Stephen Hetherington on Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge
Knowing a fact more or less well
We often talk of knowing a person, a place, or a topic; and we readily accept that there can be shades or degrees among cases of such knowledge. You can know a person more or less well, for instance. Much the same is true of knowing how to do something. There can be gradations of this kind of knowledge: You know more or less well (if at all) how to play cricket. Is all knowledge like that? Not according to existing epistemological orthodoxy: Philosophical discussions of knowledge tell us almost exclusively about propositional or factual knowledge — knowledge of a particular truth or fact — and they assume that such knowledge cannot be better or worse, considered purely as knowledge of the truth or fact in question. You cannot know more or less well that you are sitting down, say. You either have this knowledge or you do not; and that is that. There is no middle ground. Your associated evidence or reliability (in each case, underwriting your belief that you are sitting down) might be more or less good; even so, that particular piece of knowledge as such cannot be. Propositional knowledge is special in that respect. Unlike other sorts of knowledge, knowledge of a fact is always absolute.
As I said, that is a standard philosophical presumption about knowledge of a fact, simply taken for granted (rather than argued for) by epistemologists in general. Nevertheless, is that presumption true? I suspect that it is not. In Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge I argue that knowledge of a fact can be better or worse — that in this way knowledge is not always absolute. Why must we accept that propositional knowledge — supposedly alone in this regard among forms of knowledge — is unable to be gradational? If we relax that assumption, what will ensue? Can we still think coherently about knowledge? Could it even be that some traditional epistemological worries will come to seem less worrying to us once we begin thinking of factual knowledge differently — specifically, as able to be gradational?
Consider, for example, classic Cartesian sceptical challenges. These might claim that you need, if you are to know that you are sitting down, to know that you are not dreaming your sitting down. In Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge I describe how we may reinterpret such challenges (along — systemically — with several other supposed epistemological problems). We could view the Cartesian challenge as bearing first and foremost upon how well you know that you are sitting down, rather than on whether you know that you are sitting down. And then, even if you are unable to rule out the Cartesian sceptical possibility, at worst this failing will help to constitute your knowing only imperfectly that you are sitting down. Is there any real surprise — any serious linguistic awkwardness — in that view of what the putative sceptic would have shown about your knowledge? I do not think so. Can we talk in that way about your knowledge without harming our underlying conception of knowledge? I do think so. We would then be talking in an epistemically non-absolutist way about knowledge. We would be agreeing that sometimes you know a fact (such as that you are sitting down) in a way that, at least in principle, could be better, or could be worse, than it is — better or worse purely qua knowledge of the fact of which it is knowledge. You would have the knowledge that you are sitting down; and although it would be less than perfect knowledge of your sitting down, it still might be very good knowledge of your sitting down. In Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge, my minimal aim is to develop this non-absolutist way of conceiving of knowledge.
Stephen Hetherington
|
VIEW BASKET
