Intuitions about Knowledge
Intuitions about whether someone knows something vary from person to person and occasion to occasion. Epistemologists react differently to this variation. Many ignore it. Some use it to question whether the ordinary concept of knowledge is coherent.1 Still others try to impose uniformity by dismissing recalcitrant cases as ones in which the subject lacks “real knowledge”2 or insisting on such high standards of knowledge that little can be known.3
My approach is not to be dismissive of intuitions about knowledge but at the same time to concede that they can be puzzling and even jumbled. Appealing to them is thus a messy and inconclusive business. They can be useful but only as starting points, not rigid constraints.
Besides, regarding knowledge intuitions as hard data to which theories have to conform makes for a timid epistemology. It invites questions of whose intuitions are supposed to matter. All those with the concept of knowledge? Philosophers? Some other group? It also suggests that the working procedure for epistemology ought to consist of surveying the intuitions of the relevant group, thereby collecting data as representative as possible. Few philosophers conduct such surveys, however, and with good reason. A philosophical account of knowledge ought to be made of loftier stuff.
What kind of “stuff”? It is more important to provide a framework that can be used to explain how and why intuitions arise than to conform to a set of favored intuitions, and more important still that the framework can be used to engage the various philosophical questions and puzzles that arise about knowledge, from why knowledge is valuable and what its relationship is with justified belief to whether it can be acquired by luck and why it is we are so often willing to admit that something we believe to be true is nonetheless not something we know. This in any event is my project.
There are limitations as to what can be expected of any such project, however, and not just because the intuitions are not uniform and the puzzles difficult. There are also distinct species of knowledge, which require special treatments.
There is knowledge of people, places, and things; one knows Mike Bloomberg, Greenwich Village, and various Internet sites. There is also knowledge of concepts, knowledge, for example, of what valid and sound arguments are and what an irrational number is. In addition, there is knowledge of subject areas; one knows American baseball and New York City politics. Knowledge how is yet something different—for example, knowing how to fix a faulty electrical switch or how to convert centigrade readings to Fahrenheit. There is knowledge of facts as well, some scientific (the boiling point of water is 212°F), others geographical (Accra is the capital of Ghana), still others historical (Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States), and many others personal (one is six feet tall).
Nor is knowledge always restricted to humans. Dogs are said to know that their owners are approaching and birds that a storm is due. Even body parts are sometimes said to know; the liver knows when to excrete bile. Knowledge is also attributed to machines; my laptop knows when to shut itself down to prevent overheating.
Some of these attributions are no doubt metaphorical. No matter. My focus is on knowledge of facts and specifically knowledge of facts by individual human beings as opposed to collective human knowledge.4 Such knowledge may be linked with other kinds. It may even be the ground for some, but there are challenges enough in providing an account of it, because even within this category, there is striking variation, especially with respect to the amount of information required.
Often the presupposition is that broad and deep information is required for knowledge, but sometimes only scanty information seems necessary. A contestant on a quiz show is asked the date of the Battle of Marathon. She recalls from her high school world history course that it took place in 490 bce, but does not remember that the Greeks won the battle or even that the adversaries were the Greeks and Persians. Still, it may seem as if she at least knows the date.5
Why such variation? Because in order to have knowledge, one must have adequate information, where the test of adequacy is that one not lack important surrounding truths. In some circumstances, however, most of the surrounding truths do not strike us as being especially critical in order for the subject to “get” the important aspects of what is going on. Hence, it may not seem to matter much whether she believes them. In other circumstances, however, a great many of the surrounding truths seem to matter. Intuitions about how much information is needed for knowledge thus vary from situation to situation. Moreover, the tiny knowledge stories common in epistemology can be told to exploit this malleability.
All stories are structured to elicit reactions—laughter, sympathy, outrage, or whatever— and there are standard techniques available to the storyteller for generating these reactions. The most basic is selectivity. Real situations are lush, whereas stories are selectively incomplete. The storyteller decides which of a potentially limitless set of details about characters and settings to omit and which to include, and what emphasis to put on those that are included. The ways in which these storytelling decisions are made pull the reactions of listeners in one direction or another.
It is no different with knowledge stories. Stories in which a character has a true belief can be told to make gaps in her information seem important, but they can also be told to diminish the significance of whatever gaps there are. Call the latter a “narrow telling.”
There are, moreover, techniques for narrowing a story, the most obvious of which is to so dwell upon the importance of the belief itself being true that it reduces the importance of other aspects of the situation. This is what is going on the story about the quiz show, but the same technique can be used with other stories. The barn story, for example, can be retold to lower the significance of George’s being unaware of the barn facades at nearby locations.
Imagine that the barn where he has stopped his car was the location of an especially important event of his childhood. It was his memory of this event that motivated him at great time and expense to return to the region and seek out this specific location. Since he has no interest in the other locations he has passed through or in the other barns he has apparently been seeing, he has paid scant attention to them. It is this particular location that was the sole purpose of his trip.
As the story has been retold, it may no longer seem quite as important that George is unaware that there are barn facades at other locales in the region. If so, we the audience may be more ready to concede that he knows he is looking at an old barn, indeed, the very barn he remembers from his childhood.6
Can a story ever be told so narrowly that all that matters is whether one has a true belief? At first glance, it may seem that the story of the quiz show is a case of this sort. On the other hand, because beliefs come and go in clusters, there are built-in limitations on just how meager one’s surrounding information can be while having a true belief P, and hence limitations also on how meager one’s information can be while knowing P.
The truth that the Battle of Marathon occurred in 490 bce is conceptually intertwined with various other truths. Some are about location: Marathon is the name of a site in Greece; Greece is located on the Mediterranean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea is a body of water on planet Earth. Others are about time: bce stands for “before the common era”; the date 490 makes use of a dating system that has a year as its core unit of time; and a year is the period of time it takes Earth to make a complete revolution around its sun. Still others are about battles: a battle is a large-scale fight between armed forces; an armed force is equipped with weapons; and weapons have the capacity to inflict harms. To know that the Battle of Marathon occurred in 490 bce, the quiz show contestant may not need be aware of all of these linked truths, but she does have to be aware of many. Otherwise, it would be doubtful whether she even understands, much less knows, the proposition that the Battle of Marathon occurred in 490 bce.
In addition, the acquisition of beliefs, even very simple ones, typically depends on background information about the circumstances, and this too imposes constraints on how scanty one’s information can be. An individual enters the hallway, sees a ball on the mat, and comes to believe that there is a red ball on the mat, but she does so in the context of having such situation-specific information as she is not wearing red tinted glasses, the lighting in the room does not make everything appear red, and she does not suffer from red-green color blindness. Without such information, she may not have come to believe that there is a red ball on the mat.7
There are thus constraints on how limited one’s information can be while still knowing. Even so, the Marathon story and others like it pull intuitions in the direction of at least extremely narrow knowledge. They do so by focusing attention on a truth around which the story revolves and by making clear that what matters most in the circumstances at hand is that the character is aware of this key truth.8
The larger lesson here, however, is again one of caution. The knowledge stories common to epistemology are thinly described and the intuitions they elicit malleable and variable. So, a degree of skepticism is in order. Not necessarily a full-throated skepticism but at least a guardedness, which makes one wary about the intuitions of others and correspondingly humble about one’s own, the combination of which has the advantage of keeping discussions of knowledge from deteriorating into contests about whose intuitions are right. Trading intuitions is often not very different from trading insults.
Having taken a detour to look at knowledge stories and the intuitions they elicit, it is time to return to the question of how best to think about the distinction between knowledge and true belief.