Talk:Definitions of knowledge

This article was nominated for deletion on 3 June 2022. The result of the discussion was keep.

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@Phlsph7: I appreciate all the work you put into creating this article!

One small objection I have on my first reading is to your description of JTB as "the traditional definition". This is quite contentious phrasing. You may be familiar with recent work debunking the "traditionalness" of the JTB definition, for example (all of these sources were previously cited at Talk:Epistemology/Archive 6 § Bias toward (pragmatic) knowledge as justified true belief.):

• Antognazza, Maria Rosa (January 2015). "The benefit to philosophy of the study of its history". British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 23 (1): 161–184. doi:10.1080/09608788.2014.974020.
• Dutant, Julien (December 2015). "The legend of the justified true belief analysis" (PDF). Philosophical Perspectives. 29 (1): 95–145. doi:10.1111/phpe.12061. JSTOR 26614563.
• Le Morvan, Pierre (November 2017). "Knowledge before Gettier" (PDF). British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 25 (6): 1216–1238. doi:10.1080/09608788.2017.1320968.
• Ayers, Michael; Antognazza, Maria Rosa (2019). "Knowledge and belief from Plato to Locke". Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–33. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198833567.003.0001. ISBN 9780198833567. OCLC 1055458930.

Since strong arguments and evidence in these sources have debunked the "traditionalness" of the JTB definition, I used the "Find" command to search for and replace all instances of "traditional" in the article.

More generally, I am concerned that the article is very philosophy-centric, and especially centered on analytic philosophy; almost all of the references, and all of the most highly cited ones, are from the field of philosophy, although knowledge is a concept that is important in many fields. For this reason I added the adjective "philosophical" or "in philosophy" in several places in the article. Of course, the article's bias is not an issue that I would expect you to fix; I assume the bias is yours since you are the sole author so far, and if it were something you wanted to fix you would have done it already! I will see if I can find time to add more information from other fields, but I hope that editors who are specialists in other fields (anthropology, art, technology, information science, etc.) will find their way to this article and add further relevant information.

In both this article and in Knowledge, I noticed that an author was missing from the reference named "RoutledgeKnowledge", an article titled "Knowledge, concept of" in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (REP). I see that you have a separate reference to the more recent second version by Michael Hannon of the article with that name in the REP, so I assumed that the reference without an author was to Peter D. Klein's original version of the article, and I added Klein's name as author. If this assumption was incorrect, then what is now the reference to Klein should be merged into the reference to Hannon instead.

I have a few other ideas about how to improve the article but will save them for later. Biogeographist (talk) 02:50, 13 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hello Biogeographist and thanks for the detailed criticism and improvements both here and at Knowledge. I was not aware that calling the JTB account "traditional" is controversial but you are making a good point with the recent literature you cite. In the light of this, your reformulations are appreciated. Short question: do these sources also support the claim that calling the JTB account "traditional" and the focus on propositional knowledge are only or mainly present in analytic philosophy?

I think you are right that the article is "philosophy-centric". But my impression is that this "bias" is justified since most of the works that deal explicitly with the definitions of knowledge come from this field. In this regard, the academic discourse on the topic is philosophy-centric. But if you know some good works on the definitions of knowledge outside philosophy, we could try to include their perspective as well. The term "knowledge" is used in many other fields, but these fields often don't bother to discuss and compare different definitions of it.

Thanks for looking up the author of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: "Klein, Peter D." is correct.

As for other ideas to improve this article: one plan is to move various contents from Epistemology#Defining_knowledge to here and leave only a shorter general summary there. But this will take me a few more days before I get to it. Phlsph7 (talk) 04:11, 13 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Re: do these sources also support the claim that calling the JTB account "traditional" and the focus on propositional knowledge are only or mainly present in analytic philosophy? These claims are inferred from the relevant sources frequently cited in the article, which are written by analytic philosophers—Stephen Hetherington, Peter D. Klein, Keith Lehrer, Matthias Steup, Avrum Stroll—in contrast to, for example, those pragmatist philosophers who are more concerned with consequences of actions than with purely theoretical analyses of propositions and logic. (Recall C. S. Peirce's pragmatic maxim: "our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". Also, Colin Koopman's distinction between experience pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, and conduct pragmatism would be interesting to discuss here if it were relevant enough but it's probably not.) The claims are also explicitly stated in some works by Barry Allen, who is, perhaps, not exactly a pragmatist but is certainly not an analytic philosopher and has engaged extensively with the work of John Dewey—in any case, Allen sounds pragmatist insofar as he emphasizes that knowledge is "performance" and "achievement" and is not prototypically propositional but can include the propositional as an artifactual performance, which, he said, should not be confused with substituting knowledge-how for knowledge-that. Allen wrote, for example (and makes similar statements in other works):

One current in the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy – primarily English-language philosophy in Britain and the former colonies, c. 1910–60 – advanced the conviction that what makes it possible for humans to possess Truth and Objectivity is Language. The analysis of language, newly invigorated by advances in logic associated with the names of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, proves this. The same accounting also reveals the traditional 'problems of philosophy' to be logical confusions masked by misleading grammar. It is to the logical structure of language that philosophers must turn if they want to understand the scope and limits of knowledge – the traditional project of epistemology – and avoid the thinly disguised logical nonsense of their predecessors, fumbling in a darkness as yet unilluminated by the new logic. ... The commingling of Central European positivism with Oxbridge analysis is the matrix from which today's Analytic philosophy evolved. Analytic epistemologies have dutifully stuck to the propositional, linguistifying themes of traditional thinking about knowledge, including the presumption that the knowledge of greatest importance to philosophy has to be true. Even the internal attack on analytic epistemology, its therapeutic diagnosis as a pseudo-problem, is presented as the fulfillment of the linguistic turn. ... The analysis of knowledge has not preoccupied Continental philosophers as it did the logical positivists, and continues to preoccupy Analytic philosophers. ... The objection to such theories is not that they are wrong. It is that they mystify the connection between knowledge and the historical accomplishments of technological society. The ingenuity of our technical culture, the depth of technical mediation, the multiplicity of the interfaces in a global technoscientific network: all of that bespeaks intensive, extensive knowledge. But this knowledge isn't the 'application' of a theory, cannot be formalized in a canonical notation, and seldom takes the form of an indubitable truth. ...

The linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy refers to the rising influence of logical positivism (especially the work of Rudolf Carnap [1891–1970]), as well as positivism's discontents (Willard Van Orman Quine [1908–2000]), heretics (Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889–1951]), and satellites (Bertrand Russell [1872–1970], Karl Popper [1902–1994]). The movement began in German-speaking countries in the 1930s but rose to predominance in English-language philosophy after World War II. It mingled with an independently evolved linguistic analysis and so-called ordinary-language philosophy, as in the work of George Edward Moore (1873–1958), J. L. Austin (1911–1960), and Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976). For all these thinkers, everything in philosophy is a matter of language. ... Gettier's paper shows the style of the then-new analytic approach, using contrived scenarios as logical counterexamples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. ... Gettier's argument spurred an academic industry. The problem was to render the justified-true-belief formula invulnerable to Gettier-type cases, or replace this "classical" definition of knowledge with something equally plausible and immune to counterexample. Nothing memorable came of it. And contrary to what is often said, the definition of knowledge as justified true belief is not in any sense "classical." It has never been widely accepted and first entered philosophical discussion (in Plato's Theaetetus) as a refuted theory. ... The heyday of linguistic philosophy had passed by 1980. The movement had led to little in the theory of knowledge. Pure conceptual or semantic analysis was largely abandoned. Exchanging those discredited methods for the richer data of the sciences, Quine called for a "naturalized epistemology." The idea was to reframe the theory of knowledge in terms of empirical hypotheses about the neurological, cognitive, and evolutionary matrix of human knowledge. ... Later evolutionary accounts usually make two claims. The first is that human knowledge is an evolved adaptation, an outcome of natural selection. The second is that any adaptation of any species is a kind of knowledge, that evolutionary adaptation is the primary way of knowing the world. In these accounts an insect's camouflage coloration is knowledge of its environment; the fleshy water-conserving cactus stem "knows" that water is locally scarce; the shape of the hummingbird beak expresses knowledge of the structure of the flowers it lives on. Human knowledge is a special case of this primary and ubiquitous biological knowledge of adaptation. ... That knowledge must be true is a longstanding presupposition of Western thought. Yet there are many instances of knowledge that cannot be called true. These include knowledge expressed in technological objects like a bridge or satellite, or in works of art and the imagination. A technological artifact or a work of art is not true (or false) in the way a proposition is. ...

Allen's apparent low regard for analytic philosophy is his own opinion/interest, but as far as I can see he is not wrong about the general outline of the "linguistic turn" and the fact that analytic philosophers have focused more on propositional knowledge than non-analytic philosophers, not to mention anthropologists and biologists. I don't know about you, but I don't read analytic philosophy when I want to understand the kind of knowledge embodied in diagrams, physical scale models, and other non-linguistic artworks, for example (to say nothing of bird beaks and evolutionary epistemology).

Re: the academic discourse on the topic is philosophy-centric. No, the definition of knowledge is quite vigorously discussed in anthropology, for example, where the issues/problems are often different from what is currently emphasized in this article:

• Barth, Fredrik (February 2002). "An anthropology of knowledge [and comments and reply]". Current Anthropology. 43 (1): 1–18. doi:10.1086/324131. JSTOR 10.1086/324131.
• Sanga, Glauco; Ortalli, Gherardo, eds. (2003). Nature Knowledge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, and Utility. New York: Berghahn Books. ISBN 1571818227. OCLC 52519005.
• Boyer, Dominic (June 2005). "Visiting knowledge in anthropology: an introduction" (PDF). Ethnos. 70 (2): 141–148. doi:10.1080/00141840500141097.
• Harris, Mark, ed. (2007). Ways of Knowing: Anthropological Approaches to Crafting Experience and Knowledge. Methodology and history in anthropology. Vol. 18. New York: Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781845453640. OCLC 148843085.
• Marchand, Trevor H. J., ed. (2010). Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between Mind, Body and Environment. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute special issue book series. Vol. 4. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444391473. ISBN 9781444338928. OCLC 666492602.
• Fabian, Johannes (June 2012). "Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 18 (2): 439–453. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01751.x. JSTOR 41507968. Although it helps to be aware of what philosophers think about knowledge, anthropologists can neither simply relegate their epistemological problems to, nor find solutions in, philosophy.
• Bernstein, Jay H. (2016). "Anthropology and knowledge organization: affinities and prospects for engagement" (PDF). In Guimarães, José Augusto Chaves; Oliveira Milani, Suellen (eds.). Knowledge Organization for a Sustainable World: Challenges and Perspectives for Cultural, Scientific, and Technological Sharing in a Connected Society: proceedings of the Fourteenth International ISKO Conference, 27–29 September 2016, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. pp. 51–58. OCLC 960885791.

I could list more, but you get the idea.

Here are a couple of books from historians, focusing on knowledge as technē instead of epistēmē, that suggest that the field of history may also have some interesting definitions of knowledge, though I'm not as familiar with this field:

• Long, Pamela O. (2001). Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801866065. OCLC 44883619.
• Gitelman, Lisa (2014). Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Sign, storage, transmission. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822376767. ISBN 9780822356455. OCLC 854906247.

The article currently says "Some of those disagreements arise from the fact that different theorists have different goals in mind". The article could emphasize more what the goals or purposes are for different definitions: e.g., thinker/agent A uses definition D for purpose P. As this article says at the start, any definition that is general enough to command universal assent for all purposes (such as "cognitive success") is also too vague to do all the work we want to do for particular purposes or problems. Biogeographist (talk) 18:26, 13 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Would you mind if we shift the restriction to analytic philosophy to the analysis of knowledge instead of using it for all forms of propositional knowledge? That means from "Most definitions of knowledge in analytic philosophy focus on propositional knowledge or knowledge-that,..." to "In this regard, the term "analysis of knowledge" is used to...". My main reason for this suggestion is that the main sources cited in the article give priviledge to propositional knowledge but, as far as I'm aware of, none of them restricts this approach explicitly to analytic philosophy. But that the analysis of knowledge belongs primarily to analytic philosophy should be uncontroversial and it's also explicitly supported by the passages you quoted.

Thanks for the extensive bibliography on the topic in anthropology and history. I'll take a look at some of the sources once I have the time and see if I can diversify the definitions discussed.

On a very general level, the distinction based on goals concerns whether one wants a rough and practically useful definition, or a theoretically precise definition. I think the idea of explaining the goal behind each of the individual definitions is good in principle. However, this would need a lot of work to connect to reliable sources and philosophers do not always make it explicit which goals they have in mind. Phlsph7 (talk) 03:48, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure what you are proposing in your first paragraph, so you may need to follow up and clarify if I'm not understanding you. In your first sentence you juxtapose "analysis of knowledge" and "propositional knowledge", which I see as different in kind: the first is an activity, the second is a type. "Analysis of knowledge" as a general activity is something that anyone could do in various styles, but the style of "analysis of knowledge" that is described in the SEP article with that title, and that is described in this article in the same way, belongs primarily to analytic philosophy, as you said. "Propositional knowledge" is a type of knowledge. You may be trying to say that not only analytic philosophers focus on propositional knowledge? True, but the typology of propositional versus non-propositional knowledge, and a special emphasis on propositions (as opposed to other representations), involves assumptions closely tied to analytic philosophy and the linguistic turn. This can be seen in the passages above from Barry Allen and in, for example, the history section of the SEP article "Proposition": "Arguably, the three figures whose work has most shaped the framework for contemporary Anglophone work on propositions are Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell." The typology of propositional knowledge versus everything else exhibits what Allen called the "propositional bias": "It may seem innocuous to say that knowledge has to be true, but it implies that knowing have at its core, as its unit, something that can be true, which is a functional definition of proposition. In a blow, knowledge that fails to fit the format of a logical proposition falls from view" (Allen 2004, p. 14). In contrast, other cultures have different conceptions of knowledge (and the anthropology literature can greatly illuminate this): for example, recently Allen published an article on North American indigenous epistemologies (which I haven't yet read beyond the abstract): Allen, Barry (September 2021). "Indigenous epistemologies of North America". Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology. doi:10.1017/epi.2021.37. Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. By saying "Most definitions of knowledge in analytic philosophy focus on propositional knowledge or knowledge-that..." (or something like that) we say something that is true (as far as I know) and also provide readers a wikilink to Analytic philosophy, which contains in its own lead a prominent wikilink to Linguistic turn, all of which gives them a lot of historical and conceptual background about where this typology came from. (And regarding historical background, the article on analytic philosophy notes that "The analytical tradition has been critiqued for ahistoricism". Adding "in analytic philosophy" is a simple way of adding some historical awareness and avoiding the flaw of ahistoricism. We could go much further.) Please follow up if I didn't understand your proposal.

I think the anthropology literature is important, but I don't claim that the sources I listed above are especially important ones, just (I hope) collectively representative. Biogeographist (talk) 14:44, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

You may be trying to say that not only analytic philosophers focus on propositional knowledge? Yes, that is the idea. But you made some good points as well. I'm still not fully convinced but I'm also not familiar with Barry Allen's work. From my perspective, the claim is too limited. But then again, it is not false: that is what analytic philosophers actually do. So I guess we can leave it as it is. Phlsph7 (talk) 04:05, 15 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

The article states

"According to Keith Lehrer, cases of cognitive luck can be avoided by requiring that the justification does not depend on any false statement." (my emphasis)

Shouldn't it be epistemic luck? Watch Atlas791 (talk) 04:50, 27 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

I think either one works fine. Some theorists use "cognitive luck" (like Klein 1998) and some "epistemic luck" (like the IEP article by Engel). Phlsph7 (talk) 07:05, 27 January 2023 (UTC)Reply