Knowledge

Knowledge is our current store of texts that are coherent and well tested against experience.

When we say that we know something, it implies a greater degree of conviction than when we say that we think something or believe something. Knowledge is considered to have more weight than mere opinion. Still if we say we know something, we first have to believe it, so knowledge at least implies belief. Suppose we believed something that was not true. Could we be said to know it? No. So knowledge implies true belief. But suppose we just happened to guess the truth. Could we be said to know it then? Again, no. We have to be justified in our belief. Similarly, if we followed a procedure that is considered reliable to validate a belief, we would be justified in our belief. But we could still be mistaken. The belief could still be false. Because of these considerations, knowledge has been defined as justified, true belief.

This seems like a pretty good definition. The problem is that the only way we can approach truth is through justification. We do not have direct access to truth. If we want to know if a statement is true, we have to go through a process of justification, like checking for its coherence and testing it against experience. If truth is a word we use to compliment texts that are coherent and well tested against experience, the implication is that we have texts and experience and various tests involving them, but we do not have access to some transcendent truth or knowledge. So justification, testing, validation, truth, and knowledge are all slightly different ways of talking about the same issue of texts and their reliability.

One distinction is that with knowledge, I am the subject. I know something. With truth, the text is the subject. The text is said to be true. But the way we determine if we are justified in using the terms is the same. The word knowledge has the further function of designating all the different truths we have at our disposal. It is a store of true texts. The phrase “the truth” has a rather more lofty connotation as the one and only truth. Knowledge, at least in contemporary usage, does not necessarily have an implication of permanence. For example, today we speak of knowledge workers, knowledge production, and knowledge engineering. Knowledge has taken on more of the connotation of something that is produced rather than found. We produce knowledge by creating texts and then thoroughly testing them for coherence with other texts and with experience. What passes for knowledge today may well be modified or superceded based on more work in the future. Thus we talk about the current state of knowledge.

This is not in any way to denigrate knowledge. Knowledge is one of our most precious possessions. It is of great value both in itself as an object of contemplation and for its usefulness in solving problems. Still, this view of knowledge is somewhat less than some people had hoped for in the past. They distinguished knowledge from opinion as they would distinguish something that is perfect and unchanging from something that is variable and evolving. But in the world of language, experience, and desire that we seem to be confined to, these absolute distinctions are more difficult to make. It is more a matter of degree. When we have not been able to do enough testing, we may still express our opinion. But we reserve the word knowledge for cases in which we feel enough testing has been done so that we feel fairly confident.