- Key People:
- Aristotle
- Plato
- John Locke
- St. Augustine
- Immanuel Kant
- Related Topics:
- innate idea
- tabula rasa
- sensationalism
- coherentism
- foundationalism
- On the Web:
- The University of Sheffield - History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities - Epistemology (Oct. 30, 2024)
Suppose a surgeon tells a patient who is about to undergo a knee operation that when he wakes up he will feel a sharp pain. When the patient wakes up, the surgeon hears him groaning and contorting his face in certain ways. Although one is naturally inclined to say that the surgeon knows what the patient is feeling, there is a sense in which she does not know, because she is not feeling that kind of pain herself. Unless she has undergone such an operation in the past, she cannot know what her patient feels. Indeed, the situation is more complicated than that, for even if the surgeon has undergone such an operation, she cannot know that what she felt after her operation is the same sort of sensation as what her patient is feeling now. Because each person’s sensations are in a sense “private,” for all the surgeon knows, what she understands as pain and what the patient understands as pain could be very different. (Similar remarks apply to the use of colour terms. For all one knows, the colour sensation one associates with “green” could be very different from the sensations other people associate with that term. That possibility is known as the problem of the inverted spectrum.)
It follows from the foregoing analysis that each human being is inevitably and even in principle prevented from having knowledge of the minds of other human beings. Despite the widely held conviction that in principle there is nothing in the world of fact that cannot be known through scientific investigation, the other-minds problem shows to the contrary that an entire domain of human experience is resistant to any sort of external inquiry. Thus, there can never be a science of the human mind.
Issues in epistemology
The nature of knowledge
As indicated above, one of the basic questions of epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge. Philosophers normally treat the question as a conceptual one—i.e., as an inquiry into a certain concept or idea. The question raises a perplexing methodological issue: namely, how does one go about investigating concepts?
It is frequently assumed, though the matter is controversial, that one can determine what knowledge is by considering what the word knowledge means. Although concepts are not the same as words, words—i.e., languages—are the medium in which concepts are displayed. Hence, examination of the ways in which words are used can yield insight into the nature of the concepts associated with them.
An investigation of the concept of knowledge, then, would begin by studying uses of knowledge and cognate expressions in everyday language. Expressions such as know them, know that, know how, know where, know why, and know whether, for example, have been explored in detail, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. As Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) pointed out, there are important differences between know that and know how. The latter expression is normally used to refer to a kind of skill or ability, such as knowing how to swim. One can have such knowledge without being able to explain to other people what it is that one knows in such a case—that is, without being able to convey the same skill. The expression know what is similar to know how in that respect, insofar as one can know what a clarinet sounds like without being able to say what one knows—at least not succinctly. Know that, in contrast, seems to denote the possession of specific pieces of information, and the person who has such knowledge generally can convey it to others. Knowing that the Concordat of Worms was signed in the year 1122 is an example of such knowledge. Ryle argued that, given such differences, some cases of knowing how cannot be reduced to cases of knowing that, and, accordingly, that the kinds of knowledge expressed by the two phrases are independent of each other.
For the most part, epistemology from the ancient Greeks to the present has focused on knowing that. Such knowledge, often referred to as propositional knowledge, raises a number of peculiar epistemological problems, among which is the much-debated issue of what kind of thing one knows when one knows that something is the case. In other words, in sentences of the form “A knows that p”—where “A” is the name of some person and “p” is a sentential clause, such as “snow is white”—what sort of entity does “p” refer to? The list of candidates has included beliefs, propositions, statements, sentences, and utterances of sentences. Although the arguments for and against the various candidates are beyond the scope of this article, two points should be noted here. First, the issue is closely related to the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of whether qualities or properties, such as redness, are abstract objects, mental concepts, or simply names. Second, it is agreed by all sides that one cannot have “knowledge that” of something that is not true. A necessary condition of “A knows that p,” therefore, is p.
Five distinctions
Mental and nonmental conceptions of knowledge
Some philosophers have held that knowledge is a state of mind—i.e., a special kind of awareness of things. According to Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bce), for example, knowing is a mental state akin to, but different from, believing. Contemporary versions of the theory assert that knowing is a member of a group of mental states that can be arranged in a series according to increasing certitude. At one end of the series would be guessing and conjecturing, for example, which possess the least amount of certitude; in the middle would be thinking, believing, and feeling sure; and at the end would be knowing, the most certain of all such states. Knowledge, in all such views, is a form of consciousness. Accordingly, it is common for proponents of such views to hold that if A knows that p, A must be conscious of what A knows. That is, if A knows that p, A knows that A knows that p.
Beginning in the 20th century, many philosophers rejected the notion that knowledge is a mental state. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), for example, said in On Certainty, published posthumously in 1969, that “ ‘Knowledge’ and certainty belong to different categories. They are not two mental states like, say, surmising and being sure.” Philosophers who deny that knowledge is a mental state typically point out that it is characteristic of mental states like doubting, being in pain, and having an opinion that people who are in such states are aware that they are in them. Such philosophers then observe that it is possible to know that something is the case without being aware that one knows it. They conclude that it is a mistake to assimilate cases of knowing to cases of doubting, being in pain, and the like.
But if knowing is not a mental state, what is it? Some philosophers have held that knowing cannot be described as a single thing, such as a state of consciousness. Instead, they claim that one can ascribe knowledge to someone, or to oneself, only when certain complex conditions are satisfied, among them certain behavioral conditions. For example, if a person always gives the right answers to questions about a certain topic under test conditions, one would be entitled, on that view, to say that that person has knowledge of that topic. Because knowing is tied to the capacity to behave in certain ways, knowledge is not a mental state, though mental states may be involved in the exercise of the capacity that constitutes knowledge.
A well-known example of such a view was advanced by J.L. Austin (1911–60) in his 1946 paper “Other Minds.” Austin claimed that when one says “I know,” one is not describing a mental state; in fact, one is not “describing” anything at all. Instead, one is indicating that one is in a position to assert that such and such is the case (one has the proper credentials and reasons) in circumstances where it is necessary to resolve a doubt. When those conditions are satisfied—when one is, in fact, in a position to assert that such and such is the case—one can correctly be said to know.
Occasional and dispositional knowledge
A distinction closely related to the previous one is that between “occurrent” and “dispositional” knowledge. Occurrent knowledge is knowledge of which one is currently aware. If one is working on a problem and suddenly sees the solution, for example, one can be said to have occurrent knowledge of it, because “seeing” the solution involves being aware of or attending to it. In contrast, dispositional knowledge, as the term suggests, is a disposition, or a propensity, to behave in certain ways in certain conditions. Although Smith may not now be thinking of his home address, he certainly knows it in the sense that, if one were to ask him what it is, he could provide it. Thus, one can have knowledge of things of which one is not aware at a given moment.