The Question | Questions | What is Knowledge?

3 Apr

Do we really know anything? Could this all be a dream? Could we be stuck in The Matrix and not even know it? It seems like we know a lot of things about the world. How is that possible and what does it take to really know something? Here?s one answer from a young philosopher.

Liam

This week’s guest philosopher, Liam, is a 4 th grader at Mountainview Elementary School in Morgantown , WV . While at school, Liam is especially fond of recess, gym, and art. After school, he likes playing basketball, video games (especially Ultimate Spiderman and Midnight Club 3), Yugio cards, and playing with his friends in his clubhouse in the woods

Liam is playful, intelligent, interesting, and funny, so our interview was a purely delightful experience for me! From a long list of gripping questions, Liam chose one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy: What is Knowledge?

To begin his search for an answer to the question, Liam looked around the Blue Moose Café, smiling, and thinking about what he knew. He spotted his reflection in a glass frame, encasing a photograph on the wall. He noticed a checkerboard painted on the tabletop of our table, and he enjoyed an invigorating display of color throughout the café. On the basis of this thoughtful scan of the room, Liam claimed that he knew:

1.) I see my reflection in the glass. 2.) I see a checkerboard painted on the tabletop in front of me. 3.) The Blue Moose Café is a colorful place.

I asked him to give me some examples of things he did not know. He listed the following:

1.) The private thoughts of other people. 2.) What it would look like if he had an earthworm’s perspective from under the earth on a rainy day. 3.) What it would seem like to be only one inch tall. 4.) What cod (the fish) tastes like. (Liam hates fish and has never eaten cod.) 5.) How it would feel to be a character in a video game.

After that refreshing list was compiled, I asked Liam to reflect upon his examples and try to put the concept of knowledge in a nutshell. He came up with the following on his first try:

(K1) A person knows x when the person has experience backing up his or her answer.

This is a nice start. His belief that there was a checkerboard painted on the table top, his belief that he could see his reflection in the glass, and his belief that there is a lot of color in the Blue Moose Café were all based on his visual experiences. Since he does not have first hand experience of what the earth looks like from an earthworm’s perspective, what it would be like to be one inch tall, what cod tastes like, how it would feel to be in a video game, or about what other people’s private thoughts are, he does not know those things. K1 works very nicely with Liam’s list of examples.

I asked Liam to put his first theory, K1, to the test of philosophy. That is, I asked him to think hard about whether there are any objections, or counterexamples, to K1. After a quiet moment of reflection, Liam grinned at me and gave me a counterexample to K1. He said, ?Well, in school, we do a lot of long division. We have lots and lots of experience, but sometimes, despite my experience, I do not know the answer!? :-D On the basis of this counterexample to K1, Liam revised his theory of knowledge to:

( K2 ) A person knows x when the person has experience and understanding backing up his or her answer.

K2 is even better than K1. It works well with all of Liam’s original examples. It also works with the long division counterexample. Liam does not know the answer when he does not have understanding as well as experience.

There is one little problem with K2 . Liam was drinking a strawberry Snapple during the interview. I asked him if he would have knowledge that there was a strawberry Snapple in front of him if his mom had switched the Snapple with flavored water when we were not looking. He said he would not know in that case, and he revised his theory to:

(K3) A person knows x when the person has experience and understanding backing up his or her answer and his or her answer is correct.

Liam had no further objections, and K3 is Liam’s Theory of Knowledge. It is a strong theory.

Once he had a theory he felt satisfied with, I challenged him with the shoe shaking threat of skepticism! I asked him to go back to any of the things he claimed to know. I asked Liam whether he REALLY knew any of these things. After all, I asked him, ?Can you be sure that you are not just dreaming this? Couldn’t this all be an illusion? Maybe this all feels real, but it is not? How do you know things are really the way they seem to be?? Liam looked at me, threw his hands into his curly, blonde hair, and put his head down on the table. Head down, he turned to me and smiled the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. His mom chimed in, ?He thinks about this a lot!?

Since he had already thought about this, I demanded an answer from my young philosopher. He answered. ?I can pinch myself and I feel it. I must be here and awake.? I responded, ?But you could be dreaming that you are pinching yourself.? ?Right? he said and smiled some more. ?Well, I might be dreaming now, but I have to eventually wake up, and I will know when that happens. I’ll look around the room just when I feel myself waking up, and I will see if there is a checkerboard on the table. Then, I’ll know.? I was not satisfied. After all I challenged, ?Maybe you are just dreaming that you woke up. And, maybe you are always dreaming and always in a world of illusions. How do you know that’s not the way things really are and there is no table, no café, and no real me talking to you right now?? Liam had an answer. ?Well, I would die if I were always asleep. I have to eat to stay alive and I can’t eat if I am sleeping. So, I cannot be sleeping all the time.? Liam also maintained that dreams feel significantly different, and less clear and realistic, than the experiences we have when we are awake.

Is it possible that we don’t even have bodies and that all of our experiences are misleading? Is it possible that reality is quite different than what we think? If so, do we really know anything?

What if you haven?t experienced it but you know about what it is?

to me knowledge is intelligence. You cant be knowledgable if your not intelligent. Someone that has knowledge has to not only have intelligence but wise, and have street smarts as well as book smarts.

I believe knowledge to be first and foremost, about experience. Although one can have book smarts and be vastly wise about a variety of subjects, you can not fully be considered a knowledgeable person if you do not have experience. After experience, knowledge is the private thoughts that are in someone heads, it is something that is intangible, yet is there. It works only when someone has a full understanding and experience to think such thoughts. That is what knowledge is

One of my favorite questions!
I’m going to bring up flashes of Descartes, just so we all know where my ideas are comming from.
First, we have to define knowledge as soemthing we are absolutly 100 % sure of; there can be no room for error. Epistemically justifyed things are not anagolas to knowledge.

To Josh above (to maybe warrent some sort of discussion) you’re absolutly correct to ask what about things we don’t exactly expereince but are apparently clear if we think about them? All fathers being men? Things in the definitions in themselves, what Descartes refered to as Deductive reasoning. Liam does not cover this in his experience.

Dominique Dixon, I understand what you’re trying to say, but you’re still missing the central question. To be able to aquire knowledge you’re saying that person must be intelligent, have street smarts and have book smarts, but what does that mean? It requires more of a definition and perhaps an example of what you think a piece of knowledge would look like, like Liam saying above “the blue moose is a colorful place”

Kaitlyn Mann, given my definition of knowledge earlier in the post, experience has the possibility of being incorrect. What if we are dreaming, as Liam’s interview was talking about? What if we are always dreaming? What, like Descartes asked, we were constantly being controlled by an Evil Genius God and the external world didnt exist at all? We were constantly being tricked every single day, which would mean expereinces would not count towards knowledge. Although rediculas this sounds to most people, the possibility still exists that this could be true. And if something has the possibility of not being true, then it does not count as knowledge.

To Liam, although you are a 4th grader, great job with the question. I’m afraid however, with your theory of knowledge you beg the question with K3. Also, in your responce to the argument from dream theory you also beg the question. You said that in order to know something we have to expereince something, understanding backing up his answer, and the answer has to be correct. The big question is, how do you know the answer is correct? You cannot use K3 in order to prove itself, because the truth of the conclusion is already guarenteed in the premise. You have to define how you got the truth of the knowledge in the premise “and it has to be true” in order to salvage k3, but k3 itself cannot come to knowledge.
Also with the objection to the argument from dream theory, you’re assuming that you know (and we all know) what it is like to be awaking and dreaming. You say that we know we’re not dreaming most of the time because you can tell the difference between the waking life and dreaming life. But, if we have been dreaming our entire life and have had no expereince with the waking life how could we make that conclusion? You’re assuming you have been awake to counter the dream argument, which in itself begs the question. And eating and sleeping, it could be simply illusiary and our real selves, whereever they may be, could not need nourishment to survive.

The theory of knowledge i propose, in which i hope you guys give me your feedback on, comes from Descartes.
S knows P iff S comes to P through intuition or deduction.
Intuition is something that is redily apparent and obvious and cannot in any way be falsifyed.
Me thinking is an intuition. I know i am thinking.
Deduction reasoning is when you have an argument that guarentees the truth of the conclusion if the premises are true, based on previous deductive or intiution based reasoning. Me thinking leads to me existing.
I think therefore i exist.

Thoughts?

Knowledge is the awareness of an unfalsifiable experience.