Knowing by Example: A Social-Cognitive Approach to Epistemology.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the “problem of knowledge” in epistemology from a new angle. Rather than proposing conditions for when it is true or false that someone’s belief constitutes knowledge, I take as my challenge the problem of explaining why we use the words “know” and “knowledge” in the ways that we do. Ever since Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, epistemologists have uncovered many puzzling aspects of how we use these two words. In Chapter 2, I hypothesize that our human ancestors developed a word to urge others to be certain (or not) of particular facts. Because this word was understood to invoke objective reasons, the message conveyed was not only “I advise us to be certain that such-and-such” but also (at least implicitly) “I would advise anyone in a position similar to ours to do likewise”. I suggest that our word “know” is the descendant of this ancestral word, and continues to carry a “prospective” advisory message. I show that this hypothesis accounts for several features of our word “know”, such as that we apply it only when truth, certainty, and justification are present. In Chapters 3 and 4, I use the hypothesis to explain why philosophers have the verdicts they do on many puzzling cases of “true belief without knowledge” that have been discussed in the epistemology literature. In Chapter 5, I use my hypothesis to explain the results of several recent experiments conducted to test non-philosophers’ judgments about these same cases. In Chapter 6, I conclude that my hypothesis is the best available explanation for all of the puzzling features of our modern-day uses of “know”. We should thereby provisionally accept that my hypothesis (or something like it) gives the truth about the development and functioning of our word “know”. Although my hypothesis belongs to the domains of evolutionary biology and social-cognitive psychology, I argue that it also counts as a piece of philosophy: It helps us to understand puzzling features of our lives, not for any instrumental reason but simply for the sake of understanding.