Craig and the purpose of knowledge

According to Edward Craig, the usual approach to the analysis of knowledge draws on two kinds of intuition. The first concerns instances or cases of knowledge (or instances of the concept of knowledge) (that is, its 'extension'). The second concerns the meaning or 'intension' (note the 's') of 'knowledge', the analysis of the concept. But these two elements can be in tension.As well as intuitions about the extension of the concept, we seem also to have certain intuitions about its intension, that is to say intuitions about why certain cases do, and others do not, qualify as knowledge. The sceptic notoriously tries to show that the two do not mesh: our intuitions about the intension, the conditions of application of the concept, in fact determine a smaller extension than our directly extensional intuitions mark out. If he is wrong, the point needs arguing; if he is right, the question arises: to which set of intuitions should we give priority in order to arrive at the analysis of the concept? In the first case, a lot of epistemology is called for, in the second, a lot of semantic theory. [Craig 1987: 211]

This thus does not seem to be a promising approach. So Craig proposes instead that we do not simply ask what knowledge is but rather we approach that via the question, what is the point of a concept of knowledge? Why do we have one?

Instead of beginning with ordinary usage, we begin with an ordinary situation. We take some prima facie plausible hypothesis about what the concept of knowledge does for us, what its role in our life might be, and then ask what a concept having that role would be like. Such an investigation would still have an anchorage point: should it reach a result quite different from the intuitive intension, or yield an extension quite different from the intuitive extension, then the original hypothesis about the role that the concept plays would be the first casualty. It is not the idea to construct an imaginary concept, but to illuminate our actual practice by showing that a concept with the hypothesized role would have characteristics closely resembling those that we actually find. [Craig 1987: 212]

So Craig suggests as an answer to that question that the concept is of use to mark out potential reliable witnesses or informers in societies. That is, knowledge has a social function. This is then used to shed light on what the concept of knowledge is, comparing it to the then recent history of epistemology, and to draw some conclusions about the limits of such analysis (and the possibility of Gettier cases).

So there are two things to assess. Does Craig offer a plausible account of what knowledge is for? (Note that it differs from Descartes solitary starting point.) And does he draw plausible conclusions about the nature or analysis of knowledge, including whether it would be possible to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge?

- Craig, E.(1987) 'The practical explication of knowledge' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87 221-26: