Download epistemology - mrsmcfadyensspace

EPISTEMOLOGY
• Philosophers are interested in knowledge.
This will not surprise you – even if you
have never studied any philosophy before,
you will expect that philosophers are
interested in gaining philosophical
knowledge – just as historians seek
historical knowledge, and mathematicians
seeks mathematical knowledge, biologists
seeks biological knowledge, and so on.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Clearly a philosopher does want philosophical
knowledge. But there is a more important point to make
here. Historians and mathematicians and biologists want
knowledge – but they don’t ask what ‘knowledge’ is.
They take it for granted that there is knowledge, and
then set out to find it.
• Philosophers are different. They ask questions such as
‘what is knowledge?’, and ‘is it possible to have
knowledge that is 100% reliable – knowledge that is
absolutely certain?’. This is what we are to be studying in
this Epistemology unit.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Let’s see how this fits in with a definition of
‘philosophy’.
• Philosophy is an activity.
• When we are doing philosophy, we are
trying to do two things:
• We are trying to clarify our important
beliefs.
• We are trying to justify our important
beliefs.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• One of the important beliefs that we all have is
that knowledge is possible – that we can gain
knowledge by various means.
• One of the reasons for studying Philosophy is,
after all, that you want to have knowledge of
Philosophy. But you also want to have
knowledge of many other things: whether it will
rain today; what books you need for your course;
when the class begins; who can tell you what
you need to revise for the exam; where the
exam will be held; and so on.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• We go through life taking for granted that
knowledge is possible – and that gaining
knowledge is straightforward – so that by
the time we are in our teens, we have
already learned an enormous amount (and
that one of the most important differences
between a 16-year-old person and a 16week-old person is the massive amount of
learning – ‘knowledge-acquisition’ – that
the 16-week-old has ahead of him or her).
EPISTEMOLOGY
• If we think about the definition of
‘philosophy’ given above, we can see,
then, that there are two tasks for
philosophers:
• Getting clear what it means to say that
we have knowledge (this is the
‘clarifying’ part).
• Proving that knowledge is possible
(this is the ‘justifying’ part).
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Philosophers who deal with these
questions are ‘epistemologists’. The word
‘epistemology’ was introduced into
philosophy by a nineteenth century
Scottish philosopher, James Ferrier. It is
made up of two Greek words. In Greek
‘episteme’ means ‘knowledge’, and ‘logos’
means ‘explanation, or study’. So
‘epistemology’ is the study of knowledge.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• It may seem that the epistemologist’s questions
aren’t worth asking. How can we doubt that we
have knowledge? How can there be any
question about what knowledge is? This raises
an important point about philosophy.
Philosophers tend to take nothing for granted.
Philosophers will generally be very suspicious of
the notion that ‘it’s just obvious’.
• What do we mean when we say that we have
knowledge?
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Think about the ways in which we use the verb
‘to know’:
• I know that David Hume died in 1776.
• I know how to use this software.
• I know who committed the ‘Jack the Ripper’
killings.
• I know the quickest way to get from Glasgow to
Edinburgh.
• I know French.
• I know France.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• This short list contains three different uses
of the word to ‘know’. So if we are to clarify
what it means to say that we have
knowledge, then we will have to start by
getting clear what are these three, and
how they differ.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Firstly, there is the use of ‘know’ in example 1: I
know that … – where what comes after the word
‘that’ is a statement (also known as a
‘proposition’). In the case of example 1, we have
three things:
• The proposition ‘David Hume died in 1776’.
• The person who is making the claim – ‘I’.
• The relationship between the person and the
proposition – here a relation of ‘knowing’.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Notice how this is different from example
2. In example 2, what is known is not a
fact (a true proposition such as ‘David
Hume died in 1776’), but rather how to do
something. This is the kind of knowledge
that we have when we have ‘know-how’.
So if I know how to write HTML code on a
computer, or how to bake a cake or solve
simultaneous equations, then I have this
kind of knowledge.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Example 3 is really just the same kind of
knowledge as was example 1 – what we
call ‘propositional knowledge’. Whereas
in example 2 the target for knowledge is
some skill, such as a mathematical skill, or
a baking skill, in examples 1 and 3 the
target for knowledge is a proposition –
‘David Hume died in 1776’, or ‘The Prince
of Wales was Jack the Ripper’.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Example 4 can be thought of either as
propositional knowledge, or as know-how. ‘I
know the quickest way to get from Glasgow to
Edinburgh’ could be set out as:
• I know how to get from Glasgow to Edinburgh by
the quickest method.
• I know that the quickest way to get from
Glasgow to Edinburgh is by hiring a helicopter.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• People who are training to drive black taxis have
to ‘do the knowledge’. What this means is that
they have to know their way around the city so
well that they can pass a rigorous examination
before getting a licence. Here again we can
think of their knowledge in one of two ways: the
Edinburgh taxi driver needs to know how to get
from Waverley station to the Scottish Parliament;
alternatively s/he has to know that Waverley
Station is at Waverley Bridge, and the Scottish
Parliament is at Holyrood.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• ‘I know French’ (example 5) is, of course,
an example of know-how. What it means is
‘I know how to speak French’
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Finally, example 6 is importantly different. ‘I know
France’ means ‘I am familiar with France, having been
there’. This is really a third way of using the verb ‘to
know’: it is what philosophers call knowledge by
acquaintance. If I say that I know the paintings of
Gauguin, or that I know the man who wrote the book or
know the Beethoven Violin Concerto, then this means
that I am acquainted with – I have been in some kind of
contact with the man (whom I have met), the paintings
(which I have seen), or the music (which I have heard).
Notice how our Edinburgh cabbie can also be said to
have knowledge by acquaintance (of course: he needs
to be very familiar with Edinburgh).