Can Knowledge be Analysed?

Conrad Cotton-Barratt

1 Introduction to the Knowledge Debate

Since Plato's Theaetetus, philosophers have been interested in what constitutes
knowledge: how, if at all, it diers from mere belief  and how we may come
to know anything at all. The arising debate has been spurred by the sceptical
argument  that we cannot know anything at all. With this in mind, philoso-
phers have attempted to provide an analysis of knowledge, as to say whether we
know anything it must rst be established what it is to know something. Thus
analyses of knowledge have largely been attempts at dening a set of necessary
and sucient conditions that are satised if and only if S knows that p is true,
where p is some proposition, so we may check in any given case whether each
of the criteria are met, and so whether it is a case of knowledge. Note that
this is propositional knowledge  knowledge that p, such as knowing that water
is composed of hydrogen and oxygen  rather than knowing a person, place,
or how to do something. The philosophical analysis of knowledge, for the vast
part, is concerned only with this propositional knowledge, and so henceforth we
will use knowledge for propositional knowledge.
Most theories of knowledge have taken as a starting point that knowledge
is a subset of true belief: that for S to know that p, S must believe that p and
p must be true, but this is not sucient  if I happen to believe that when I
next roll a die, it will come up a 6, and as it happens it does, then I had a true
belief, but we would not generally call it knowledge, as it appeared to be more
luck than anything else. Thus, runs the argument, knowledge is something more
than just true belief.
The Justied True Belief  (JTB) model runs along the lines of:

S knows that p if and only if:

(i) p is true;

(ii) S believes that p;

(iii) S is justied in believing that p.
This attempts to illuminate the dierence between true belief and knowledge.
The JTB model, with various interpretations of justied, has had many advo-
cates  including the likes of Ayer, who wrote a similar analysis, replacing (iii)
with S has the right to be sure that p 1.
1 See Knowing as Having the Right to be Sure in Ayer, A. J., (1956) The Problem of
Knowledge, London: Macmillan

1
 However, in 1963 Edmund Gettier published a paper that seemed to demon-
strate that JTB does not constitute knowledge  that there are instances of
belief that satisfy the criteria but are not what we would, according to our intu-
ition, call knowledge. Such a case may run as follows: Jones has good evidence
for (and so is justied in believing):

(A) Smith drives a Ford

And so deduces both:

(Bi) Smith drives a Ford or Brown is in Boston

(Bii) Smith drives a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona

And believes both of these, and is justied in believing them, though has no
idea where Brown is, as he believes (A) to be true, and (Bi) and (Bii) are both
strictly weaker claims than (A). Suppose that (A) is, contrary to Jones' belief,
not true, but as it happens Brown is in Barcelona, so (Bi) is true. In this case
according to the JTB model, Jones knows (Bi), but intuitionally, because it
appears to be more a matter of luck that in fact Brown is in Barcelona, we
would not say he knows it.
From this point, the knowledge debate has diverged into various attempts
to characterise knowledge into a set of conditions that match our intuitions in
all scenarios. The debate largely consists of constructing cases in which the
proposed conditions hold but we would not call cases of knowledge, or where
the conditions do not hold but we would still call cases of knowledge.
To give an example: Nozick, in an attempt to create a 'degettierized' theory
of knowledge uses conditions (i) and (ii) from JTB and adds to them his own
third condition: (Niii) if p weren't true, S wouldn't believe that p , which seems
to eliminate standard Gettier cases. However, Nozick is concerned that these
criteria are not sucient, and considers the case of someone who is in a tank
and brought to believe by direct electrical and chemical stimulation that he is
in a tank. The en-vatted person forms a true belief which he wouldn't believe
if it weren't true  and so it satises Nozick's conditions  but because the
method by which he is brought to believe it is one that could bring him to believe
that he is an any other environment, we would not attribute knowledge to him,
Nozick argues. Thus  by our intuitions on this case  Nozick motivates the
2
addition of a fourth condition . In this manner, many dierent sets of criteria
have been proposed, and attempts at theories outlined  reliabilist, internalist,
externalist, to name a few  but it is beyond the scope of this essay to describe
or evaluate them individually.

2 Conceptions of Knowledge
Each of these attempts to characterise knowledge has sought to do so by ap-
pealing to our intuitions as to what qualies as knowledge: if we intuitively

2 see Knowledge and scepticism in Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press

2
feel that a case is (or is not) knowledge, then the set of conditions will be
written to include (or exclude) the case as knowledge  these endeavours are
thus intuition-driven. Such intuition-driven theories presuppose the existence
of a universal and well-dened concept of knowledge. Universal in that it is
assumed that most people will share the same internal denition of knowledge
(i.e. have the same intuition as to what qualies as knowledge). Well-dened in
that it is assumed that the concept knowledge may sharply divide all scenarios
into those which are and those which are not knowledge  there is no uncer-
tainty or undecidability as to whether any given case is a case of knowledge or
not.
Universality is key to the project: if no such collective denition exists then
knowledge is a term that varies in meaning from person to person and usage
to usage. In this case then there is no single concept knowledge that is well-
dened by our collective intuition. Thus a set of conditions may be necessary
and/or sucient for a particular conception of knowledge, but there will be
other conceptions of knowledge for which the conditions are too stringent or not
stringent enough.

It is this paper's contention that the concept of knowledge is not univer-

sal. This is not entirely unexpected: knowledge, unlike concepts such as dark,
magnetic, or water, is not a concept that is given to us by the nature of the
universe, or necessary for us to be able to discuss or consider. Rather, knowl-
edge is an articially constructed concept. Edward Craig eloquently describes
knowledge:

...something that we delineate by operating with a concept which

we create in answer to certain needs, or in pursuit of certain ideals.
The concept of water, on the other hand, is determined by the nature
of water itself and our experience of it.
3

And given that it is articially constructed, but not simply enough dened to
be immediately characterisable as a set of necessary and sucient conditions,
it should be no great surprise if one person's intuition as to what qualies as
knowledge diers from another's, as there will never have been any compre-
hensive denition given to either of them. That is, unlike some other articial
concepts, such as married or chair, which can  and are  straightforwardly
and explicitly dened to us when we learn the word, knowledge is not dened
to us in the same manner, and instead it is a concept we learn how and when
to apply from context of use. The diculty arises because these contexts from
which we learn to apply the concept do not exhaustively (or even necessarily
consistently) dene it.

A recent study by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich

4 generated signicant data
in support of the non-universality of knowledge: they presented people from

3 Craig, E., (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Pg. 3
4 Weinberg, J., Nichols, S. and Stich, S. (2001) 'Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions',
Philosophical Topics, 29, 1 & 2, 2001. Pp. 429-460. The data that follows is all from this
study.

3
dierent backgrounds with the following Gettier case and question:

Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years.
Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not
aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is
also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a
dierent kind of American car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives
an American car, or does he only believe it?

The results were startling: while 74% of those from a Western background gave
the answer that is standard in philosophical communities  that Bob only
believes it  only 43% of those from East Asian backgrounds, and 39% of those
from Indian Subcontinental backgrounds answered that he only believed, the
rest saying that he did really know it.
Consider also this Cancer Conspiracy Case presented in the same study :
5

It's clear that smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of getting

cancer. However, there is now a great deal of evidence that just
using nicotine by itself without smoking (for instance, by taking a
nicotine pill) does not increase the likelihood of getting cancer. Jim
knows about this evidence and as a result he believes that using
nicotine does not increase the likelihood of getting cancer. It is pos-
sible that the tobacco companies dishonestly made up and publicized
this evidence that using nicotine does not increase the likelihood of
cancer, and that the evidence is really false and misleading. Now,
the tobacco companies did not actually make up this evidence, but
Jim is not aware of this fact. Does Jim really know that using nico-
tine doesn't increase the likelihood of getting cancer, or does he only
believe it?

Results from this showed not only a dierence in answer given cultural back-
ground (only 11% of Westerners were willing to attribute knowledge compared
to 30% of those from the Indian Subcontinent), but also a marked dierence in
answer given socio-economic status: 50% of those of low socio-economic status
attributed knowledge to Jim where only 17% of those of high socio-economic
status were willing to do so.
Also, notice the signicant dierences within the same cultural and socio-
economic groups: responses to several of the questions gave data of very sim-
ilar proportions of people giving the answer really knows as those who gave
only believes: we've already seen responses within cultural and socio-economic
groups being split at ratios such as 50/50 and 60/40. It is signicant that very
few questions yielded responses completely or nearly-completely giving one an-
swer. That intuitions dier so drastically with diering cultural socio-economic
backgrounds, and even within these classes, is strong evidence that knowledge
is not a concept that is dened either a priori or universally.

5 Ibid. Pp. 21-22 & 27

4
 That this necessarily follows from the data is, perhaps, a leap that needs to be
defended. Could it not, the intuition-driven theorist may ask, simply be that
when people give suciently deep and reasoned reection there is a universal
concept of knowledge that may be uncovered? Perhaps these polls merely tested
people's surface intuitions  which do dier  but are not the ones we need be
6
concerned with. Weinberg, Nichols and Stich addressed this , answering that
respondents to the study did give the matter some thought  demonstrated by
explanatory notes given with many of the answers. More importantly, though,
respondents from dierent cultural backgrounds seemed to respond to dierent
features of a situation. This is evidenced by three Truetemp Cases that were
7
used in the survey . A basic, individualistic Truetemp case was presented as
follows:

One day Charles is suddenly knocked out by a falling rock, and his
brain becomes re-wired so that he is always absolutely right when-
ever he estimates the temperature where he is. Charles is completely
unaware that his brain has been altered in this way. A few weeks
later, this brain rewiring leads him to believe that it is 71 degrees
in his room. Apart from his estimation, he has no other reasons to
think that it is 71 degrees in his room. In fact, it is at that time
71 degrees in his room. Does Charles really know that it was 71
degrees, or does he only believe it?

Only 12% of respondents of East Asian background called this knowledge. How-
ever, presented with a slightly altered version  in which a whole community is
altered by a radioactive meteor  32% of East Asians called it knowledge, while
in both cases a statistically similar proportion of Westerners called it knowledge.
Given, therefore, that those of dierent cultural backgrounds respond to dier-
ent features in a situation, there does not seem to be any reason to believe that
reection on the concept of knowledge would lead to a reduction (rather than
increase) in the dierences in intuitions.
Alternatively, the intuition-driven theorist may argue that knowledge has
several dierent conceptions, but they are all on a scale of stringency. That is
to say, given two dierent conceptions of knowledge, A and B, either A is more
stringent than B, so everything A classes as knowledge, B classes as knowledge
too, or vice-versa. In this case, it could be argued, that discovering the common
ground and how the ordering progresses  and so how more stringent denitions
of knowledge are constructed  could prove useful. However, the same study
by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich casts serious doubts on this. When presented
with a case in which S comes to believe that p by a reliable mechanism, but
S is unaware of its reliability, Westerners were much more likely to attribute
8
knowledge to S than East Asians . Thus there are cases (such as the Gettier
case detailed above) which a Western conception is less likely to call knowledge
than an East Asian one, and also cases which an East Asian conception is less

6 Ibid. Pp. 34-36

7 Ibid.
8 For the precise questions used, see Ibid. Pp. 15-16

5
likely to call knowledge than a Western one. Given this, there seems to be no
reason to suspect there to be any kind of ordering of these conceptions in the
way that the intuition-driven theorist may desire, nor a basic common ground
which all conceptions of knowledge agree on.
So far, we have cast considerable doubt over the assumption that dierent
people largely have the same conception of knowledge. This, though, is not
all: there is signicant evidence that people do not consistently operate with
one conception of knowledge, but change which conception they are using 
consciously and unconsciously  depending on context. A study by Swain,
Alexander, and Weinberg
9 examined people's diering judgements on a pos-
sible case of knowledge while varying what they considered before hand, and
found that responses to a case were aected by which thought experiments were
considered rst. Students were presented with a Truetemp case very similar to
the one above, and asked to rate indicate to what extent they agreed with:

Charles knows that it is 71 degrees in his room.

Those who had not been given another scenario to consider before hand were
marginally inclined to disagree with the statement. However, those who had
rst been presented with a clear case of knowledge (testimony from a scien-
tic journal) were, on average, signicantly more likely to disagree with the
statement, while those who had been presented with a case which was clearly
not knowledge (a guess of a ip of a coin which happened to be correct) were
much more inclined to assent to the use of the word knows. Vitally, those who
rst considered the case which clearly was knowledge on average disagreed with
the statement, while those who rst considered the case which clearly wasn't
knowledge on average agreed with the statement
10 .
This instability (as Swain, Alexander and Weinberg call it) of intuition
clearly provides further empirical evidence that the conceptions of knowledge
we use are far from universal, and moreover that a single person's conception
of it may change dependent on internal considerations and changes.
An intuition-driven theorist may here argue that these results do not throw
intuitions into as much disrepute as has been made out. Just as our sight may
be deceived or misled by poor or coloured lighting  suppose a I saw a ping
pong ball in an orange light, then I may believe it to be orange, when in fact it
is white  but this does not mean that our sight is usless
11 . Instead, it shows
that we cannot trust our sight in all conditions, but in neutral (i.e. well-lit) con-
ditions, we may be able do so. The intuition-driven theorist, at this point, may

9 Swain, S., Alexander, J., and Weinberg, J. (2008) 'The Instability of Philosophical Intu-
itions', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 76, Pp. 138-155
10 The average of the answers was calculated by assigning a number to each of the possible
responses (Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Neutral = 3, Disagree = 2, Strongly Disagree = 1,
and averaging these. Those who were asked the Truetemp case without a preceding case had
an average response of 2.8, those who rst considered the case which was clearly knowledge
had an average response of 2.4, and those who rst considered the case which was clearly not
knowledge had an average response of 3.2.
11 This objection is raised and discussed in Swain, S., Alexander, J., and Weinberg, J. (2008)
'The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

6
hope to extend this analogy to our use of intuitions: while some things, such as
considering thought experiments, may distort our intuitions, under normal con-
ditions they too can be useful and provide us with valuable insight. However,
the crucial dierence here is that while we know what qualies as normal con-
ditions for sight, and how abnormal lighting may aect our results, and indeed,
our sight is able to detect defects in the illumination that may cause problems,
we do not have similar familiarity with the problems of intuition. That is, we do
not know what it is about the Truetemp case that makes is aected by previous
thought experiments, nor precisely what eect other thought experiments will
have, or whether other thoughts and feelings we are experiencing at the time
aect our intuitive judgement . Nor can we always, by use of intuition, detect
the abnormalities which are causing a diering intuition.
Furthermore, while we have good reasons to believe that objects we see have
a physical existence in their own right, it is not clear that there is such an ana-
logue when we use our intuition to examine the concept of knowledge. We
may concede that it might be that each of us has one elementary conception of
knowledge  or set of intuitions  which is then distorted by abnormal con-
ditions in the same way that poor illumination may distort our perception of
an actual object. However, where we have good reasons to believe in the phys-
ical existence of objects (such as supporting evidence from the sense of touch,
and pragmatic necessity), we have no such compelling reasons to accept the
existence of an elementary conception of knowledge over a mish-mash of dier-
ing conceptions. That is, while the evidence does not rule out one elementary
conception, nothing seems to point towards it as the answer.

3 Can Analysis be worthwhile?12

Thus we nd ourselves with a word that denotes dierent conceptions from usage
to usage, with little hint at precisely which conception it refers to in each case.
Instead of a clear-cut extension to the concept of knowledge, we are left with
a great variety of conceptions which we employ haphazardly and inconstantly.
For instance, most people when asked in an everyday situation whether they
know they have a pair of hands are unlikely to give any answer other than
an armative one, but presented with the same question in a discussion on
scepticism they may well concede that they don't know. Further, if there is no
universal or a priori form of the concept of knowledge, then there appears to
be no reason to give one of these conceptions of knowledge precedence over any
other.
Clearly then, there are serious questions regarding what value intuition-
driven theories of knowledge may have: given that people's intuitions on the
matter vary greatly, why is the concept being characterised by an intuition of
any use or value? It is up to the intuition-driven theorists to defend their at-
tempts to characterise knowledge. Of course, they may maintain that there

12 Simon, P. and Garfunkel, A. (1966) 'The Dangling Conversation', Parsley, Sage, Rose-
mary and Thyme, New York: Columbia Records

7
is one 'true' concept of knowledge, and take the position that one particular
set of intuitions will uncover the genuine concept of knowledge: but given the
previous discussion on articial concepts, there seems to be no reason to ac-
cept the existence of a genuine concept or to choose one set of intuitions over
another. Alternatively, an intuition-driven theorist may hold an epistemic rel-
ativist stance, and argue that we may attempt to characterise the concept of
knowledge for certain groups. However, given the dierences in intuition even
within the groups, this must ultimately lead to either incomplete characterisa-
tions  to cover several diering intuitions of knowledge  or a characterisation
of a conception of knowledge that is only held by a tiny group of people. The
value of either of these is questionable: what, if anything, would we gain?
To put this in the perspective of the main purpose of the knowledge debate,
the sceptical question  do we know that the world is real?  becomes a
matter entirely dependent on what denition of know is being used. If to know
is to require absolute (and rational) certainty, then it must be conceded that we
do not know that the world is real. If, on the other hand, knowledge is taken
instead to be JTB, then (so long as there really is an external world) we do know
that the world is real. However, without any reason to choose one conception
(and so denition) of knowledge over another, it becomes a choice regarding
which is most useful in the situation, and may be chosen with this in mind.
To avoid faulty reasoning, knowledge, if being used, must be carefully and
explicitly dened: if the use of knowledge is such that knowing p necessitates
the truth of p, then when making a knowledge claim its truth must be shown,
and cannot then be inferred from the knowledge claim. Thus we may not use
our everyday notion of knowledge to assert I know that my hands exist, and
thereby deduce my hands exist to defeat scepticism: if our notion of knowledge
requires truth then we must either note the assumption being made  that my
hands exist  or prove it. If our conception of knowledge does not require
truth, then the above deduction would not be a valid one.

In essence, then, we must accept that Knowledge is an umbrella term, used

to describe any of the many dierent concepts employed in everyday language,
without dierentiating between them. No one of these is the right or true
denition, though some may be employed more than others, and some make
stronger claims than others. For general communication the concepts falling
under this label are similar enough that we do not have to distinguish them
from one another, but if we desire rigour when using the term knowledge,
we must either make explicit which concept is being used, or show that which
concept it refers to makes no dierence to the argument.
Intuition driven theories, then, are deeply awed, as they  for the most
part  rely on the existence of one intuitive extension of knowledge, to which
their theories attempt to provide an explicit intension. Without this universal
extension, their theories can achieve no absolute truth by themselves. This is
not to say that they are completely fruitless: by examining the concept we can
hope to sharpen it into something more useful to us. However, if we consent to
construct new concepts that are more useful to us, then a detailed examination

8
of precisely what our intuitions say  which is what the intuition driven dis-
cussion gives us  is unlikely to lead us to the most useful denitions. Instead,
as Edward Craig has begun to do
13 , analysing the purpose of the concept of
knowledge  that is, why we use the concept, and why it is useful to us (and
it seems likely that it is, given that practically every language has evolved to
have some kind of equivalent word)  and then using this to build a concept
designed to do precisely what we want is likely to give us a much better concept
for purposes of discussion and rigorous argument.

13 See Craig, E., (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press

9
References
• Ayer, A. J., (1956) The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan

• Craig, E., (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon
Press

• Gettier, E., (1963) Is justied true belief knowledge?, reprinted in Ber-

necker, S. and Dretske, F. (eds.) (2000) Knowledge, Oxford: OUP
• Moore, G.E., (1939) Proof of an External World, reprinted in Huemer, M.
(ed.) (2002) Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, London: Routledge
• Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press

• Plato, Thaeatetus
• Stroud, B. (1989) Understanding Human Knowledge in General, reprinted
in Bernecker, S. and Dretske, F. (eds.) (2000)Knowledge, Oxford: OUP
• Swain, S., Alexander, J., and Weinberg, J. (2008) 'The Instability of Philo-
sophical Intuitions', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 76, Pp.
138-155

• Weinberg, J., Nichols, S. and Stich, S. (2001) 'Normativity and Epistemic

Intuitions', Philosophical Topics, 29, 1 & 2, 2001. Pp. 429-460

10