Clarifying the Concepts of Knowledge Continued

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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This is a continuation of my thread Clarifying the Concepts of Knowledge.

In my last post I discussed evidence, i.e., evidence for the truth of a claim, but evidence can be present and not understood. You may be able to cite the correct evidence, cite the correct source, give the correct formula and still not understand the implications of the evidence. This brings us to the next post, understanding.

Post 6 Understanding

Understanding isn’t the same as belief, isn’t the same as truth, nor is it the same as evidence. A person can hold to a belief without understanding what they believe. For example, they may cite “Water is H₂O,” without understanding the meaning of the claim. Citing the words or a proposition doesn’t mean you understand the words or the proposition.

Understanding isn’t the same as truth. A person may understand a claim that turns out to be false. For instance, one can understand the proposition that the Earth is the center of the universe, understand what would make the claim true, and understand why people believed it, and at the same time recognize that the claim is false.

Understanding isn’t the same as evidence. Evidence supports a claim/conclusion, but understanding is about the claim, the evidence, and background information and how they fit together in the relevant way.

The concept of understanding fits more appropriately inside justification. Justification is much more than attaching evidence to a belief. A person must grasp what is being claimed, what counts for and against it, and how the evidence/reasons connect to the truth of the claim. Without understanding, justification may just be repetition.

Why does it matter? Because someone can repeat a claim, cite their favorite philosopher, and use philosophical jargon without understanding the role the claim plays in an argument. So, understanding is much more than writing out your conclusion.

We can understand a word, a method, a person, or even a situation; but in relation to knowledge, the point is that the person must understand enough of the supporting data to know how it supports the claim. Obviously, this doesn’t mean you have to know everything connected to the claim, or it would make knowledge impossible. The question is whether the person has the right understanding to support the conclusion.

So, understanding fits between mere belief (opinion) and genuine justification. Understanding demonstrates the difference between merely saying the words and grasping their use. Saying the correct words doesn’t mean you understand what you’re saying, and if you don’t understand, then it’s not knowledge.

This is why in my previous writings I don’t treat understanding as an optional extra. It’s what makes justification genuine. Evidence/reasons must be demonstrated, and they must be understood in relation to the claim. Without understanding, we don’t have knowledge.

This brings us to the next post, knowledge. We’ve looked at facts, truth, belief, justification, and understanding. So, the next step is to look at how these concepts fit together to support a claim to know.

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Post 7, Knowledge

I’ve been moving slowly through facts, truth, belief, evidence, justification, and understanding, not because I’m trying to avoid defining knowledge, but because a definition won’t help much if the concepts inside it aren’t clear.

The question is, what must be in place for someone to claim to know?

It seems obvious that truth must be intrinsic to knowledge. If I say the Earth has two moons, but it has one moon, then I don’t know it. I may sincerely believe that the Earth has two moons, and someone may have told me that the Earth has two moons, but the claim is false. If the claim is false, then it’s not knowledge. So, knowledge isn’t just any kind of belief. It’s a belief that’s true. Knowledge is a success word, i.e., it achieves the goal of being true.

Knowledge also involves belief. If I know the Earth has one moon, then I believe the Earth has one moon. It would certainly be strange to say, “I know the Earth has one moon, but I don’t believe it.” Belief by itself isn’t enough for knowledge, but it seems necessary.

Truth and belief are still not enough, since a belief can be true by accident. You may guess correctly, say something without understanding, or even arrive at a conclusion that’s true through insufficient support. In such a case, the belief may be true, but it’s not knowledge. This is where justification enters the picture.

A belief must be connected to the truth in the right way. Does the belief have the right kind of support? Is the support strong enough to justify the claim? Does the conclusion survive the relevant checking, and does it survive obvious defeaters? A belief shouldn’t count as knowledge simply because it happens to be true.

So, as a working definition I’d put it this way: To know something is to believe what’s true, based on sufficient and properly understood justification, in the absence of relevant defeaters.

This isn’t the final word on knowledge, though it’s a way of bringing together the relevant concepts. Truth must rule out false belief. Belief rules out cases where someone says the right thing but doesn’t believe it. Moreover, justification rules out unsupported opinion and lucky guesses. Understanding rules out mere repetition, and defeaters keep the belief open to correction.

This helps us understand why knowledge doesn’t always require infallibility. If all knowledge required absolute certainty, as in a mathematical proof, then not much of what we claim to be knowledge would survive. Much of what we know, even in science, is inductive (i.e., probabilistic, not absolute).

Knowledge shouldn’t be confused with subjective certainty (e.g., one’s strong conviction). A person may feel certain and still be wrong. Knowledge may produce a feeling of conviction, but that conviction doesn’t equate to knowledge. The effect isn’t a two-way street.

The question is, does the belief have the right standing? Is it true? Is it believed? Is it properly justified? Is the justification properly understood? Are the defeaters absent or answered? If so, then we have the basics of knowledge.

This is why “I know…” isn’t a report of inner confidence. It’s a claim of success. It says the belief has reached the truth in the right way. This doesn’t mean the claim can’t be challenged. Someone can always ask, “How do you know?” or “What’s your evidence?" or “Have you considered this or that objection?” But such challenges only make sense if knowledge has standards.

The next concept we’ll consider is certainty. People often use certainty as if it were a synonym for knowledge, but this isn’t always the case. There are several uses of certainty, and there is often confusion surrounding these uses.

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Glad you’re picking this up again. Since I don’t have access to the earlier posts, could you say again how you understand “truth”? As you say, “It seems obvious that truth must be intrinsic to knowledge.” In a similar discussion in one of your previous threads, we found ourselves wondering about how to separate truth from justification. Does “It is true” say anything more than “It is properly justified”? Is it possible for a statement to be true, absent the proper justification? Is it possible to know that a statement is true, absent the proper justification?

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Not sure if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here, but the earlier posts are still accessible to everyone: **Clarifying the Concepts of Knowledge**

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Oh, I see. Somehow I got confused between a thread being closed and being removed. Thanks, that’s helfpul.

Sam, you can still answer if you want though!

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Good questions. I’m using truth in the ordinary sense, i.e., a statement, belief, or assertion is true when it gets what is the case right. In philosophical jargon, the fact obtains. So, if someone says, “The book is on the table,” then the statement is true if the fact obtains, viz., the book is on the table.

There is a difference between asserting that a claim is true and justifying our assertion that the claim is true. In our example, “The book is on the table,” if the book is in fact on the table, then the claim is true. However, if someone asks, “How do you know?” then we’ve moved to justifying the claim. We now must explain how we know. Maybe I saw it moments ago, maybe someone told me, or maybe I have some other justification. Truth is about whether a claim gets the facts right. Justification is about whether we’re entitled to believe it gets the facts right. Simply saying a statement is true is fine, but people want to know how you know, which involves various methods of justification, e.g., logic, sensory experience, testimony, linguistic training, and so on.

Does “It is true” say something more than “It is properly justified?” Yes. “It is true” says something about the claim’s relation to what is the case. Being properly justified says something about the claim’s epistemic standing. A claim can be true even if there’s no justification for believing it. For example, there may be seventeen coins in a drawer that no one has opened, and if there are, then the statement “There are seventeen coins in the drawer” is true apart from any justification or right to claim knowledge.

Yes, a statement can be true apart from proper justification, i.e., even if no one knows it’s true. Justification is what gives us the right to claim knowledge.

I wouldn’t say that we can know a statement is true apart from justification. For example, if someone guessed that there were seventeen coins in the drawer, the belief would be true, but it wouldn’t be knowledge. Knowledge requires not only for the belief to be true, but that it’s held on the basis of sufficient and properly understood justification, and in the absence of relevant defeaters.

If you collapse truth into justification, then you lose an important distinction, viz., the difference between a claim being correct and our being entitled to claim it’s correct.

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Understanding is not part of epistemology. It’s either a synonym for knowledge or is an empty name. Csn you tell us more about understanding?

Take the classic idea of an expert. Experts don’t understand, they know (stuff). No money is to be made from U, only K matters. Yes?

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I don’t believe understanding is a synonym for knowledge or an empty name.

Understanding involves seeing the relationship between a claim, the concepts, the support offered, and what would count for and against the claim. That’s different from repeating a true statement.

If someone memorizes “Force equals mass times acceleration,” he may be able to repeat the formula and even get a few problems correct, but that doesn’t mean he understands what the formula means, why it works, or how changing mass or acceleration changes force. The words are correct, but the understanding is very thin.

My point is that understanding belongs inside justification and a person must understand how justification bears on the conclusion or claim. If someone gives evidence but doesn’t understand how the evidence supports the conclusion, then the relationship between belief and justification fails.

I don’t think your expert example helps your point. What makes someone an expert is precisely because they understand their field, i.e., they see connections, notice errors, can explain why something matters, apply principles to new cases, etc. If an expert memorized statements without understanding how everything fits together, we wouldn’t call that expertise in any serious sense.

So, understanding in the sense that I’m using it isn’t a decorative addition to knowledge. It’s used to mark the difference between merely saying the words or isolated true beliefs and grasping what the beliefs mean, how they’re justified, and how they function within a practice.

It’s in this sense that understanding isn’t a synonym for knowledge, and it isn’t empty. It’s what makes justification genuine as opposed to merely verbal.

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Great, this is very clear. The question I’d raise is whether the notion of “truth” can survive being separated from epistemic justification – but we want it to be separable, certainly. Otherwise, it would fly in the face of our common-sense notion that states of affairs are what they are, quite independently of whether we know about them, and that a statement can have the property of “being true” without being uttered, as it were. I think there are some concerns about how to conceive of propositions under such circumstances, but the concerns are quite abstract and I don’t think they affect what you’re laying out here.

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Well, I’ve read my fair share of philosophy and logic/critical thinking books and never have I encountered a section/chapter on understanding. Even God is defined as all-knowing, not all-understanding. If we’re epistemologically challenged, we’re referred to as ignoramus (not-knowing), not akataleptics (non-understanders).

You’re just trying to create a separate epistemic category without justification. It’s totally unnecessary. As for experts they’re knowledgeable, not understanding people. What problem can’t you solve in physics if all you know are the formulae in physics? Force, mass, acceleration are related as F = ma. Give me any 2 of those and I’ll tell you what the 3^{rd} is. But of course I’m not Einstein :smiley:

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Understanding (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Must be a higher-tier concept. :cry: Thank you.

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All them tears of pain and joy! :joy:

What is another word for knowing? | Knowing Synonyms - WordHippo Thesaurus

What is another word for knowledge? | Knowledge Synonyms - WordHippo Thesaurus

What is another word for understanding? | Understanding Synonyms - WordHippo Thesaurus

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I posted links to the WordHippo website after looking at the previous ‘clarification of concepts’ thread.
This post was not responded to:

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I agree that fact and truth are often used interchangeably without confusion. People say things like “It’s a fact that the book is on the table,” or “It’s true the book is on the table,” and in everyday speech it’s unproblematic. But that doesn’t mean that the distinction is useless. For example, we also hear people say, “That’s not a fact, that’s just what he believes,” or “His statement is true because he gets the facts right.” In these latter two examples, fact and truth aren’t doing the same work. The distinction is the one I’ve pointed out, i.e., fact is what is the case, and a belief or assertion is true when it gets what is the case right. My point isn’t to correct ordinary usage. I’m pointing out distinctions that ordinary language already allows.

The same applies to justification. When I claim that justification is concerned with whether a belief is connected to truth in the right way, I’m not saying that there’s only one method or one philosophical procedure. I simply mean that not every connection between belief and truth is enough for knowledge claims.

Of course many of these concepts are problematic, which is precisely why they need clarification, especially in epistemology. So, I think you’re overstating the problem.

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I agree. We always have an understanding and knowledge is derivative thereof.

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Yes, I agree with your main point. I’d only make one clarification. I’m hesitant to say that an unuttered statement is true, since a statement usually involves something asserted, spoken, or written.

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If one is all-knowing and knowing is derivative of understanding, then isn’t all-knowing the functional equivalent of all-understanding? And if the former is derivative of the latter, then the inverse need not be true.

The relationship of knowledge to understanding is such that saying God is all-knowing says more than saying God is all-understanding.

Just saying. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yes, and this touches on my “abstract concerns” about propositions. Have you read Irad Kimhi and Sebastian Rödl? They opened my eyes to ways in which analytic philosophy may be too quick to claim an obvious understanding of what a proposition – and “propositional content” – is. And the difference between “uttered” and “asserted” has a lot to do with that. I assume you’d be OK saying that an unasserted statement could be true?

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@Amity, errare humanum est.

To Arne, this is the kind of self-deception I refer to. It is a failure to see the identity, understanding = knowledge, much like theists fail to see God doesn’t exist, and atheists are oblivious to the fact that they need to prove God doesn’t exist.

One only needs to ask the right questions to discover if you’ve deceived yourself. For example, one can ask, do I really know that God doesn’t exist? How big is the pond I’m in? etc.