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From: jfbuss@water.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: The nature of knowledge
Message-ID: <1022@water.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Jul-87 09:49:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: water.1022
Posted: Fri Jul  3 09:49:09 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 11:41:46 EDT
References: <3587e521.44e6@apollo.uucp> <680@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
Reply-To: jfbuss@water.waterloo.edu (Jonathan Buss)
Distribution: world
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 26
Keywords: knowledge belief truth certainty

In article <48@thirdi.UUCP> sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes:
>At any particular moment, from the viewpoint of an individual, knowledge and
>belief (meaning not a weak opinion but a firmly-held conviction) are one and
>the same thing.  If I believe something (such as the truth of *this*
>philosophical position), I say "I *know* it's true."  In other words, it is
>knowledge, to me.

A distinction between knowledge and true beliefs is not made in
everyday discourse.  We should not expect "know" in everyday use to
refer to "knowledge" in the philosophical sense.  The phrase "I know
it's true" usually means "Stop arguing with me.  I'm right, even though
I can't give a good reason."

If you want to argue that the philosophical concepts of "knowledge" and
"true beliefs" are the same, that is proper.  But this is a different
question from that of the common use of these words.


>To summarize:  As each of us looks at what he knows in his own life, what he
>knows at a particular time is coextensive with what he believes at that time.
> ...  Knowing, and the various criteria we use
>for deciding what we know and what we don't know, are two different things.

There are three things here:  what we have "knowledge" of (in the
philosophical sense), what we say we "know," and our criteria for
deciding what things to put in the second category.