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Conceptions of Knowing
An analytical study of knowledge ought to acknowledge that the word "knowl-
edge" is significantly ambiguous—as are its equivalents in other languages, such as the
Greek episteme, from which "epistemology" is derived. The principal meanings of
these words can be arranged into three groups. The first group concerns abilities
of various kinds, primarily cognitive abilities that result from learning but some-
times even motor abilities. One can know German or know how to walk on stilts;
one can know how to give a rousing speech, how to use the library, how get to the
airport, but also how to do a handstand or back flip. Another group involves acquaint-
ance, familiarity, personal experience, and corresponding recognitional abilities. One
can know a former teacher; one can know a person by name or by sight; one can
know fear, love, or disappointment; and can know New York, Boston, or the neighbor-
ing university campus. The last group of meanings—perhaps it is a single meaning-
concerns "facts gathered by study, observation, or experience," and conclusions in-
ferred from such facts (as when one has an in-depth knowledge of particle phys-
ics)."1 What the dictionary describes as knowledge of facts can be described more
plainly as knowledge-that:2 knowledge that snow is while, that grass is green, or
that 2+2 = 4. It is this last sort of knowledge that is central to recent work in episte-
mology.
In the early part of the last century some philosophers, notably Bertrand Rus-
sell, considered acquaintance or direct experience the fundamental source of empiri-
cal knowledge; for them, knowledge-that ultimately arises from knowledge of. As
they saw it, our subjective experiences are elements of our consciousness, and every-
thing we know by perception arises from our experiences. This view is no longer
widely held: most philosophers now contend that acquaintance involves a substantial
amount of knowledge-that, and the directly experienced residue in experience is
little more than a stimulus for interpretive acts that result in more knowledge-that.
Just think of your knowledge of your own hometown. You know that it has various
buildings, various streets, various parks; you know where your house or apartment
was—you know that it was in such and such a place. You can call up memory im-
ages of places you recall, but these images simply bring more facts to mind. The
prevalence of this new view of acquaintance—the idea that it is not a distinctive
kind of knowledge more basic than knowledge-that—owes a lot to Wittgenstein's at-
tack on what he called "private languages," and it may or may not be right or defen-
sible. I shall have more to say about acquaintance in chapter five.
Before 1963 analytically-minded philosophers mostly agreed that knowledge- that
could be understood as justified true belief. Edmund Gettier's now famous criticism of
this account destroyed the agreement and stimulated a plethora of at- tempts to provide
an improved definition. The philosophers seeking an im- provement had two desiderata
specifically in mind. They wanted a definition incor- porating standards that would
make it possible for ordinary human beings to know most of what they think they know,
and they wanted a definition that would avoid Gettier examples and others relevantly
like them. A definition having the first feature would be instrumental in avoiding
skepticism, an outcome that could be expected if the required standards of evidence
were set too high. They also assumed that a defini- tion having the desired features
would require a knower to possess an appropriate true belief.
The great number and variety of attempts to provide a definition satisfying
the desiderata I mentioned make it fairly clear that the philosophers attempting to
provide such an improvement were not working with a single knowledge concept that
already existed and was generally accepted. They may have had illusions about what
they were doing, but the reality is that they were attempting to create a knowledge
concept that was philosophically preferable to the simple one that Gettier criticized.
They wanted a better analytical account of what knowledge could be taken to be. As
it happened, they did not definitely succeed in this endeavor: no generally accepted
conception or account of the desired kind was ever created. Many philosophers con-
tinue with the hunt, but some have basically given up on it. Among the latter, Timo-
thy Williamson came to the conclusion that "knowing does not factorize as stan-
dard analyses require." Instead of attempting to provide a definition of knowl-
edge, Williamson offered a "modest nonreductive analysis," describing knowing as
"the most general factive, stative [human] attitude"—factive in being attached
only to truths, and stative in being a state rather than a process. But Williamson's non-
reductive analysis does not appear to have attracted many adherents. Most philoso-
phers appear to want a more informative account of knowing than Williamson's
analysis provides.
The consensus that once existed on seeking an improved justified-true-belief (or
JTB+) analysis of knowing broke down for other reasons. Some philosophers, such
as Peter Unger and Robert Fogelin, did not believe that skepticism should be ruled
out by easily satisfied standards for knowing. These philosophers even wrote books
supporting versions of that generally abhorred doctrine. In taking a skeptical line
they had little trouble satisfying the other desideratum for a JTB+ analysis of knowl-
edge, the one requiring the avoidance of Gettier examples. Each of the examples
Gettier actually gave presupposed that a person may know that P on the basis of in-
conclusive evidence—evidence that does not exclude the possibility that P is actually
false. But supporters of skepticism normally endorse higher standards for knowing:
they seek evidence that is logically conclusive. Since a skeptical scenario featuring
Descartes' evil genius or Putnam's brains in a vat cannot be conclusively refuted (or
ruled out with utter certainty) by any evidence plausibly available to an observer, a
philosopher requiring conclusive evidence for knowing will end up with the view that
no alternative scenario incompatible with skepticism can possibly be known to be
true.
Thus far I have been speaking of assumptions about knowledge that phi-
losophers have held since 1963. Before that further differences existed, particu-
larly if we go back far enough. Plato held that knowledge (episteme) is infallible
and, unlike belief, directed to an immutable object. Aristotle held knowledge to be
either immediately certain or a demonstrative consequence, via the syllogism, of im-
mediately certain premises. Descartes did not limit necessary inference to the syllo-
gism, but like Aristotle he thought properly scientific knowledge, or scientia, re-
quired rational certainty: the subject's evidential basis for such knowledge must be
conclusive. Earlier twentieth-century philosophers had a more flexible attitude to
knowing. G. E. Moore held that "I know that P" sometimes does, and sometimes
does not, imply "I know that P with utter certainty"; and in 1952 Norman Malcolm
distinguished a strong from a weak sense of "knows," one implying that the subject is
certain of something, the other not.
In everyday life we often apparently do speak of knowledge in what Malcolm
called the weak sense; we seem to assume that people often have genuine knowl-
edge when their evidence is logically inconclusive, when it does not exclude the possi-
bility of error. We seem to assume this when, having looked at our watch, we say
we know what time it is; we seem to assume it when, watching a television news-
cast, we say we know the Twin Towers have been destroyed by a terrorist attack;
and so on. But sometimes we speak of it in what is pretty clearly a stronger sense,
one requiring that a subject's evidence be logically conclusive or very close to it. In a
recent letter to the Scientific American, a man calculated that to win the $160-
million with his lottery ticket, he would have to beat the winning odds of 1 to
120,526,770. In spite of these odds, he was willing to buy the ticket, and when he
bought it we would not agree that if his friend Tom believes he will lose, Tom
knows he will lose if that is what will happen. In spite of the very strong evidence
Tom possesses, the possibility remains that the man will win—and this is enough to
defeat Tom's claim to know he will lose. In this case, actually knowing that the
man will lose seems to require rational certainty: our evidence must be sufficient
to rule out the possibility that he will win.
The idea that we do in fact commonly apply different standards of evidence or
different levels of certainty in deciding whether this or that person has knowledge
under these or those circumstances is now widely accepted, but some philosophers give
"invariant" accounts of this diversity. According to some, knowledge-ascriptions
based on weak standards are usually in fact false, though they may have some practi-
cal value; according to others, negative ascriptions ("S does not know that P") based
on exceptionally strong standards are actually false, though they seem plausible in
the context of some well-known skeptical arguments. The key issue in the whole de-
bate is how the diversity that is apparent in assertions involving "knows that" is best
accommodated theoretically, and what account of how knowledge may be un-
derstood is most illuminating. As it happens, I shall be defending a dual
account in what follows, one in which a concept of knowing for certain is
distinguished from a minimal concept that does not require rational
certainty. My approach is not widely accepted at the present time,
however; the most widely discussed alter- native in recent years is some
form of contextualism. Because of its popularity as well as its complexity
and suggestiveness, I want to consider this sort of view first.
(from What is Knowledge? by
Bruce Aune)
