Okay, so how might we begin to pin down what we mean by knowledge that p what is it? For somebody, let's call them s the subject to know a proposition P. Well, the standard traditional analysis is to say, first of all, he has to be true. You can't know a proposition that's false. You might think you know it, but if actually it's false, you don't know it. Secondly, you have to believe it. You can't be said to know something you don't even believe.
And thirdly, you have to be justified in believing it. So those are the three standard conditions sometimes called the JVB analysis justified true belief. A.J. Hammer, who is particularly well-known in this connexion, gave the last two conditions slightly differently. He said that to know something, you have to be sure of it and you have to have the right to be sure. And you might think that's rather preferable if I just vaguely believe something without any strong commitment.
That might not be enough for knowledge. Suppose something to my mind has a 60 percent probability, though. I reckon it's going to rain tomorrow. Something like that. And maybe it's justified because I've seen the weather forecast. But is that knowledge? Probably we'd say it isn't that kind of weak belief isn't enough. You've got to be sure in order for it to count as knowledge and you have to have the right to be sure.
At any rate, that seems quite plausible. But let's ask some further questions about all this. If somebody knows that he does it actually follow that P must be true. Notice that there are two slightly different claims that might be made here. When I say if S. knows that P p must be true or if s knows that P P is necessarily true. That's an ambiguous claim. On the one hand, I might be saying the defence knows that P. It follows that P is necessarily true, but P is a necessary truth.
It might be tempting to think that, but it's just wrong. I know that I exist, but that I exist is not a necessary truth. It's not like one equals one or two. It's greater than one. I could easily not have existed once. I didn't. Sometime I won't. But I do know that I exist right now, don't I? So it's simply not true and it can't follow from the meaning of no.
That the only things you can know are necessary truths. The second interpretation of this claim, however, looks much more plausible necessarily. If S. knows that P, then P is true. Something cannot count as a case of propositional knowledge. Unless the proposition in question is true. And that seems right. But do be ever so careful when you use words like necessarily in philosophy. Always be careful to watch for the scope of the modal operator. So distinguish between the two versions there.
In the second case, you see necessarily lies outside the brackets. Whereas in the first case, if you were to put brackets, necessarily lies inside. So talking about the scope of the modal operator sounds terribly technical, but be very aware that word orderings of this sort can matter a great deal in philosophy. Let's now ask, is it, in fact, the case that if somebody knows some proposition, that proposition must be true? Well, supposing I say I know that frumps is hexagonal.
I know that Frantz's hexagonal. And Italy is shaped like a boot. But of course, France isn't hexagonal. So there we are. I know a falsehood. Now, that seems to me to be just a confusion. There is a sense in which France is hexagonal, namely that it's roughly hexagonal in that sense. I can know that France is hexagonal. There's another sense, a precise sense in which France isn't anything like hexagonal.
And in that sense, I can't know that it is. So as long as we're clear is what we mean about what we mean by hexagonal. Exactly. Hexagonal or roughly hexagonal. That straightens out the problem. For a different case, if you want to get your philosophy, tutors really cross say something like this. Well, that might be true for you, but it's not true for me.
Philosophers hate that. Often people say that kind of thing when all they really mean is, I believe P but you don't believe P. So some people will say it was true in the mediaeval period that the sun orbited around the Earth. No, it wasn't. It wasn't true. It was universally believed. But it was never true. Probably it was quite a reasonable belief at that time. That didn't make it true. Take another example. It's true, we think that the continents drift for centuries, millennia.
Nobody believed that. But it was, in fact, true. Indeed, if you didn't think it was true way back in the time of the dinosaurs and so on. You're going to have a very difficult job explaining the distribution of fossils around the world. That distribution only makes sense in the context that continents were moving even when nobody believed it. So don't confuse P is true with everyone believes that P. They're quite different. Let's move on.
I'm gonna take it for granted from now on that you can't know a falsehood. What about belief? In order to know that P. Do you have to believe P? This isn't so clear. Suppose, for example, I mean a quiz and I'm asked. Let's say to compare a list of capital cities and the countries and I have to say, which city is the capital city of each country? And suppose I say, I don't know. I haven't a clue. I don't know any of these. I mean, somebody says, go on, have a go, have a guess.
Well, I really don't know, it's random. Go on, guess. And I do. And I get them all right. Now, there might be some very plausible explanation of that. It might be that when I was at school, I learnt all these things. Maybe I had a teacher who was really keen on capital cities. And fortunately, the test was confined to countries that existed when I was at school. And although I've completely forgotten all those lessons, I'm able to do the test accurately.
I didn't believe that I knew. But actually, I gave the right answers. And you can imagine the quizmaster saying afterwards, Milliken didn't think he knew any of those. But in fact, he did know them. Now, one way of dealing with this kind of problem is to say I had unconscious knowledge of the capital cities, and in that same sense, you might want to say I had unconscious belief. We can flesh this out a bit. Suppose somebody is putting one of those quizzes. They claim to be guessing.
They make their guesses and all they guesses come out wrong. But then you put them in the quiz again. The guess again, they come out wrong again, but they come out wrong consistently, they're still getting the same thing. Well, clearly, they don't know the answers because they're getting them wrong. But you might want to say they've gotten some kind of unconscious belief because they're consistently giving the same answers.
A map could give you a way of saying that knowledge does require belief, even if you accept that in the case of the quiz, I do have knowledge. You could say, yes, you can have unconscious knowledge, but only if you've got unconscious belief. Only if your answers display a kind of consistency. The related case is the strange phenomenon called blindsight. This is where someone has damage to their brain in such a way that they have no conscious awareness of seeing anything.
And yet if you ask them to point to things, they can do it with reasonable reliability. So if you take them into a room, spin them around and say, point to the desk, they'll say, I can't see a thing. How do you expect me to point to the desk? And you say, go on, guess. My guess, and when they do guess, they get it right. Much better than chance. So, again, with this sort of case, it might be tempting to say they know something even though they don't believe it.
Here, the idea of unconscious belief may seem a little bit less plausible because there's no long term memory or consistent pattern underlying the behaviour. A related problem. It's tempting to think that knowledge must be completely conscious that if you know something, you must know that you know it. So at one extreme, you've got the question, do you even need to believe it? At the other extreme, you've got people who might want to say that if you know it.
Not only do you have to believe it. You have to know that you know. Well, that at least must be wrong. Suppose it's true, but in order to know something, I have to know that I know it. In that case, if I know that P, I have to know that I know that P. And that means I have to know that. I know that. I know that P. Which means that I have to know that. I know that. I know that. I know that p. And obviously there's no stop to that. In order to know that P. I have to know that. I know that. I know.
And so on. Even when there are Google, Plex knows in that sentence something I'm obviously completely incapable of understanding, let alone believing. There's no way that you can possibly believe an infinite number of those propositions. And I, I personally lose grip on what's being said once you've got five or six no's in there. So insisting on consciousness all the way through that all knowledge has to be self reflective and known to be known is just not going to work.
OK, I'm going to put the question of belief to one side now and move on to the key condition that attracts most of the attention, because the main point in distinguishing between just having a belief that P and knowing that P seems to be to focus on justification. The main reason we want a concept of knowledge is to distinguish between things that we really know and things that we think we know.
So let's just assume that P is true here. What is it that makes the difference between truly believing that P and knowing that P? Suppose I have a true belief that P. Basilone surely isn't enough to imply that I know it. It might be just a lucky guess. It might be something I've been told by someone who's actually completely unreliable. Yet on this occasion, they just happened to have told me a truth.
There are all sorts of ways that I can have a true belief, and yet it fails to be knowledge because it is not justified. So we know terms, if I'm to know that P, I must have a right to believe it or a right to be sure of it, at least that seems very plausible. Here, the shadow of scepticism can come back to haunt us. Suppose I believe that P. What is required for this to be knowledge? Well, plausibly, it has to be justified. No doubt it will be justified in terms of other beliefs.
If you asked, how do you know that, P, I'm likely to have to appeal to other beliefs. Call them Q and R and then the question can arise. Okay. How can you justify Q and R and they recut require further justification perhaps in terms of S and T and so we go on. It looks like there's a threat of infinite regress here. Everything has to be justified by reference to something else. How can you stop it? Well, there are two different approaches that are traditionally taken.
Indeed, it's difficult to see how else you could do it. One of them is coherent wisdom, which simply says you have this web of interlocking beliefs. And if they all cohere together strongly enough, then they can justify each other. The other approach foundation, lissom, says that ultimately you hit rock bottom. Ultimately, you get to certain things that you can just know directly without there having to be justified by anything else.
Maybe one equals one. For example, how do you know one equals one? Well, I just see it to be true. I don't have to justify that in terms of anything else. How do you know you're thinking? Well, I just see it to be true. Like, Descartes was a foundation foundational. He thought some beliefs were just totally secure in and of themselves.
A more modern approach to halting the regressive justification which moves away from the emphasis on conscious justification, which we've seen, is probably not something that we want to insist on right the way through is called externalism, externalism features in a lot of modern approaches to philosophy.
An internal list counter justification is one that requires that all the relevant factors that play a role in assessing a belief as worthy of being called knowledge must be cognitively except accessible to the subject. Nothing can be hidden. And externally, it doesn't require this an external list. By contrast, will say that some factors that are relevant to judging whether you're justified in believing something may be inaccessible to you,
external to you. Now, one obvious advantage of this is the following. Suppose you want to say that dogs can know things or cats can know things. Well, that better not be in terms of some intellectual justification the dog or the cat is able to provide. So how does the dog know that there's a cat nearby? Well, it smells it. Can the dog give an explanation of that? Of course it can't.
What makes this knowledge is that there's a reliable causal connexion between the smell and the existence of a cat nearby. And the dogs detecting the smell and the smell actually being there. So you've got a reliable causal link between the cat and the dog sensing the presence of a cat. Now, it's quite tempting to say that the key to knowledge in this sort of case is not intellectual justification, not reflection, but simply the existence of that reliable causal link.
And the dogs having reliable faculties. Well, why not say the same about us? Why not say that we are capable of knowing things without necessarily knowing how we know? Because we've already seen, after all, that we don't want to say that you can only know that P if you could know that you know that P. Why not go the whole hog and say you don't even have to be able to give an account of how you know that you're justified.