A further note on knowledge

During your excellent discussion on knowledge on Wednesday morning, in which facts, truth and proof all played important roles, we were left with a definition of knowledge as true belief. If you continued to think about it afterwards, a serious flaw in this definition might have occurred to you.

Since this is a somewhat abstract and challenging issue, an example might help. Consider this example: I have a dream in which I see our class tomorrow. The details are a bit blurry, but I can clearly see that there are twelve students present. I believe my dream, so as I'm walking to room B2 at 9:29 AM tomorrow morning, I have the belief that there are twelve students present. In fact, there are twelve students present, so my belief is true. But do I know that there are twelve students present? No  It would seem strange to call this true belief knowledge, because although I do have a true belief, it's true purely by accident, by lucky coincidence.

If you would like a more dramatic example, I can vary dream. In the revised dream, I see the exact amount of money that Petch has with her, 1,287 Baht. Again, I have great faith in my dreams, so I believe that Petch has 1,287 Baht when I walk into the room. In fact, she does have exactly that amount with her. Do we want to say that I know this, that my belief about her currently carried cash is knowledge?

happily, your discussion also helps us here: the importance of reasons, of having the right sort of reasons, also came up in the discussion, and that seems to be the sort of thing we need to also include in a definition of knowledge, which now becomes: knowledge is a true belief that is believed for the right sort of reasons. A shorter way of saying this is that knowledge is justified, true belief.

This is more or less the definition that Plato arrived at around 2,400 years ago (Theaetetus, Meno), and it lasted even longer than Aristotle's well justified belief that the sun circled the Earth, which belief was always false so never knowledge, although it was accepted as knowledge by all educated people in the West for 2,000 years. Plato's suggested definition of knowledge lasted pretty well until 1963, when a few well-crafted examples showed that it had some problems.

However, just as schools continue to teach Newton as a useful way to get a grasp on understanding motion and gravity, so too can you comfortably continue with an understanding of knowledge as justified, true belief.

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