to some of those concerns.
The Ideal of Knowledge
Most people naturally and properly want their beliefs to be reliable and true, to connect well to reality, to clue them in on what’s really happening in the world and in their own lives. They want their most important beliefs to be more than mere opinions; they normally assume their convictions constitute real knowledge of what matters. But may people have never thought about what knowledge, as distinct from mere belief, really is.
PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS
Philosophers analyze ideas. They take apart concepts like knowledge and try to put them back together, to understand how they work. Like auto mechanics, conceptual grease monkeys often aim to adjust and repair rough-running ideas so that they can better get you where you want to go.
The common philosophical analysis of knowledge as something like “properly justified true belief” breaks knowledge down into what are called necessary and sufficient conditions, or, to be more exact, into individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Having a belief is necessary for having knowledge but it’s not sufficient. The belief could be false, in which case it does not attain the result of knowledge. Or you could have a belief that’s also true but it still doesn’t amount to knowledge, if for example it’s just a crazy, wild, lucky guess that happens to be right. A friend could rightly say to you in such a case, “Yeah, you were right, but you really didn’t know. It was just a lucky guess.” In order for you to have real knowledge about something, you need a belief about it, that belief needs to be true, and your having that belief needs to be properly justified and not just the result of some wacky series of mistakes. For example, you could believe that your friend Bob is at work and it could be true that Bob is at work, and you may justifiably have this belief because your mutual friend Fred told you that Bob is at work, and you know Fred is an honest man who normally keeps track of Bob, who is his best friend. So you have a belief, and it’s true, and you’re justified in holding it. But that still doesn’t count as actual knowledge of Bob’s whereabouts if in this particular case Fred was forced into lying to you, while he really believed Bob was out for the day shopping for your big surprise birthday present they both had to keep secret, and yet unknown to Fred, Bob was already finished shopping and back at work. You’d have a true belief that Bob is at work, and you’d be justified in holding it, having listened to the normally reliable Fred, but your justification would not be proper, since it depended in this instance on a lie that turned out to be false. And yes, this is how complex true knowledge can sometimes be. No wonder Socrates discovered that so many people think they know things they don’t actually know at all!
The idea or concept of knowledge is first of all an attainment, or accomplishment, or completion concept. In basketball, players shoot in order to score. Shooting is the activity; scoring is the intended attainment or result. In the life of the mind, you naturally believe in order to know. Believing is, in a sense, the activity; knowing is the intended attainment, or desired result. Nobody just believes stuff for the fun of it. Knowledge is always the intended result.
To break down this analysis of knowledge, part by part, and get your head around it, it’s best to start at the end of the definition — “properly justified true belief” – and work forward. That way, you can come to understand it better, and thus come to grasp more deeply what knowledge, as distinct from opinion, or conjecture, or prejudice, really is.
You can’t know something unless you believe it. You can’t know that philosophy is the love of wisdom unless you believe that it is. Belief is necessary for knowledge. It is a part of the package deal. But, again, it’s not the whole package.
Truth is always a part of knowledge. When you discover that what you’ve believed is actually false, even thought you thought you knew it to be true, you thereby discover you never knew it at all. Suppose you have come to believe that all medical vaccines are placebos, nothing but salt water. Imagine that you’ve been in social media echo chambers where this claim is made repeatedly and is backed up with fake claims from alleged scientists who are announcing that vaccines are just a part of government conspiracies to scare people. You may get to the point where you are convinced and so think you now know that all vaccines are bogus. “I don’t just believe it, I know it,” you may say to skeptical friends. But then imagine that you discover it was all a bunch of well-orchestrated political disinformation meant to mislead, and you finally have to admit your belief was false and you didn’t at all know what you thought you knew on that issue.
Confucius once said in the sixth century, BCE that, “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to admit that you do not know it, is knowledge indeed.” Knowledge always tracks truth. And anyone who wants to know what truth itself actually is should be introduced to Aristotle’s famous explanation, that is captured in these inimitable words that begin with defining what’s false and move to what’s true: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Clear enough? Try to say that real fast ten times in a row. Not even a philosophy graduate student can pull it off. And that’s the truth. It is what it is.
The truth about truth
But is there really any such thing as truth? The viewpoint known roughly as relativism claims that all so-called truth is relative to a perspective, that there really is no absolute objective truth, but that different things may be true for different people, or from diverse perspectives, but nothing is absolutely true apart from a perspective. This is sometimes also known as perspectivalism. Perspectives differ, this viewpoint alleges, and one is as good as another.
But notice a problem with the mere statement of relativism. It says: There really is no such thing as absolute truth. It sounds like relativism is actually suggesting to us that it is revealing the ultimate, absolute truth about truth. But it can’t be that the absolute truth about truth is that there is no absolute truth. Taken literally, relativism ends up actually asserting what it denies, and so it’s self-defeating, or logically incoherent as a philosophical position. If it’s true, then it has to be false, which means it can’t be true.
The question then arises as to why so many people seem to be relativists. Why has relativism in one form or another been so attractive to a number of intellectuals in the 20th century? The answers here may be quite simple. The profound French essayist Montaigne anticipated it all when he once remarked, “The mind is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not discreetly how to use it.”