So this week's topic is mainly knowledge, with a little bit more to say to round scepticism. Our four luminaries there. We've got Freddie Air, AJ Air, who was professor at New College when I was an undergraduate, edman getting a famous for writing a three page paper in the Journal analysis in 1963. I'm not sure whether he's published anything since, but it suffice to make him very famous. Then we've got Hillary Putnam, who will come to the very end.
And Tim Williamson on the right, who is professor here. A successor to AJ. Tim's work isn't actually going to feature in this lecture or indeed in the readings you have. But he's one of the most prominent epistemology states in the world. So it's as well to know that he's around. If you find yourself giving a paper and you see him in the audience, beware. He's universally feared for the sharpness and precision of his questions. OK, so we've seen some sceptical arguments.
Most famously, those of Descartes and those sorts of arguments, rather suggest that if we put a threshold for knowledge very high, then we're quite likely to be driven to the conclusion that we do not know anything at all. Descartes own answers don't seem to work very well. Other answers are all very controversial. It's rather tempting to try to get round this problem by redefining the notion of knowledge to provide a useful distinction amongst the beliefs we have.
Maybe none of them, or only very, very few like I exist, will actually reach the highest threshold. But surely it makes sense to try to define a more moderate, more reasonable threshold, because we do want to distinguish between things that we know in a perfectly ordinary sense and things that we do not know. So we naturally get the question, what is knowledge? How should we understand the notion of knowledge? Now, questions of the form. What is X feature quite prominently in philosophy.
If you go back to Plato and look in his dialogues, you'll see that Socrates is always asking this sort of question. In fact, it used to be the case. I think that people thought of this sort of thing as absolutely paradigmatic of what philosophers do. Philosophers search for essences by trying to define things. I don't think you'll find it's nearly as prominent these days, but such questions still come up quite a lot in topics like personal identity or freedom.
What do we mean by freedom? What is freedom? No such questions, if you think about it's a rather puzzling. Because they could just be asking, when do we apply the word X, where X is freedom, knowledge or whatever? But that sort of question seems to be just about our use of language that we want to go deeper than that to ask what is a genuine case of X? If that question isn't just about our use of language, then what is it?
It seems rather peculiar. What could knowledge be other than what we refer to using the word knowledge? So let me give you an example. Take the discipline of geography. Suppose that the study of geography started out as the study of places in terms of their location, physical characteristics, mineral, mineral resources, the natural environment, that sort of thing.
I'm not sure whether that was true, but let's suppose that it was then over time, people became interested in things like land use, economic considerations, maybe even culture. And if you study geography now, you will find that culture is one of the things that gets studied. Now, you can imagine someone saying, that's all very well. You now study culture as part of geography, but his culture really part of geography. Does geography really include cultural things?
Well, if the word geography is now used to cover cultural matters, amongst others, then sure, the discipline of geography includes culture. How could it not? So it might well look as though the kinds of questions we're asking when we ask what is X, what is knowledge, just come down to language. And in the 1950s and 60s, Oxford philosophy was famously identified with ordinary language philosophy as though the purpose of philosophy was just getting clear about how we use ordinary language.
If that were all there is to it, then it would be rather an uninteresting kind of question. But with most of the concepts that interest philosophers, there is something deeper at stake. Take the case of freedom, which we'll be looking at in a week or two, that we're not just interested in how we use the word freedom. We want to know what kinds of acts we should describe as free because the notion of freedom is tied to moral responsibility.
We think it matters whether somebody is free. It could turn out that we describe actions as free when really from a God's eye point of view, then not maybe we described people as free in certain circumstances in ordinary life. But actually, if we knew about it, there's no moral responsibility there, no genuine freedom. So there is a deeper metaphysical question underlying the linguistic question.
Now, likewise, in the case of knowledge, the concept of knowledge has a normative aspect when we say is knowledge. We're not just categorising it as something that is called knowledge. We're saying that it's reliable, that it has a certain authority. So it is possible to ask of a particular belief. Well, everyone says they know this. But is it really knowledge? Do they really know it? Again, a similar issue arises with Strauss' response to the problem of a problem of induction.
On your induction reading list. He famously says that inductive methods just are what we mean by reasonable. When we describe an inference about the world is reasonable, that just means it meets inductive standards. But a very well-known answer to Straughan is to say, hang on a minute. No. When we say that a method of inference is reasonable, we're not just saying that this is the kind of inference that everybody calls reasonable.
We actually mean that it is reasonable that it has normative force, that this kind of inference really does convey assurance to the conclusion. The kind of conceptual analysis that we're doing on the concept of knowledge provides a nice example of this, and that's a good reason for having it in this general philosophy. Course, from this example, you can get an idea of the kinds of things that typically pop up in these sorts of discussions.
So one of the things that often comes up is appealed to linguistic intuitions. Now, when people talk about intuition, it's sometimes a bit sloppy, as though they're saying, oh, well, this is just something, I think an intuition. You've got to accept it. But actually, linguistic intuitions have a particular authority, because if you're a native expert, speaker of your language, then certain things do just come naturally to you to say.
And that does carry some authority that the standard use of language. Now, obviously, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about philosophical truth, but it does keep you on the rails of using language correctly. Puzzle cases also feature a lot, as we'll see in this lecture. Some people call these intuition pumps. The idea of a puzzle case is that you sketch out some hypothetical scenario and then you ask, well, what would you say about that?
And clearly, what you try to do is devise puzzle cases which steer your hearers intuitions in the way you want to take them so often you'll find in philosophical debate. Each side is producing puzzle cases to favour their own particular point of view. You'll find in personal identity, for example, puzzle cases feature quite highly. Then obviously we get argument and we get systematise Asian. We try to pull all these intuitions and thoughts together to make sense of them altogether.
So let us now embark on a discussion of knowledge and its variants, trying to employ some of these methods to straighten out what we want to say about it. So, first of all, let's distinguish between three different kinds of knowledge, acquaintance. Knowing how and knowing that what we're interested in here is propositional knowledge, knowledge that p a strange phrase that you'll find philosophers use it quite a lot. So here's a proposition. Could be any old proposition.
But notice, knowing that P is the case is quite different from having acquaintance with somebody or something or having practical knowledge. For example, I know how to ride a bike. I don't exactly know how I do it. I'm ignorant of all sorts of propositions that would explain how I managed to remain upright on a bike. But I have the practical knowledge that is I can actually do it.