectively, include the following information:

Start your essay with a catchy hook statement that is related to the topic and the term chosen.
State the generally known definition of the term. If the word chosen has multiple interpretations, select the most common one.
Provide background information precisely. Determine the origin of the term and other relevant information.
Shed light on the other unconventional concepts and definitions related to the term.
Decide on the side or stance you want to pick in your essay and develop a thesis statement .

After briefly introducing the topic, fully explain the concept in the body section . Provide all the details and evidence that will support the thesis statement. To draft this section professionally, add the following information:

A detailed explanation of the history of the term.
Analysis of the dictionary meaning and usage of the term.
A comparison and reflection of personal understanding and the researched data on the concept.

Once all the details are shared, give closure to your discussion. The last paragraph of the definition essay is the conclusion . The writer provides insight into the topic as a conclusion.

The concluding paragraphs include the following material:

Summary of the important points.
Restated thesis statement.
A final verdict on the topic.

7. Proofread and Edit

Although the writing process ends with the concluding paragraph, there is an additional step. It is important to proofread the essay once you are done writing. Proofread and revise your document a couple of times to make sure everything is perfect.

Before submitting your assignment, make edits, and fix all mistakes and errors.

If you want to learn more about how to write a definition essay, here is a video guide for you!

Definition Essay Structure

The structure of a definition essay is similar to that of any other academic essay. It should consist of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

However, the focus of a definition essay is on defining and explaining a particular term or concept.

In this section, we will discuss the structure of a definition essay in detail.

Introduction

Get the idea of writing an introduction for a definition essay with this example:

Body Paragraphs

Here is an example of how to craft your definition essay body paragraph:

Types of the Term/Concept

If applicable, the writer may want to include a section that discusses the different types or categories of the term or concept being defined.

This section should explain the similarities and differences between the types, using examples and anecdotes to illustrate the points.

Examples of the Term/Concept in Action

The writer should also include real-life examples of the term or concept being defined in action.

This will help the reader better understand the term or concept in context and how it is used in everyday life.

Conclusion

This example will help you writing a conclusion fo you essay:

Definition Essay Examples

It is important to go through some examples and samples before writing an essay. This is to understand the writing process and structure of the assigned task well.

Following are some examples of definition essays to give our students a better idea of the concept.

Understanding the Definition Essay

Definition Essay Example

Definition Essay About Friendship

Definition Essay About Love

Family Definition Essay

Success Definition Essay

Beauty Definition Essay

Definition Essay Topics

Selecting the right topic is challenging for other essay types. However, picking a suitable theme for a definition essay is equally tricky yet important. Pick an interesting subject to ensure maximum readership.

If you are facing writerâs block, here is a list of some great definition essay topics for your help. Choose from the list below and draft a compelling essay.

Authenticity
Sustainability
Mindfulness

Here are some more extended definition essay topics:

Social media addiction
Ethical implications of gene editing
Personalized learning in the digital age
Ecosystem services
Cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation
Sustainable fashion
Gender equality in the workplace
Financial literacy and its impact on personal finance
Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence
Welfare state and social safety nets

Need more topics? Check out this definition essay topics blog!

Definition Essay Writing Tips

Knowing the correct writing procedure is not enough if you are not aware of the essayâs small technicalities. To help students write a definition essay effortlessly, expert writers of CollegeEssay.org have gathered some simple tips.

These easy tips will make your assignment writing phase easy.

Choose an exciting yet informative topic for your essay.
When selecting the word, concept, or term for your essay, make sure you have the knowledge.
When consulting a dictionary for the definition, provide proper referencing as there are many choices available.
To make the essay informative and credible, always provide the origin and history of the term.
Highlight different meanings and interpretations of the term.
Discuss the transitions and evolution in the meaning of the term in any.
Provide your perspective and point of view on the chosen term.

Following these tips will guarantee you better grades in your academics.

By following the step-by-step approach explained in this guide, you will acquire the skills to craft an outstanding essay.

Struggling with the thought, " write my college essay for m e"? Look no further.

Our dedicated definition essay writing service is here to craft the perfect essay that meets your academic needs.

For an extra edge, explore our AI essay writer , a tool designed to refine your essays to perfection.

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(PDF) The Elusive Definition of Knowledge
Knowledge is an abstract concept without any reference to the tangible. world. It is a very powerful concept, yet it has no clear definition so far. From the Gre ek philosophers up to present ...
The Analysis of Knowledge
1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief. There are three components to the traditional ("tripartite") analysis of knowledge. According to this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge. The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge:S knows that p iff. p is true; S believes that p;
What is Knowledge?
The Knowledge Problem. Studying knowledge is one of those perennial topics—like the nature of matter in the hard sciences—that philosophy has been refining since before the time of Plato. The discipline, epistemology, comes from two Greek words episteme (επιστημη) which means knowledge and logos (λογος) which means a word or ...
Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge
One historically popular definition of 'knowledge' is the 'JTB' theory of knowledge: knowledge is justified, true belief.[3] Most philosophers think that a belief must be true in order to count as knowledge.[4] Suppose that Smith is framed for a crime, and the evidence against Smith is overwhelming.
Knowledge
In principle, knowledge-that is the kind of knowledge present whenever there is knowledge of a fact or truth — no matter what type of fact or truth is involved: knowledge that 2 + 2 = 4; knowledge that rape is cruel; knowledge that there is gravity; and so on. When philosophers use the term 'know' unqualifiedly, knowledge-that is ...
Definition of Knowledge
For an example essay plan on definitions of knowledge, see the How to Get an A in A-level Philosophy book. Gettier cases are a devastating problem for the tripartite definition of knowledge.. In response, philosophers have tried to come up with new definitions of knowledge that avoid Gettier cases.. Generally, these new definitions seek to refine the justification condition of the tripartite ...
7.2 Knowledge
Plato's analysis is known as the traditional account of knowledge. Plato's definition is that a person S knows proposition P if and only if. P is true, S believes P, and; S is justified in believing P (Plato 1997b). Plato's hypothesis on knowledge, often referred to as the JTB account (because it is " justified true belief "), is ...
Knowledge
Knowledge is an awareness of facts, a familiarity with individuals and situations, or a practical skill.Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often characterized as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification.While there is wide agreement among philosophers that propositional knowledge is a form of true belief, many controversies ...
The Value of Knowledge
Notice that, if knowledge is a cognitive performance that is an achievement, then with reference to the above set of claims, the robust virtue epistemologist can respond to not only the secondary value problem but also the tertiary value problem (i.e., the problem of explaining why knowledge is more valuable, in kind and not merely in degree, than that which falls short of knowledge).
Defining Knowledge
Knowing as simply being correct. In Zhang, B. and Tong, S., eds., A Dialogue between Law and Philosophy: Proceedings of the International Conference on Facts and Evidence, Beijing: Chinese University of Political Science and Law Press, pp. 68 - 82. Google Scholar. Hetherington, S. ( 2018 b). Knowledge and knowledge-claims: Austin and beyond.
Knowing That One Knows and the Classical Definition of Knowledge
these definitions, the concept of knowledge is defined in terms of three. conditions, of which the first may be termed the condition of acceptance. or belief the second, the condition of justification or evidence, and the. third, the condition of truth. In Rynin's formulation of the classical definition, the first clause of.
PDF An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge
Preface. The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is one of the main areas of philosophy. Some of the problems are as old as Plato, yet they remain alive and interesting today. This book is intended to introduce the reader to some of the main problems in epistemology and to some proposed solutions. It is primarily intended for students taking ...
Knowledge How
With these premises the regress goes as follows. Suppose that one performs an action Φ: By AP, one employs one's knowledge-how to Φ. By SI, one employs the knowledge that p, for some p.; So, by CP, one contemplates p.; But contemplating p is an action.; So by AP, if one contemplates p, one employs one's knowledge-how to contemplate p.; By CP, one ought to contemplate another proposition ...
Definition of knowledge.
In this chapter on the definition of knowledge, the author provides a survey of epistemological theories from Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus before transitioning to modern philosophy. Modern theories of knowledge include modern agnosticism, Locke, Hume, and Kant. He then describes later agnosticism, the agnostic view of knowledge and absolute idealism. Noting the element of truth in ...
Plato's Theory Of Knowledge: The Most Comprehensive Review
January 4, 2024. Plato's theory of knowledge is a massive challenge to most students because it involves a lot of introspection. Not many modern students have the time to sit around brooding and meditating, given how fast-paced the academic life is today. So we're here to help you understand what this is all about.
On the role of knowledge in critical thinking—using student essay
It is not knowledge in a discipline, domain or subject in a general sense, it is knowledge directly required or called for by the specific object of thought. This kind of knowledge could, of course, most often be obtained from a certain discipline, but it could also be obtained from several different disciplines or other domains of knowledge.
Essay on Definition of Knowledge
Definition of Knowledge. Truth is the essence of all knowledge. Our Knowledge is justified true belief. Everyday people hear and experience things and then choose whether or not to believe them. It is the justification of the knowledge that we acquire that makes something believable to a person or not. The justification for our knowledge allows ...
Essay on Knowledge for Students and Children
Knowledge is understanding and awareness of something. It refers to the information, facts, skills, and wisdom acquired through learning and experiences in life. Knowledge is a very wide concept and has no end. Acquiring knowledge involves cognitive processes, communication, perception, and logic. It is also the human capacity to recognize and ...
The tripartite view
The tripartite definition of propositional knowledge can be derived from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus. It holds that propositional knowledge is true justified belief: s knows p iff (if and only if): p is true. s believes p. s has justification for believing p. This definition of knowledge claims that these three criteria (truth, belief and ...
Essay
Essays known as Knowledge Skills and Executive Core Qualifications are required when applying to certain US federal government positions. A KSA, or "Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities", is a series of narrative statements that are required when applying to Federal government job openings in the United States. KSAs are used along with resumes to ...
Definition Of Knowledge Essay
Definition Of Knowledge Essay. 1084 Words5 Pages. My definition of knowledge is a true fact or justified belief that is acquired through a persons experience and education. To a great extent, faith does play a role in deciding if knowledge we acquire has purpose and meaning in our lives however, sometimes faith does not play a role.
The Four Main Types of Essay
An essay is a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. There are many different types of essay, but they are often defined in four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays. Argumentative and expository essays are focused on conveying information and making clear points, while narrative and ...
Definition Essay
A definition essay is more than a mere explanation of the term. It represents the writerâ s perception of the chosen term and the topic. ... When selecting the word, concept, or term for your essay, make sure you have the knowledge. When consulting a dictionary for the definition, provide proper referencing as there are many choices available.

The Knowledge Problem

Do We Know Stuff?

What is Knowledge?

Justification

People-centered Knowledge

Rene Descartes and the Search for Universal Knowledge

Postmodernism and Knowledge

Perspective at the Center

Community Agreement

Knowledge and the Mental Life

Wired for Bias

Biases and Belief Formation

Making Knowledge Practical

For Further Reading

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Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge

1. What is Knowledge? [2]

2. Analysis of Justification

3. Sources of Knowledge and Evidence

4. The Structure of Knowledge, Justification, and Inference

5. Skepticism

6. Other Issues

7. Conclusion

Related Essays

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Overview – The Definition of Knowledge

Reliabilism

Justified True Belief

Necessary and sufficient conditions

Problem: Gettier cases

Gettier case 1

Gettier case 2

Problem: Not necessary

Alternative definitions of knowledge

JTB + no false lemmas

Problem: fake barn county

Children and Animals

Linda Zagzebski: What is Knowledge?

Zagzebski’s definition of knowledge

Sosa’s virtue epistemology

Problem: children and animals

Problem: too strict

Knowledge from Perception>>>

7.2 Knowledge

Plato and the Traditional Account of Knowledge

Problems with the Traditional Account of Knowledge

Dharmakīrti’s Mirage

Russell’s Case

Fake Barn Country

Fixing Plato’s Traditional Account of Knowledge

No False Premises

Ruling Out Defeaters and Alternatives

The Problem with Justification

Bibliography

Knowledge How

1.1 The Contemplation Argument

9.1 Skill Across Cultures

4. The Linguistic Argument

6. The Epistemology of Knowledge-How

7. The Argument from Cognitive Science

8. Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

8.3 Radical Anti-Intellectualism: Practicalism

9. Knowledge-How and Skill

Acknowledgments

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Plato’s Theory Of Knowledge: The Most Comprehensive Review

Background: About Plato

What is Plato's Theory of Knowledge?

Plato’s Concept of Equality as Proof of Immortality

Plato’s Knowledge and Forms