We don’t know what it is or what it is not.
We don’t know when we have it or when we don’t have it.
So who needs it.
ok, so it’s a thread on Epistemology. I just didn’t want to say that in the title because I wouldn’t want keiths to get confused again.
One source writes that epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge and truth claims. Another that epsitemology is the branch of philosophy that tries to make sense out of knowledge, rationality and justified or unjustified beliefs.
There’s been quite a bit of nibbling about the edges of the topic in recent threads if not the taking of outright bites, and it’s almost always an undercurrent in every thread. So why not a thread on epistemology. Four major areas of epistemology are:
(1) the analysis of concepts like knowledge, justification and rationality
(2) the problem of skepticism
(3) the sources and scope of knowledge or justified belief
(4) the study of criteria for knowledge or justified belief
But I’d like to start with an innocent question and see where it leads. Feel free to participate, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I have to believe that way else I’d never be able to participate in any thread here!
Q: What do children know, and how do they come to know what they know?
I’m confident that confidence is quite useful, though.
That’s largely an empirical, not a philosophical question. There is a huge experimental literature with bearing on your question in a variety of domains.
Well, ignorance blows.
Glen Davidson
What do you mean by what do children know? What kind of answer would satisfy you?
🙂
And I thought ignorance was bliss.
I wouldn’t want to drive too much of a wedge between them, though. When Piaget invented developmental psychology he called it “genetic epistemology”.
First the bible , always insists that wisdom is first in mans intellectual anatomy. Then understanding. Last is knowledge.
God sees a difference and so there must be.
Children have no knowledge ay birth. They just learn stuff. So its in a curve depending on the kid.
Jesus, as a kiod, knew nothing. Thats why the bible says he grew in wisdom as a child. Not because he never had this wisdom for millions of years priopr to being born here but because being put into a humans body he was put into a humans thinking restrictions. That means a memory machine. Jesus could not remember his smarts as God. he had to learn everything like everyone else.
The phrase ‘knowledge is justified true belief’ is causing me some trouble. I can see the contribution of ‘belief’ and ‘justified’, but struggle with the ‘true’ bit. There appears to be a circularity here. Who gets to decide if the justified belief is true? Someone who has full knowledge of the actual situation, I suppose. How do we know if their knowledge is true and not a false belief? That must be because there is someone who knows it to be true…. mmm… hm.
fG
It may help to note that knowledge as justified true belief has fallen out of favour within contemporary philosophy and epistemology, though the concepts may yet retain some value.
Regarding child knowledge, I think Wittgenstein’s idea of concept formation as something that is taught and learned within a social context is very helpful, as well as Aquinas’ idea that one has to have some kind of disposition or potentiality to learn in order to learn a concept – which would basically be the act/potency theory applied to concept-formation.
Truth is essential to knowledge in my opinion. Because nothing can be known (to be true) which is not true. So it really is possible that it’s the case that everything that that we think we know we actually don’t know–that everything reasonable to humankind is false. That may seem (full-on) skeptical, but even if stuff has to be true too to be known, that doesn’t make what evidence we have for this or that proposition go away. We still have that.
You ask ‘who gets to decide if a justified belief is true?’ Nobody. Every proposition is either true or it isn’t. Take one of them. If we believe it and we’re justified in doing so, we will know it if it is true, but we won’t if it isn’t true–no matter how much warrant we may have for believing it. Nobody gets to decide–the things we can “make true” are the things we have power to achieve, like standing up. But, of course, even there we may be deceived.
The same thing holds of our beliefs about what we know or think we know. Say I believe that I know that knowledge is some sort of justified true belief (even though setting forth the proper kind and amount of justification needed is notoriously difficult). If I do in fact believe this and I have the proper justification then I know it–but only if it happens to be true. If it’s not true, I only thought I knew it–even if I had a ton of justification for that belief.
In a way that all sucks, because it recognizes that human beings are fallible creatures.
It’s no fun being human a lot of the time, and if one wants to be something more, I guess one can have a religion that seems to allow us to be CERTAIN of this or that. That’s a nicer feeling for sure. Such religions may also provide eternal life (even perhaps among a trove of (willing and alluring) virgins after we die. Or lovely singing with harps for a long time. They may promise to unite us with lost love ones too or that we will understand EVERYTHING right after our death rattle. And they may tell us that proper observance will get us other things we’d like before we die, things that are denied to non-believers.
All that is very appealing, no doubt, and it is completely understandable that many people will be attracted to these religions. But no matter how many people they make happy, one thing the religions cannot do is make themselves true. Just like the size of my house being either over or under 3000 square feet– either is true or is not , Either Jesus wasn’t nearly as tough as Wolverine would have been when it really counted, or he was just as tough. Saying that such states of affairs can be settled dispositively by something one calls an incarnation or logos, is just more wishful thinking.
That is not a proof of the falsity of such claims, of course. I just point out that there’s nothing special about such beliefs except how nice it would be for human beings if they were true. But that, sadly, is no evidence at all.
I wouldn’t say it’s fallen entirely out of favor, but it’s certainly true that the Gettier problems, the rise of reliabilism and externalism, and some worries about the relationship between knowing-how and knowing-that have certainly made the JTB model much more contentious than it used to be.
Yes, those are both hugely relevant connections to this issue — esp. Wittgenstein’s idea that a child is trained, not taught, to conform to rules. But if there were no behavioral disposition towards rule-conforming — say, not disposition towards joint attention, imitation, or emulation — then the behavior of adults and older children in sculpting rule-confirming behavior would have no effect.
walto,
Do you have any specific views about theories of truth?
One of the big things that Sellars did for me is getting me to see that there must be something to the correspondence theory of truth, even though truth as a semantic notion can be nicely deflated. (Some very smart people over the years have convinced me that the prosentential theory of truth does a nice job of explicating the content of “truth” as a semantic concept, but I’ll admit philosophy of language is not my forte and there could very well be serious problems with the prosentential theory of truth that I don’t see.)
Do you have specific views about how correspondence is detected or determined?
——————————————————————————
To return to a drum I was beating in another thread, I think it is important to stress that the JTB account of knowledge privileges assertions, or declarative speech acts. This is perhaps not a problem. Assertions have truth-value; more precisely, we can say that truth is the normative criterion specific to assertions. (There are other normative criteria for other kinds of speech acts, like prescriptives, baptisms, commands, observables, recognitives, etc.)
However, it would be a problem if we were also trying to shoe-horn into our account of knowledge everything that is of cognitive significance. There’s a lot of norm-governed activity that has bears on cognitive states and statuses that doesn’t fit into the JTB model, because the relevant speech acts aren’t assertions. (Though it now occurs to me that my close readings of Brandom and associated philosophers might be leading me to use “assertion” in a narrower way than I’ve previously indicated.)
Further, it would be a huge problem if we were to endorse a linguaformal account of knowledge — since that would entail that non-linguistic animals don’t know anything. I might be persuaded that beliefs are linguaformal, since they are propositional attitudes — having a disposition-to-endorse towards an assertion — but in that case, I’d feel even more strongly that the JTB model of knowledge can’t the whole story, since animals can know even if they cannot believe.
Welcome whitefrozen.
I was going to mention Brandom, Sellars and the Pittsburgh Hegelians but you beat me to it. Though for me personally, it was Michael Polanyi (‘we know more than we can tell’) who started me on the path to thinking that there was more (much more, in fact) to knowledge than the cognitive aspect. I was reading Wolterstorff’s book on language and divine revelation recently, and he has a short tidbit on the normativity of speaking (not communicating, but speaking) where it really clicked for me. Brandom has had a similar effect (though my knowledge of his work is broader and less deep, since I don’t have time or money to read his books, sadly. I’ve read some of his essays and interviews and have a decent knowledge of his main ideas).
But at any rate, I very much agree that there is a *huge* amount of nor-governed activity going on in cognition, underneath cognition and below cognition – and the JTB simply doesn’t do that justice. It’s helpful as far as it goes, but it’s not the gold standard anymore.
Thanks!
Interesting! I’ve heard of Wolferstorff but haven’t read his work. What of his do you recommend?
The Pittsburgh Hegelians are my main research focus these days, though I have some Continental philosophy in my background (Nietzsche, some critical theory, some phenomenology). My work is here under my real name if you want to check it out, but I prefer being addressed by the pseudonym here, if that’s all right with you.
I very much agree! Welcome to The Skeptical Zone, whitefrozen! I think we will have some excellent conversations!
Forgive my poor quoting skills – I haven’t had to use the quite tags since my days on heavy metal music forums. Combine that with my using Excel for the first time in a decade yesterday, yeech – kids and their computers these days…
I’d highly recommend his work on revelation – ‘Divine Discourse’. He engages contemporary (circa 1992, I believe) continental hermenutics by way of Ricouer (sp?) and Derrida, as well as speech-act theory, Locke, Augustine and a host of others. Fascinating and stimulating work. Any of his works are absolutely top-shelf professional philosophy – I have two of his books on justice, Divine Discourse and his shorter work on aesthetics.
I hugely appreciate your link to your work on the PH -that exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. Like I said, the broad outlines are easy enough to grasp, but good lord, Brandom is not exactly fun, easy reading. McDowell is a bit better – I loved his essay on primary/secondary qualities in the ‘Essays on Moral Realism’ anthology edited by Sayre-Mccord.
I appreciate the welcome, and look forward to the conversation as well! Although I did just realize why I thought your username was familiar – I recall following some comment threads on Ed Feser’s blog some time that actually led me to bookmark this site, and this post just popped up in my google now feed. Small world, eh?
He said Ed Feser. There could be trouble. LoL.
Read your “What’s All This About?” page and your “A Definition of Theology” page.
Nicely done.
Mung,
Thanks!
If I told you what kind of answer would satisfy me it would take all the fun out of it. 🙂
Let me see if I can give an example.
How do children come to know who their parents are? If you ask a child, do you know who your mother is, are you asking for something they could not possibly know?
We all have to start somewhere. We start out as babes, then children. Whence then, knowledge? When and how do babies and children acquire knowledge? Or do they not?
That’s good to hear.
It has always seemed to me that knowledge is different from belief. Roughly speaking, I take our knowledge to be our abilities at coping with our world. So beliefs might be ways of expressing that knowledge, but they are not themselves the knowledge. Also there are no truth requirements for knowledge as abilities. There are, instead, pragmatic requirements (how well does it work).
We need not be concerned with nihilism. Perhaps the world is just an illusion. In that case, our knowledge is our ability to cope with that illusion. So it is still knowledge because it is still our ability to cope.
Let me add mywelcome to whitefrozen. Re my views on truth, I guess I’m a fairly run-of-the-mill Tarskian. I like what Putnam said (supporting Field) in. His recent APA article on the subject. I put a comment on his blog on the subject.
BTW, who are all the Pittsburgh hegelians? I didn’t recognize a couple of the apparent bigshots at that Chicago conference.
I don’t think children ever know who their mother is. Can you accept that answer?
walto,
Thanks for the welcome – the Pittsburgh school generally refers to Brandom, McDowell, and Terry Pinkard, though I don’t remember off the top of my head if he’s actually at Pittsburgh. And of course Sellars.
Thanks. I think James Conant was one of the guys at that Sellars conference. Is he considered one of that gang?
Off the top of my head man, I don’t know. I’d have to look him up.
Absolutely. It would not surprise me in the least if some people here at TSZ think children incapable of knowledge. Is that your view?
Or is it your view that there are some things a child can know, but who her mother is just isn’t one of them?
At least we’re talking about it. It’s like a thought experiment but not imaginary. 🙂
I have no children of my own, so I have to ask others.
There are lots of things a child can know. You just happened to pick a thing that is beyond the ability of a child to know.
A child will know the person acting as female parent. But some children are adopted, and occasionally switched.
The issue here is learning.
Learning seems to puzzle theists. Learning and evolution are similar processes. They do not have a destination. They do not produce ideals.
I’m not sure I can agree with this.
Let’s say that there are at least three types of knowledge.
1. Knowledge by acquaintance.
2. know how
3. knowledge by description (propositional knowledge)
All of these seem to me to rely on truth requirements. I see your “knowledge as abilities” as know how. What are some things you, as a mathematician, know how to do (as an ability) that does not have a truth requirement?
But keeping to the question raised in the OP, are children somehow restricted from any of these three types of knowledge, and if so, why?
Most of my mathematical knowledge does not have truth requirements. Sure, I need to know how to solve equations, prove theorems, etc. But that means that I need the ability to use truth. There are no truth requirements for the knowing how.
Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell are the big names in that minor little tradition. Working off of their stuff would be folks like Michael Williams, Mark Lance, Rebecca Kukla, Danielle Macbeth, and Joseph Rouse — the so-called “left-wing Sellarsians,” as distinct from “right-wing Sellarsians” like Millikan, Dennett, Churchland, Rosenthal, and people like that. I forget who all was at the Kant &Sellars gig in Chicago but I remember that I knew most of them. Conant is a very sophisticated philosopher in his own right. His reading of Sellars’s criticism of C. I. Lewis is the definitive treatment of the subject.
Thanks, KN.
BTW, I transcribed an interesting, hitherto unpublished letter from Hall to Sellars for my Hall book. It’s from about the time of Sellars’ “Realism and the New Way of Words.” Hall chastises him for being insufficiently realist.
There is some other, gossipy correspondence that consists mostly of Hall bitching about Bergmann (whom he apparently fought with almost constantly while at Iowa).
I also procured all the Sellars letters to Hall from the Sellars archive, but there wasn’t much, and what there was is mostly llegible.
Mung,
http://www.theoryofknowledge.net/ways-of-knowing/
some may be horseshit, though.
walto,
My friend is almost finished with his book on Bergmann, Hall, and Sellars. I’ll make sure you’re informed when it’s finally published.
I’m perfectly happy with this emphasis on knowledge as knowing-how. As a first pass, I’m willing to say that the success condition of knowing-how is successful coping and that the success-condition of knowing-that is accurate belief. But on a second pass, I’d urge that accurate belief is really a special kind of successful coping, and that knowing-that should be collapsed into knowing-how.
Or, as I would prefer, that while knowing is knowing-how “all the way up,” there is still a difference between knowing-how directly tied to the deployment of sensorimotor abilities — like knowing how to ride a bike or swim – and successful coping where the criteria are partly constituted by cultural expectations and social norms — like knowing how to cook a delicious meal.
The humanities and sciences also depend on skills such as knowing how to solve a theorem, or construct a good experiment, analyze the data, and write a publishable article, or for that matter knowing how to closely read a difficult text and generate an intelligible interpretation.
So while I strongly endorse the priority of knowing how over knowing that, I strongly protest against the picture that knowing-how is “manual labor” and that knowing-that is “mental labor”. The manual/mental distinction should be erased entirely. It was developed as part of the legitimizing ideology of ancient Greek slavery, has persisted into modernity as part of the legitimizing ideology of capitalism (the distinction between “blue collar” and “white collar” labor), and it also makes the mind/body distinction seem intuitively plausible.
But when it comes to the more discursive sorts of knowing-how, being able to persuade others is also a success-condition. I see justification as a success-condition that involves what others find reasonable, acceptable, warranted, etc.
I have a funny view about truth. I think that the semantic conception of truth can be handled nicely by some deflationary theory. As I noted above, I think that a prosentential account works. But I also think that the non-semantic or epistemic conception of truth is crucial, and that this is what “correspondence” is all about.
But what are the corresponding elements? As I see it, the corresponding elements are, at a first pass, sensorimotor abilities and ambient affordances and at a second pass, the neurodynamical mappings deployed in sensorimotor abilities and the real patterns underlying the relevant affordances. In short, Rorty and other neopragmatists made a mistake when they rejected correspondence in favor of successful coping. Rather, they should have said that successful coping is what correspondence really is.
The homomorphisms between neurodynamics and real patterns, in other words, is “the truth about truth”: it is truth-as-correspondence as understood in rerum natura.
In other words, when it comes to JTB-style knowledge, my view is a combination of being a Brandomian about justification (but with some Foucault about how different epistemes constitute different criteria of justification) and a cross between Dreyfus and Churchland on truth.
Non-human animals don’t have justification, because they don’t play the game of giving and asking for reasons. But they can still have the kinds of successful coping, with the same kinds of underlying causal mappings between brain states and real patterns, as we have and which we express as true beliefs.
I think this commits me to a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: non-discursively structured knowledge (truth-as-correspondence-as-coping) and discursively structured knowledge (truth-as-correspondence-as-coping + initiation into discursive practices that allow one to play the game of giving and asking for reasons).
Both are kinds of knowing-how, but knowing how to play the game of giving and asking for reasons does make a real difference in how one can, in turn, assess the adequacy of one’s own embodied coping, there can be a process of mutual criticism whereby we realize that we occupy different perspectives and try to develop a more comprehensive — less perspectival — conceptual framework that in turn allows for new kinds of successful coping (technology, engineering, science).
Hm. While I appreciate the emphasis on ‘knowing how’ (KH), I’m not sure that such a collapse really works. While there is no doubt reason to think that the dichtotomy between KH and ‘knowing that’ (KT) isn’t as stark as has been traditonally thought (see Ryle, for instance), and I see good reason to think that KH is conceptually prior to KT, I don’t see that it follows that all knowing is KH.
For example, I know that 1+1=2. Now, this isn’t a bare knowledge – surely there is a KH involved conceptually prior in terms of rules and norms and whatnot – but I’m not sure that I see that a conceptual distinction warrants such a collapse.
Yes, I agree.
I see mathematics is “knowing how”, but I don’t think it counts as manual labor.
I’ll add, though, that I think people make a mistake when they demean manual labor. Some manual labor can be mechanized, but there’s a lot of manual labor that requires intelligence, though perhaps not the kind of intelligence that is measured by IQ tests.
The weaker thesis, then, would be something like “all knowing-that presupposes some knowing-how” and the stronger thesis would be something like, “there is no knowing-that, but only knowing-how”.
Usually the weaker thesis is the more plausible one, and this is no exception. But let me see if I can make a case for the stronger thesis.
Any case of knowing-that would be a matter of assenting to a proposition that’s both justified and true. And I don’t deny that we do this. But what is assenting or endorsing? It is something that we do, and in order to do it, we need to know how to do it. So even knowing that 1+1=2 involves knowing how to recognize the equation as a true assertion, knowing how to use it, even if (as it the case for most of us) knowing how to prove it is beyond one’s abilities.
Having written this, I suspect that this supports the weaker thesis and not the stronger thesis.
I agree entirely that manual labor is not to be demeaned, and it is certainly involves a good deal of intelligence and creativity.
I’m skeptical as to what IQ tests actually measure. Last time I checked, results on IQ tests correlate strongly with affluence. I’m not sure if this is because poverty actually has a negative impact on brain development or if IQ tests are really detecting affluence rather than intelligence.
I know your friend Peter. He owes me an acknowldegement for a line he lifted from one of my papers on Hall, incidentally.
I’ll remind him!
Hi whitefrozen,
Welcome to TSZ.
You write:
I agree.
Right. For example, we know that vinyl alcohol exists in interstellar space. It’s clearly an example of “knowledge that”, but how is it an example of “knowledge how”?
The only remotely plausible answer would be that when we say we know that vinyl alcohol exists out there, we are really saying that we know how to perform the observation that detects its presence. But that doesn’t work, because knowing how to perform the observation is insufficient. We also have to know the result.
Also, there may be multiple methods for detecting vinyl alcohol in interstellar space. Knowing one method does not mean that you know the others, so knowing that vinyl alcohol is present cannot be identical to knowing how to employ a particular method to detect its presence.
Right. The beer I spilled on an LP while stoned in 1972.
But isn’t knowing the result itself a matter of knowing how to analyze and interpret the data collected from performing the operation, knowing how to collate that data with data on vinyl alcohol gathered through other techniques, and so on?
OK, I like this point — that maybe one reason why we need a knowing-that/knowing-how distinction is to capture the distinction between the aspects of reality that are known and the methods we use to grasp them. If that’s right, then collapsing the former entirely the latter would be tantamount to anti-realism.
I think I’d have a problem with that myself!
So, fine: in the name of realism, I hereby renounce my rejection of the knowing-how/knowing-that distinction!
How about the weaker thesis: that there is no knowing-that without some knowing-how?
This is something that I believe, but I deny that I know. My belief depends on trusting the reports of scientists. To really know, I have to first understand how the research was done, and that’s a “knowing how”.
I see that KN has made a similar point.
That’s roughly where I was heading – that there is a non-collapsable distinction between the known/method.
As far as the weaker thesis – hmm. I want to say no – that there is non-knowing-how knowledge. But I’m rather drawn to the idea of there being no percept without a concept, and I think that applies here. While there is a distinction between KT/KH, KH is prior to KT – otherwise, would we have any knowledge at all?
Putting this in the context of empirical knowledge: if there was no concept to go with our percept (I’m not being very technical here about those terms), then we wouldn’t have anything but a constant flux of sensory impressions, with no order or sequence.
I think the same applies with KH/KT. KH is prior to KH – without the KH, there would be no KT. How about that? As far as I can tell, this isn’t too much more than the idea that we simply know more than we can tell – in this specific case, the rules and norms that govern certain aspects of our cognition.
KN,
Yes, but there is a point at which reality steps in and says yes or no, VA or no VA. The result comes from reality, not from us, although our know-how is essential to obtaining it.
Excellent. Congratulations. 🙂
It depends on your definition of “knowing-how”. I can see, but I wouldn’t say that I “know how” to see — my eyes and nervous system just do it. Yet I know that my cat is sleeping next to the keyboard because I see her there.
That seems to be a case of “knowing-that” without “knowing-how”.
Neil,
In that case you’re still trusting the reports of the scientists who made the observations. Would you have to make the observations yourself in order to know that the VA was there? That seems like an unreasonably strict standard.
🙂
And started with Wittgenstein and Aquinas. Look out at TAZ! 😉
Ok, we definitely agree that knowing-how is prior to knowing-that. We might some room to disagree on how to make sense of that little word, “prior” — or perhaps not.
Ah, we definitely on the spirit of this thought, though I want to quibble over the details.
First, the disagreement: I do think that the stable correlations between sensory input and motor output (bodily movement) are sufficient to introduce structure into perceptual consciousness. It’s not a constant flux. (And I’m ambivalent about whether there really are “sense-impressions”.) Whether these stable structures of sensory-motor coordination are concepts depends on what one thinks concepts are.
Second, the agreement: whatever the sensorimotor coordination turns out to be like, whether it is better described as “conceptual” or as “non-conceptual” and whatever kind of primitive or basic knowledge that it makes possible — the knowledge that a crow might have of how to make a tool to get at food that otherwise be inaccessible, for example — knowledge of that sort is going to be necessary but not sufficient for the distinctive kind of empirical knowledge that is of interest to epistemologists.
That kind of knowledge requires a special kind of concept: concepts that aren’t just sensorimotor correlations but rather also nodes in an inferential nexus that is shared across body-minds through a public language.
It’s a bit more complex than “no percept without concept” but I think the basic idea is clear.
Well, we can still make explicit those rules and norms. They are usually implicit because we don’t pay attention to them explicitly.
That strikes me as a case of knowing-how, only it is not a knowing-how that is immediately available to subjective reflection because it was not explicitly taught.
It is knowing-how because your awareness of the cat sleeping next to the keyboard depends on (a) the sensorimotor coordinations that developed as your embodied senses matured in infancy and early childhood and (b) the ability to use concepts such as ‘cat’ and ‘sleeping’ and ‘keyboard’ in your “inner speech”, which in turn depended on being taught those words and how to use them.
But it’s not knowing-how like knowing how to drive or cook is — it’s not a skill that was explicitly taught, and it’s not a skill that you ordinarily think of yourself as having. It’s rather part of your sensorimotor navigation of your environment, which is in turn the ‘ground floor’ on which skills and norms are built.
I know nothing of Aquinas, but I have a deep admiration for Wittgenstein & have for many years. Wittgenstein is one of my major philosophical heroes.