Knowledge

Michael Welbourne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317489795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is it about knowledge that makes us value it more highly than mere true belief? This question lies at the heart of epistemology and has challenged philosophers ever since it was first posed by Plato. Michael Welbourne's examination of the historical and contemporary answers to this question provides both an excellent introduction to the development of epistemology but also a new theory of the nature of knowledge. The early chapters introduce the main themes and questions that have provided the context for modern discussions. The Platonic beginnings, Cartesian individualism and the tripartite analyses of knowledge are examined in turn. In the second half of this book, the focus shifts from conceptual analysis to an examination of the social practices surrounding knowledge, placing special emphasis on the notion of testimony. The author argues originally and persuasively that our idea of knowledge has its roots in communicative practices and that thinking about how testimony works as a source of beliefs actually gives us a handle on the very idea of knowledge itself. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in epistemology, the philosophy of language, or the intersection between the two areas.

1 Beginning with Plato

Preamble

Plato was the first philosopher in the Western world to think seriously about the nature of knowledge. To him we owe most, if not all, of our basic philosophical questions on the subject, and he invented one way of addressing the issues which, in the past half century or so, after many hundreds of years, has come to dominate the field. I am going to use him in this chapter to introduce some important themes.

Plato’s interest in knowledge is twofold. First, it is, for him, one among many proper topics for philosophical enquiry. It is something that human beings value, alongside justice, love, virtue, and beauty, to name a few other subjects of his investigations; because we think these things are valuable, it is natural that anyone of philosophical bent should want to understand clearly what they are. If we want people to act justly, for example, as we surely do, we need to know what just action involves. Similarly, if we want to obtain knowledge, it behoves us to get clear about what it is we want to obtain. But, secondly, as Plato conceives of it, knowledge is bound to be of special interest to anyone engaged in any philosophical enquiry at all, because knowledge, in a sense, is the object of all of them. Take the Republic. It is about justice. Plato embarks on this investigation because it is in our interest to learn what justice entails, to get to know what it is and to understand why it is worth pursuing. Knowledge is the whole point of the exercise: knowledge of what justice really is. For Plato this means understanding the nature of justice and hence what makes it valuable to us; for him there is an intimate connection between knowledge and understanding. Now, what goes for justice goes for anything else which might be a proper object of philosophical enquiry. We enquire into the nature of virtue or beauty or love because it is in our interest to get to know what they are so that we can cultivate them effectively. It follows that a philosopher who hasn’t thought about knowledge cannot have thought about her own activity as a philosopher, no matter what specific enquiry she is pursuing; if she hasn’t worked out what knowledge is, she can have no clear idea of what she is up to, what she is aiming at.

If we can get to know what justice is, so the thought runs, we shall be equipped to conduct ourselves justly, and consequently (as Plato believes) live a more genuinely satisfactory life. On the other hand, if we are ignorant about justice, we won’t know how to behave in order to obtain the best quality of life for ourselves. In fact, Plato’s mentor, Socrates, went further than this. Socrates held that knowledge of justice would inevitably translate into just conduct: no one, knowing what it is right or just to do, would ever do the opposite. And even if it is allowed, against Socrates, that people may sometimes act in ways which are contrary to what they know to be right, it will still be the case that getting to know what justice is has important practical implications for us. The Republic, perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most famous of Plato’s works, is primarily an investigation into the nature of justice; but in the light of the beliefs just mentioned it is fitting that a substantial part of the book should also be devoted to a discussion of knowledge. The Republic contains one of the three major Platonic discussions about knowledge on which I shall be drawing in this and the following chapter. The first may be found in a relatively early work, the Meno, and the third in a more mature work, the Theaetetus, generally thought to have been written somewhat later than the Republic. Plato’s philosophy of knowledge is not easy. For one thing, it would be astonishing if there were no signs of development in his various works, written over several years. But it is hard to be sure whether what we find in these three books are different stages in the progressive development of a single unitary position, or, alternatively, whether he radically changed his views over time. What is definite is that he addresses the question “What is knowledge?” in different ways in these works and appears to offer different answers (or, as it turns out in the case of the Theaetetus, no answer at all).

High and low conceptions of knowledge

Plato’s most fully elaborated theory about the nature of knowledge is the one in the Republic, where it is intimately linked to his celebrated theory of Forms. According to this theory, what a successful philosopher achieves, through painstaking intellectual enquiry, is knowledge of Forms: for example, knowledge of what Justice itself (the Form of Justice) is; or what Virtue itself or Beauty itself is. The Forms are, as it were, real but abstract essences which ideally can be apprehended by the intellect or understanding but are utterly inaccessible to the senses. Moreover, according to Plato’s theory in the Republic, they are the only possible objects of knowledge. Unlike sense-objects they are eternal and unchanging. Sense-objects, by contrast, are in constant flux: for example, visible hues vary as the light varies, the sound of the car changes as it whizzes past us and so on. In Plato’s eyes this disqualifies all things visible, audible or, more generally, sensible as objects of knowledge. Our senses license statements about how things seem to be to each of us at this moment or that, but they can never license statements about how things really are. Their domain is that of mere seeming, mere opinion, not knowledge.

The perpetually changing objects of sense-perception may imperfectly mimic the Forms, so it may not be altogether wrong to describe the building we see as, say, beautiful. But, Plato tells us, it cannot be perfectly (or really) beautiful; only Beauty itself, the unchanging Form, is really beautiful. What is really beautiful never changes and its beauty is pure, uncontaminated with other properties. The building, on the other hand, has many different properties jumbled together; at any moment it appears to have a certain shape and a certain colour or array of colours, and sometimes, perhaps, certain sounds and smells issue from it and sometimes they don’t. This jumble of properties keeps changing over time, like everything else that we apprehend through the senses, and, in any case, all sense-objects decay as time progresses; none of them is everlasting. For our part, we are only able to describe a building as beautiful to the extent that we have at least an inkling of what is involved in being beautiful. That is, we have perhaps some faint and insecure understanding of the eternal and unchanging Form of Beauty and it is this Form that provides us with the standard by which beauty is to be measured. The mission of philosophy is to improve our understanding of the Forms, to secure our knowledge of them. The true philosopher, for Plato, is one who has accomplished this mission. The true philosopher, if there is one, will know perfectly, completely, what Beauty is (or Justice, or Love, or Knowledge, and so on).

According to the theory of knowledge that is correlative with the theory of Forms, knowledge is a state of an individual in virtue of which she has infallible, unerring insight into eternal truths through her intellectual grasp of the Forms. Her apprehension is such that it could not conceivably be mistaken. Plato was, perhaps, the first to elaborate a theory about the nature of knowledge of this extremely elevated kind; but others, too, have held similarly exalted views, although without his theory of Forms. According to Descartes, for example, in the second of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, knowledge is certain and evident cognition, and we should resolve to believe only what is perfectly known and incapable of being doubted. Reason, underwritten by God, is able to engender this certain and evident cognition. When two people cannot agree, Descartes tells us, we can be sure that neither of them has knowledge, “for if the reasoning of one of them were certain and evident, he would be able to lay it before the other in such a way as eventually to convince his intellect as well”. On this view we are all, to the extent that we are rational beings, capable of attaining knowledge of whatever truths are humanly attainable. These truths must be accessible to reason, so it is hardly surprising that mathematics should have become the paradigm of what can be known. The notion that what is known must be rationally demonstrable in the manner of mathematics is, on a long historical view, perhaps the prevailing thought about knowledge. It is nonetheless seriously at odds with our vernacular use of the vocabulary of knowledge, according to which it is perfectly possible for me to know now that it is raining since I can see that it is, and even perhaps for you to know now that it is raining when I tell you that it is.

Contemporary philosophers are apt to dismiss these elevated theories out of hand. The idea that knowledge might be selfauthenticating, that our minds might apprehend truth in a manner which guarantees there is no error, is alien to our modern self-understanding. So it is not unusual for the distinguished proponents of such theories to be charged with error – even rather elementary error. In particular, they have sometimes been accused of misunderstanding an important truism: if you know, you can’t be wrong. The suggestion is that they misinterpret this as saying that if you know something, the something you know is the sort of thing (like a truth of mathematics) which could not be otherwise than it is, so that you could not be mistaken if you believe it. But all the truism really says is: if you know that P, then (necessarily) it is the case that P. As far as this goes, P might be a simple empirical proposition like “it’s raining”. If I know it’s raining, then it is raining. But it might not be raining; the truth could be otherwise. If it were, I could not know that it is raining, even though I might mistakenly believe that it is. Again, the truism does not say that if you know that P, then your state of mind is such as to be able to filter out error, an infallible truth-attaining state. All that is said is that if it is not the case that P, then it cannot be correct to describe your state as one of knowing that P. But Plato and Descartes (and others), who did believe that human beings were capable of a state that infallibly accessed truth, should not be lightly charged with mistaking the import of a rather elementary point about the logic of knowledge. The suggestion that they did gets things the wrong way round. The fact is, I think, that they each of them had a particular vision of what a human being is. According to their vision, we are essentially rational and immortal beings, temporarily encumbered with bodies, and liable to be confused by our very imperfect information-gathering faculties – the senses. It is because this is our essential nature that truth is, so to speak, our birthright; it can be attained with certainty when our rational nature is given free play, unmuddied by the senses, and knowledge is the name we give to our state when we have actually accessed it. What we will have accessed, on this view, can only be the sort of thing (like a mathematical truth) that is accessible to reason.

This vision of what human beings are has an important place in the history of our culture and it deserves our respect even if it we don’t share it. A philosopher who thinks in this way about our essential nature will find that the concept of knowledge, having the logical property encapsulated in our truism, is apt for expressing our apprehension of eternal and unchanging truths: the truths of mathematics, for example. It would be dangerous and wrong, however, to treat the fact that we possess this concept as a premise for a knockdown argument in favour of this kind of theory about our real nature and the real nature of the things we can know about; at one key point in the Republic, Plato certainly does use our possession of the concept as tending to confirm his theory (Republic 476d–480a), but he only presents it as a suggestive line of thought that might help to persuade a Form-sceptic of the truth of the theory.

We, for our part, should certainly be interested in the fact that we operate with a concept that has this property, namely, that if you know, you can’t be wrong. It is one of a number of properties that any theory about knowledge needs somehow to accommodate and explain. One might perhaps view the elevated theories about human nature and its cognitive powers to be found in writers like Plato and Descartes as attempts to rationalize our possession of such a concept. But the fact is, of course, that we are all liable to make mistakes; we are rational beings, but, alas, we are not purely rational and we may become confused by the contingencies of our material existence. A lot of the philosophy of knowledge may be construed as an attempt to reach an accommodation with this human liability to err.

We return now to Plato. He himself, in later works, came to see that there were difficulties in the theory of Forms and hence in the correlative theory of knowledge. Indeed the Forms are not even mentioned in the Theaetetus. We may ask, does this silence reflect Plato’s disenchantment with the theory when he came to write this dialogue? Or are the Forms meant to be conspicuous through their absence from a dialogue which, failing to deliver a positive account of knowledge, leaves us only with the somewhat less than cheering consolation that at least we now know that we don’t know what knowledge is? Is the moral meant to be, as some have thought, that a satisfactory account of what knowledge is cannot be given without reference to these supposed objects of knowledge? Or has Plato abandoned that theory?

This is not the place to try to resolve such interpretative issues. What we do need to notice, however, is this: Plato, notwithstanding the exalted doctrine of the Republic, for which he is most renowned, often seems to be friendly to an apparently less lofty, more workaday conception of knowledge. At all events, he seems to be happy in other works to use much less exalted instances of knowledge in order to illustrate key features of the concept on which he wishes to insist.

These key features include the notions of expertise and teaching on which the Republic itself puts great emphasis. The philosopherkings of the state which Plato describes combine sovereign political authority with the epistemic authority that comes from knowledge of the Forms. They are expert on such matters as justice and right living. They have the authority, both epistemic and political, to tell others how to live. And those of us who are not expert but recognize that it is in our interest to live just lives can only defer to them. (Those who do not recognize where their best interests lie should, according to Plato, be made to conform (Republic: 590c– d).) Moreover, the knowledge that these experts possess can be taught, but not to everybody. The Republic painstakingly outlines the curriculum which should be used to engender knowledge of the Forms, but only very few people actually have the intellectual capacity to pursue it. Still, that the knowledge can be taught is an important feature of the scenario which the Republic develops. It means that the state has a future; provided a proper programme of education is put into place, future generations can acquire the expertise that is necessary to provide the only sort of government which can ensure that the state will flourish. (But in the long run, so Plato thinks, no state subsisting in the material world can flourish for ever. Corruption and decay are ultimately inevitable, although their onset may be delayed by the actions of knowledgeable rulers. One of the most important elements in the Republic is Plato’s mapping of the supposedly inevitable steps in the process of decay.)

Plato’s linking of the concept of knowledge with the ideas of teaching and of expertise seems intuitively right. So perhaps this is another feature of the concept, to put alongside our truism (if you know, you can’t be wrong), which any theory about knowledge needs to accommodate and explain. It is not peculiar to lofty theories, like that of the Republic. In fact, in both the Meno and the Theaetetus, we find that Plato illustrates this aspect of knowledge with lowly examples. In the Meno, we are told that anything that counts as knowledge may be taught, and anything that may be taught counts as knowledge. The underlying thought is that a master, in command of a branch of knowledge, can teach it to his apprentices. In the Theaetetus, this notion of expert knowledge, evidently thought to be utterly familiar, is enlisted to make a very important and substantive point against relativism, a type of theory that Plato utterly abhors; we shall discuss this later. What matters here is that the point is illustrated with a range of mostly mundane examples of expertise: medicine, wine-growing, gymnastics, music and cookery (Theaetetus 178b ff.).

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is this. Even if at the end of the day we resolved, with Plato of the Republic, that what cobblers and cooks have is unworthy to be called knowledge on account of the impermanent, shifting nature of the material matters they “know” about, we might nevertheless learn something about what we understand by knowledge from observing the implications that attributions of knowledge have, even in these common or garden cases. We might think it wrong to include these humdrum arts and crafts in the extension of the concept – those items to which it is correctly applied – but our workaday thinking about them ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Beginning with Plato
• 2 Analysing knowledge Plato's way
• 3 Analysing knowledge the modern way
• 4 Public knowledge
• 5 Learning from testimony
• 6 The concept of knowledge: a new theory
• 7 So, why do we value knowledge?
• A guide to further reading
• References
• Index