Travis Joseph Rodgers
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many people floated claims about the disease. Did it come from a lab, an animal, or both? Was it spreading more quickly or more slowly than the flu? Did it claim more than seven million lives, or less than 1% of that number? Are any of these claims true? Are any of these claims tantamount to knowledge? That’s a lot of questions. In philosophy, the theory of knowledge, and the investigation of claims like these is called epistemology. Let’s start with a relatively uncontroversial sort of knowledge.
Easy Knowledge
In English, “to know” often does the work of multiple verbs in different languages (connaître vs. savoir, conocer vs. saber, kennen vs. wißen, shiru vs. wakaru, etc.). It’s not surprising that this complicates issues in English discussions of knowledge. So, for the purposes of this chapter, let’s focus on propositional knowledge. While there are ways of knowing how to do something, knowing what it’s like to do something, and being acquainted with someone or something, propositional knowledge is knowledge with an embedded proposition. It takes the form: I know that P, where P is a proposition. If, for instance, you know that today is Tuesday, then P would be “Today is Tuesday.”
“Easy knowledge” is any true propositional belief you have. If you believed in March 2020 that COVID was a hoax, and it really was a hoax, then you knew that COVID was a hoax. If you believe your team won the game after you went to bed, and they really did win, then you know your team won the game, even if you haven’t checked the score. Why is this easy knowledge? Because we have numerous beliefs without any good evidence. But the level of evidence is irrelevant for easy knowledge. What is it relevant for?
Normativity of Knowledge
Knowledge seems to be a normative concept. That means that there’s some special sort of value or values attached to it. There are standards of knowledge. Even easy knowledge has some standards. Not all propositional beliefs are easy knowledge. Only the true ones are. So, if you think something is true, but it’s false, then you don’t know it. Additionally, you must actually believe the proposition. An idea might pop into your head. “My neighbor is behaving strangely. He’s a spy,” you might think. Then you quickly correct yourself, “No; that’s crazy. I don’t believe that.” Even if your neighbor is a spy, given that you don’t believe it, you don’t know that your neighbor is a spy. In addition to the truth condition and the belief condition, there’s a third traditional attribute of knowledge.
Justified True Belief (JTB)
Edmund Gettier credits Plato with expressing the so-called JTB model of knowledge. On this view, if something is knowledge, then it must be a belief. It must also be true. And the believer must have some justification for that belief. This view has become quite popular as at least a proxy for knowledge. If it’s not quite the right analysis of propositional knowledge, it seems to get close. There are, of course, disagreements about what counts as justification. Let’s consider some of the rival accounts of justification.
Internalism
Internalism is a position about what counts as justification in the JTB model. On this view, what justifies our beliefs is internal to our cognitive structures. Access internalism is the view that justification requires the believer have access to the justifiers. So, if I am justified in believing that a mask is ineffective against COVID, one way of being justified is if I have access to the evidence on mask safety, comparative transmission rates, etc. Access here means that I can think about it, reflect on it, etc. A common sort of justified belief on the internalist picture is memory. Although memory is fallible, which means it is open to some errors, memories are things I can access. So, they often play justificatory roles. For instance, if I believe my car is at location X because I remember parking it there, then I may be justified in holding that belief.
Externalism
Externalism is a rival account of justification. On this view, what justifies our belief is external to our cognitive structures. One of the most popular forms of externalism is reliabilism. Justification is a question of a belief’s reliability. So, if something is knowledge, on this view, then it is a true belief that is produced in a reliable way.
Obviously, determining what reliability means here is important. Consider how perceptual beliefs are fallible. There are situations in which our perceptions fail to lead reliably to true beliefs. When lighting conditions are poor or when one is tired or intoxicated, one’s perceptions are liable to error. But there are some ideal conditions under which our perceptions are incredibly reliable. When light is good, we’re well rested, and we have more than one set of eyes on a situation (and agreement), we often produce excellent beliefs. The successes of empirical science are attributable to a highly reliable process of belief production.
Skepticism and Contextualism
It’s worth noting that not all epistemologists accept that humans actually possess knowledge. One position worth discussing is Pyrrhonian Skepticism. This view, stemming from late Hellenic/early Hellenistic Age takes seriously the origin of the term. Skeptesthai means “to inquire.” The Pyrrhonian Skeptic hears a claim and offers a competing claim before proceeding to investigate the issue. This sort of skeptic is especially slow to commit to claims of empirical knowledge. These are claims about what the observable world is actually like, as opposed to mathematical and other theoretical claims. Still, the Pyrrhonian admits that the standard of knowledge may be high, but we must still act in a physical world. This creates multiple standards of justification, leading to more contemporary views called Contextualism(s), where justification varies with the context.