Theory of Knowledge
Fall 2006
The TAK

I. Kinds of Knowledge

•    Get students to list the kinds of knowledge (see text, p.8).

•    Go over definitions of “knows whether” and “knows when” from text, p. 7. Review rules about what is required for a good definition.

•    Show that “knows x” can not be defined in terms of propositional knowledge.

•    Show that “knows how” (in one sense) cannot be defined in terms of propositional knowledge.

•    Conclusion: Propositional knowledge is of fundamental importance, and many kinds of knowledge claims can be defined in terms of it. But “knows” is also used to describe acquaintance and ability. These cannot be defined in terms of propositional knowledge. Our focus will be propositional knowledge.

II. Knowledge and True Belief

•    Knowledge is not strong conviction. It requires truth.

•    But true belief is not enough. Lucky guesses are not knowledge. See Ayer, p. 440, first paragraph. Two examples - superstition, off-setting errors.

•    Important to be sensitive to the difference between when something is false and when it is odd to say it. This explains away some seemingly problematic cases. See text, p. 13.

III. The TAK

•    The conclusion drawn from II is that knowledge is JTB. J is what seems to be missing in the counterexamples.

•    Some comments on justification: justification comes in degrees, justification does not imply belief, it is “relative” in the sense that it can vary from case to case. Ayer uses the phrase “right to be sure” for this. What’s his point, on the bottom of p. 442, about it being a mistake to build a complete description in the definition? And what’s his point in the paragraph before this?

•    Belief: “doxastic” alternatives, propositions (not sentences) are the objects of belief. Note: Ayer says that you must be “sure”. So this is strong belief or conviction.

•    Truth: (why do people make such a fuss about this?), correspondence, points (1) - (8) on pp. 17-21 of the text summarize the issues. (6) is especially important - if a sentence says anything with a truth value, then the correspondence theory gets things right; but maybe some sentences don’t express things with truth value.

•    Extremely important to understand the truth condition in the TAK. Perhaps it is worth distinguishing subjectivism about truth from relativism about truth. Subjectivism is entirely wrong. It suggests that somehow what we think determines what’s true. That’s the idea to be avoided. A combination of what a sentence says and how the world is determines whether the sentence is true. What people sometimes have in mind when they assert relativism is correct: what’s true in one place, or at one time may not be true in another. But we should be very careful about what this says. An alternative way to put the point: we express different propositions with the same sentence at different times or places. And those different propositions can differ in truth value.