KNOWLEDGE: A BASIC REVISION HANDOUT

by Howard Simmons June 2015

The definition of knowledge: What is propositional knowledge?
Terminology
The word 'knowledge' can be used in several different ways, such as:
Acquaintance knowledge. If I am 'acquainted' with Westminster Bridge, for
example, then I am said to know of it, perhaps through having seen it.
Linking this with the topic of perception (see my guide on that subject), it is
worth pointing out that some philosophers have believed that the only things
that we are ever truly acquainted with are sense-data and other purely
mental phenomena, though this is not of course the 'common sense' view.
Ability knowledge. This is knowing how to do something, e.g., knowing how
to ride a bike.
Propositional knowledge. This is knowing that certain things are the case,
e.g., knowing that hydrogen is the lightest gas. It is called 'propositional'
because the thing known ('that hydrogen is the lightest gas' in the example)
is referred to as a 'proposition'.
Clearly there are connections between these different forms of knowledge.
Acquaintance knowledge seems to require at least some propositional
knowledge. (It would make little sense, for example, to say that someone was
acquainted with Westminster Bridge but did not know any facts about it.) Ability
knowledge too can partially involve propositional knowledge. (For example, my
knowing how to solve simultaneous equations is likely to be based on knowing
that if they are manipulated in certain ways, certain results will be obtained.) But
an interesting thing about ability knowledge is the fact that in many cases, it is
possible to have it while possessing very little, if any, relevant propositional
knowledge. I may be entirely competent in bike riding while finding myself at a
loss to answer the question 'How exactly do you do it?'
What exactly is propositional knowledge? This question is a request for a
philosophical analysis. In order to have any hope of tackling it successfully we
need to understand what sort of thing a philosophical analysis of a concept is
what exactly are we aiming for when we seek to provide an analysis of a given
concept, whether it be knowledge, perception, causation, free will or any of the
other notions that philosophers seek to understand. While we cannot give a
complete account of the nature of philosophical analysis here, it is useful to
highlight two key notions: Necessary and Sufficient conditions.
The idea of necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. p is said to be
a necessary condition of q if and only if p follows from q, i.e., if q is the case, p
must be the case. For example, having a power supply is a necessary condition
for an electric heater to work properly: if the heater works properly, then there
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must be a power supply. p is said to be a sufficient condition of q if and only if q

follows from p, i.e., if p is the case, q must be the case. For example, being an
unmarried man is a sufficient condition for being a bachelor. When philosophers
try to analyse a concept, what they are (standardly) trying to do is provide
necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. In the case of knowledge,
then, the aim would be to find a condition x such that it is true to say that if x
holds, then a given person a knows some proposition p (making x a sufficient
condition for knowledge) and also if a knows that p, x holds (making x a
necessary condition for knowledge). Sometimes a sufficient condition consists
of several elements. For example, for an electric heater to work properly, it is
not enough that there is a power supply: it is also required that there are no
faults in the heater, that the heater has been plugged in properly and so on.
These more specific conditions would be described as jointly sufficient, but not
individually sufficient for the heater to work properly. (The same distinction can
of course be drawn in relation to necessary conditions.)
The tripartite analysis of knowledge So, with these concepts ready to hand,
let's now turn to the task of providing an analysis of 'a knows that p', that is to
say, of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for a to know that p.
Clearly, one necessary condition for knowing something is believing it. But belief
is not a sufficient condition. Brian may believe that looking at tea leaves is a
good way to predict the future, but it does not follow that Brian knows this, for it
may not be true. This suggests the following analysis of knowledge: a knows
that p if and only if a believes that p and p is true. But this is still not enough.
Suppose I correctly predict the winner of the Grand National. It does not
necessarily follow that I knew which horse would be the winner, for it was
probably just luck. To deal with this problem, the so-called tripartite analysis of
knowledge emerged: a knows that p if and only if all of the following conditions
hold: (i) a believes that p; (ii) p is true; (iii) a is justified in believing that p.
According to the advocates of this analysis, these conditions are jointly sufficient,
and each individually necessary, for a to know that p.
Possible problems with the tripartite analysis
It can be claimed that it is not true that each of the clauses is individually
necessary. The truth-condition, which says that p must be true, is hard to
dispute. Admittedly, there are examples like this one, discussed by A. Hazlett:
Everyone knew that stress caused ulcers, before two Australian doctors in the
early 80s proved that ulcers are actually caused by bacterial infection. However,
it is hard to avoid thinking that the word 'knew' should be in inverted commas
here: people didn't really know this: they just thought they knew it. The beliefcondition which is that a must believe that p, can more plausibly be
questioned. Colin Radford cites the case of 'Albert', who doesn't think he knows
anything about history, though he is able to give the correct answers to many
historical questions. Suppose one of these questions is 'When did Queen
Elizabeth I die?' and Colin gives the correct answer: 1603. Does Colin know that
Elizabeth died in 1603? Clearly, yes. (He can't be getting it right by magicwe
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assume of course that there was no cheating going on.) But does he believe that
Elizabeth died in 1603? Radford suggests not, since he does not trust his own
answer. If this is all correct, then we seem to have a case of knowledge without
belief. The justification-condition Doubts can also be raised about the last
clause, the requirement that a must be justified in believing that p. Must this
always be true for a's belief to count as knowledge? Here one might make
reference to the fact that we frequently talk of animals knowing things and yet it
would be strange, to say the least, to suppose that they are 'justified' in any of
their beliefs. One could perhaps get round this by arguing that so-called animal
knowledge is knowledge only in an extended sense of the term. However, there
seem to be possible cases in which we might say that people know things though
they are not justified in believing them. Suppose there were some people who
were telepathic (something which is logically possible) and that we knew this
simply because of the results of numerous experiments proving their success in
reporting others' thoughts. Now consider one of these individuals, Freda, before
the experiments have been done to prove the genuineness of her telepathic
abilities. She uses these abilities to report that Bill is thinking about the Eiffel
Tower. It is highly plausible to say that she knows that Bill is thinking about the
Eiffel Tower. But she is not justified is believing this because, at the relevant
time, the evidence to support the reality of her telepathic abilities has not yet
been obtained. She thus appears to know something which she is not justified in
believing. (Of course, she may feel very sure that Bill is thinking about the Eiffel
Tower, but even if her telepathic abilities are working correctly and he is, it
doesn't follow that she is justified in trusting her telepathic abilities at this
stage.)
Questioning whether all the conditions together are jointly sufficient .
This line of argument was adopted in the early sixties by Edmund Gettier, who
provided a number of counter-examples, that is, cases in which the analysis
would require us to say that certain people know things, whereas in fact we
would not say this. Here is one such case: There are three people in a room,
Smith, Jones and Brown. Smith believes that Jones owns a Ford and has good
evidence for this. Smith knows that he himself does not own a Ford. He
considers whether it is true that someone in the room owns a Ford and, because
of his good evidence that Jones does, concludes that this is the case. Finally,
suppose that in fact Jones does not own a Ford but, unknown to Smith, Brown
does. The question is this: does Smith know that someone in the room owns a
Ford? It certainly seems that all the conditions of the tripartite analysis are met:
(i) Smith believes that someone owns a Ford; (ii) it is true that someone own a
Ford; and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that someone owns a Ford. So
according to the analysis, it would be correct to say that Smith knows that
someone in the room owns a Ford. But according to most people's intuitions, it
would not be correct to say that he knows this. What we have here seems too
dependent on good luck to count as knowledge.

Assuming that these intuitions are correct, any satisfactory analysis of

knowledge needs to be immune from Gettier-style counter-examples. There are
several possible ways of making it immune:
The justification condition can be strengthened (i.e., made more exacting).
The existing conditions can be retained, but one or more extra conditions
added.
The justification condition can be replaced by something else.
Strengthening Justification: infallibilism Bear in mind that the essential
challenge posed by Gettier cases is that they allow knowledge to be obtained by
sheer luck and this seems to be a misconstrual of what we normally take
knowledge to be. The thought behind the strengthening response is that we
might be able to make the justification condition more exacting in such a way as
to exclude this kind of lucky true belief from counting as knowledge. One way of
doing this is to appeal to Descartes' infallibilist conception of knowledge.
Descartes understood knowledge in a way that contrasted it directly with doubt.
If there is any doubt at all, then we do not have knowledge. So far, this does not
help much, as it simply invokes a certain kind of subjective state. Perhaps we do
not feel doubt, but this is no guarantee that what we think we know is actually
true. However, when we consider some of the language used by Descartes to
characterise the state of knowledge, we can see how this state is not the sort of
thing that could be subject to luck in the way that Gettier cases are. He
describes the relevant state of certainty as 'a great light in the intellect',
enabling me 'to see utterly clearly with my mind's eye' such that 'I see a
manifest contradiction' in doubting the relevant proposition. Such a state would
not be susceptible to Gettier-style counter-examples. In the example presented
above, Smith would not be able to see a contradiction in supposing that no one
in the room owns a Ford. Indeed, this would apply to any alleged case of
knowledge based on experience of matters of fact in the world (empirical
knowledge) as opposed to purely conceptual, logical or mathematical
considerations (the 'a priori').
Weaknesses of infallibilism However, the last point perhaps reveals the
weakness of this approach (known as infallibilism). Surely it is possible to have
knowledge not just of the 'a priori' but of the empirical realm too. Indeed most of
our everyday knowledge is of the latter sort. Appeal to infallibilism seems to be
a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the baby being empirical
knowledge and the bathwater being Gettier cases. We need something less
drastic.
Adding a 'no false lemmas' condition 'Lemma' is a term borrowed from
mathematics to refer to a proposition that you prove so that you can use it to
infer the main thing that you want to prove. In the Smith, Brown and Jones
example, it is noteworthy that Smith reaches his conclusion that at least one
person in the room owns a Ford by inferring it from a false belief: that Jones owns
a Ford. This suggests the possibility of stipulating that a justified true belief does
not count as knowledge if it is inferred from some false belief. This is most easily
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done by adding a fourth condition to the analysis so that it reads: (i) a believes
that p; (ii) p is true; (iii) a is justified in believing that p; (iv) a does not infer p
from any falsehood.
Problems with the no false lemmas condition However, this modification
seems inadequate on the grounds that there exist Gettier cases that do not
involve any false lemmas and so satisfy condition (iv). Here is an example from
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Matthias Steup: Suppose Japanese engineers
have developed a type of robot which looks just like a real dog. And suppose you
are sitting in a garden and you see one of these dogs, mistaking it for a real dog.
Then you believe that there is a dog in the garden. And suppose further that a
few feet away from you, there is a real dog, obscured from your view, so that
your belief happens to be true. Can you be said to know that there is a dog in
the garden? Since (a) you believe that there is a dog in the garden, (b) your
belief is true and (c) it is presumably justified (all other things being equal, you
are surely justified in believing the evidence of your senses), conditions (i) to (iii)
are satisfied. But notice that condition (iv) is satisfied too, since you have not
inferred your belief from anything false. You just looked and, as result, formed
your belief in a completely unreflective way. So the 'no false lemmas' solution to
the Gettier problem does not appear to be successful in all cases.
Replacing 'justified' with 'reliably formed' Some writers have suggested
that the problem of Gettier cases can be overcome by replacing the justification
clause with something else. One suggestion is that instead of requiring that a is
justified in believing p, we should require that a's belief that p be reliably formed.
The conditions for a to know that p then become: (i) a believes that p; (ii) p is
true; (iii) a's belief that p is reliably formed. But what does it mean for a belief to
be 'reliably formed'? One answer is that we should see this in causal terms. More
precisely, we could say that a's belief that p is reliably formed when this belief is
caused by the fact that p. Let's see how this analysis would be applied to deal
with our Gettier case involving Smith, Jones and Brown. It is clear that the causal
condition given by the analysis is not satisfied, since the fact that someone in
the room owns a Ford is not what causes Smith to believe that someone in the
room owns a Fordwhat causes him to believe this is his (false) belief that Jones
owns a Ford. The causal account thus produces the desired result that Smith
does not know that someone in the room owns a Ford. This account also works
well in the robot dog case, since the fact that there is a dog in the garden is not
what causes you to believe that there is and this is why, according to the causal
account, we should not say that you know that there is a dog in the garden. It
has been argued that the causal theory, although adequate for dealing with
some of the Gettier cases (like the one discussed above) does not cope with all
of them.
Problems with replacing justification with reliably formed Thus consider
the 'Barn County' example, described by Ichikawa and Steup as follows: To be
plausible, the causal theory has to be limited to a posteriori knowledge. It is not
plausible to say that we know a priori truths because we are caused to believe
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them by a priori 'facts'. On the other hand, it still seems true to say that in order
to count as knowledge a priori beliefs need to be in some sense reliably formed.
Suppose there is a county in the Midwest US with the following peculiar feature.
The landscape next to the road leading through that county is peppered with
barn-facades: structures that from the road look exactly like barns. Observation
from any other viewpoint would immediately reveal these structures to be fakes:
devices erected for the purpose of fooling unsuspecting motorists into believing
in the presence of barns. Suppose Henry is driving along the road that leads
through Barn County. Naturally, he will on numerous occasions form false beliefs
in the presence of barns...Now suppose further that, on one of those occasions
when he believes there is a barn over there, he happens to be looking at the one
and only real barn in the county...it is exceedingly plausible to judge that Henry's
belief is not an instance of knowledge. But if in fact Henry's belief is not
knowledge, then the causal theory must be wrong, since it is clear that Henry's
belief is caused by the fact that there is a barn present. But is it correct to say
that Henry does not know that there is a barn there? I am not so sure. I agree
that the fact that Henry gets it right is very much a matter of luck. But, unlike in
any of the standard Gettier cases or in the robot dog case, I am reasonably
happy to say that Henry knows that there is a barn present and, I think, for the
very reason that the reliabilist would offer, that this belief has the right sort of
cause and is thus formed in a (generally) reliable way.
Replacing 'justified' with a condition related to epistemic virtue A 'virtue'
is an admirable quality and so 'epistemic virtue' refers to the set of admirable
qualities that are conducive to the acquisition of knowledge. These would
include the ability to examine evidence carefully, a willingness to listen to all
sides of an argument and an avoidance of rushing to unjustified conclusions.
Such qualities are rightly valued. At first sight, it might seem that an appeal to
epistemic virtue would be unhelpful in dealing with Gettier cases. In our main
example, Smith might be as epistemically virtuous as we could desireit will not
prevent him acquiring the true belief that someone in the room owns a Ford
purely by luck. Again, in the robot dog example, you might be fully epistemically
virtuous (the existence of such robot dogs might not be well known, so you can't
necessarily be blamed for not knowing about them) and so our tendency to say
that you do not know that there is a dog in the garden can't be due to our
thinking that you lack epistemic virtue. So how does the suggestion help? The
answer is that it can help by forming the basis of a new condition to replace
condition (iii), though not the whole condition. Ernest Sosa has described what is
needed here in terms of three As: accuracy, adroitness and aptness. He uses the
analogy of an archer firing an arrow at a target. There are three distinct
questions that we can ask about this:
1. Was the shot successful? Did it hit its target? (Accuracy)
2. Did the shot's execution manifest the archer's skill? Was it produced in a way
that made it likely to be successful? (Adroitness)
3. Did the shot's success manifest the archer's skill? (Aptness)
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This third condition is the crucial one. To be apt, the shot has got to be accurate
because it is adroit. Suppose the arrow is shot with skill, but a gust of wind
blows it off course and then a second lucky gust of wind blows it back on course
so that it hits the target after all. Then it was accurate and adroit, but adroitness
was not the reason for its accuracy: the reason was good luck. To put it another
way: to be apt, the archer's accuracy must manifest or be demonstrated by her
skill. It is not too hard to see how these ideas can be applied to the case of
knowledge. Belief in general aims at truth. So an accurate belief is one that is
true. An adroit belief is one held as a result of epistemic virtue. And an apt
belief is one in which the belief is accurate (true) because the believer is
epistemically virtuous. This suggests that all we have to do to avoid Gettier
cases is to rewrite the condition for a to know that p so that it reads as follows:
(i) a believes that p; (ii) p is true; (iii) a's belief that p is adroit and apt.
On this analysis, Smith does not know that someone in the room owns a Ford
because his belief is not apt: although he is epistemically virtuous, that is not the
reason why he managed to believe the truthit is a matter of sheer luck.
Similarly, in the robot dog example, you do not know that there is a dog in the
garden, since, although you are epistemically virtuous, that is not the reason why
you manage to believe the truth: it is wholly due to the fact that there happens
to be a dog in the garden that you have not seen. Those who think that in the
fake barn case Henry's belief in the presence of a barn does not count as
knowledge will reject the AAA account. This is because Henry's belief seems to
be accurate, adroit and apt. It is accurate because the barn he believes he sees
is a real one. It is adroit because he is epistemically virtuous (assuming he has
no reason to suspect the existence of fake barns). And it is apt because his
belief manifests his epistemic virtue. As I mentioned above, my own intuition is
that Henry does know that there is a barn present and so I do not feel that this
case provides any reason to doubt the AAA account. The reader should consult
his/her own intuitions on this matter! At least you have not made any epistemic
errors, which is often enough for epistemic virtue. The latter does not require
making any special effort to establish the truth when, as in this case, there
appears to be no particular risk of error.