The Concept of Knowledge

By now you may have a better understanding of what the concept of "knowledge" means in theory. However, that does not imply that the concept of knowledge is straightforward in practice. On a daily basis, we are continually confronted with what appears to be "knowledge", but;

1. How do we know whether those claims about knowledge are well founded?

2. On what basis should we accept or reject something as knowledge?

3. How do we know if something is true?

4. Can we ever truly know what is really out there?

These questions are very difficult to answer and it can be frustrating to feel a lack of certainty in our quest for truth. It may be tempting to give up on our quest for truth, because our search seems arguably futile. After all, we are limited by our human frame and human intelligence (or not, when we look at AI and technology?).

In addition, history shows us that knowledge changes over time. Can we know anything with certainty given that knowledge seems provisional?

Because of the apparent lack of certainty in our search for knowledge (and truth), some people resort to the position of radical doubt (Lagemaat, 2011). If we doubt everything and everyone, should we even bother getting closer to the truth? This is a difficult position to live with. Others, however, feel that we can come up with valid justifications of knowledge claims and that our continual search for knowledge is invaluable. Indeed, if we think about the progress we have made in the last 500 years, it is clear that we have acquired a lot of knowledge. The road to progress may not always be straight, yet on the whole, we now have a much better understanding of, for example, the natural world, human behaviour and mathematics.

Although we have made massive progress in the production of knowledge. knowledge can be provisional. What is accepted as knowledge today, may be discarded tomorrow. You can easily find examples of knowledge claims of the past that are not accepted anymore. This is true in many areas: some religions have disappeared completely, the geocentric model is obsolete, what is considered "art" has been reviewed repeatedly with changing cultural movements. When you think about this, you may wonder what this changeable nature of knowledge implies for our search for knowledge. You may also wonder whether the search for knowledge is less provisional or dependent upon the beliefs of groups and/or individuals in some areas of knowledge? If so, does this mean that the knowledge they produce is more 'valuable' or "of a better quality"?

When we question what knowledge is, we will undoubtedly stumble upon the question 'What is truth?' Even though there may not be a satisfying catch-all answer, different theories attempt to offer a response. The coherence theory, correspondence theory and pragmatism each offer some attractive suggestions, but none of them seem entirely satisfying. It is, indeed, very difficult to define what "truth" is. According to the coherence theory of truth, something is true when it fits within our world view, previous knowledge or sentences surrounding the statement. In a court case, for example, we can say that someone is (beyond reasonable doubt) guilty if this statement fits with all the evidence and everything else we know about the situation. This theory of truth is good in the sense that it is not limiting itself to knowledge that can be found in the natural world. However, it is possible to have a statement that seems coherent but is false (just as the person we found to be guilty may be innocent). The correspondence theory of truth states that something is true if the statement corresponds with the natural world and accurately describes the natural world. In this sense, we can say that "the grass is green" is true if there is indeed grass in the world, when the grass is also green and when we have used the sentence structure correctly to describe the state of the grass. The correspondence theory of truth is not very useful to assess the truth value about things that cannot be found in the natural world. However, the kind of thinking represented by the correspondence theory has been pivotal in driving important movements for knowledge such as the scientific revolution. The pragmatic theory of truth claims that something is true when it is useful. The strength of this theory is that it offers an alternative to the (rather limited) correspondence theory and (sometimes inaccurate) coherence theory. There are cases (such as is the case in ethical, legal and political discourse), when the utility of a theory is very important to assess the truth value of statements and cases that cannot be assessed through the correspondence and coherence theory. Nevertheless, it is obvious that mere utility is not always enough to assess the truth value of a statement. When Trump claims that he is "a very stable genius"", this statement may well be useful for himself (and maybe his supporters), but this does not make it true. Even though we should steer away from overly relativistic interpretations of knowledge and truth, Václav Havel's words contain a lot of wisdom: "Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run away from those who have found it." As Raphael's painting 'School of Athens' demonstrates, the search for what is true has kept thinkers occupied for millennia. We do not expect you to offer "the answer" as to what constitutes "the truth". However, it is important to show an awareness of the complexity of the notion as well as the context (eg area of knowledge) in which you would use it.