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What is knowledge? Beyond that, what is truth? In other words, what makes something knowable and/or true? With regards to knowledge, how should we classify things? Is anything knowable? If so, what parts? These are all questions that tie into the general category of epistemology and will be pursued in subsequent posts. First, though, we should get some definitions cleared up.

Truth

What kind of things can be true? For our purposes, “kinds of things” will be grouped into two categories: real objects and assertions. Real objects are things like this computer you are looking at and the person who wrote this (i.e. me). Assertions are things such as propositions (such as the infamous “If P then Q”), statements (”The earth is round”), beliefs (”i believe i am alive”). Can real objects be true? If i were to say something falsely (e.g. “Man was created by aliens from the Orion Nebula”), am i true (or not)? Or is it that my statement is true (or not). It seems, then, that real objects cannot be true or false, but assertions can. With that in mind, we will restrict our enquiry to assertions.

Now, there are three general theories of truth and each has good points and bad ones:

• Correspondence: This is basically such that an assertion is true if and only if (or, iff) it corresponds to the way things actually are in the world. In computer lingo, that’s similar to WYSIWYG. The good is that it is intuitive with regards to perception (after all, it’s what you see), but it’s impossible to prove (there is no way to “step outside” and verify). For example, this screen that you are seeing exists because you see it.
• Coherence: This differs from the above in that an assertion is true iff it consists with one’s already true beliefs. In other words, if an assertion is coherent with one’s set of beliefs, it is true. The downside is that it is not so intuitive when it comes to perception, but chances are, this is how most people in practice call something true. To re-use the example above, this screen exists because it is more in line with your other beliefs (such as the one that you are reading this on a screen) without contradicting them.
• Pragmatism: The last general theory of truth comes down to practicality. William James wrote “what works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word.” That is, if it works best to assume this screen does in fact exist, then believe that it does. This may best be seen in the abundance of Euclidean geometry in grade school because it works better to assume that parallel lines never meet that the opposite (although that opposite is required to be assumed when discussing atomic bombs).

Generally, though, most do not hold to just one of these theories, but work them together in some way to create a more plausible notion of truth.

Knowledge

This is what epistemology is primarily about. What constitutes “knowing”? There are two generic theories of this as well:

• foundationalism: This is found must notably in Descartes’ writings. There are some assertions that are foundational to others. Knowledge is constructed as a pyramid of sorts where the most basic assertions are required for others. If one of these basic assertions is removed, the structure collapses like a house of playing cards. Many foundationalists hold to Correspondence from above.
• Coherentism: This should not be confused with coherence from above even though the two are related. Here, knowledge is not a structure of assertions, but a web of them. While a single assertion may be open to doubt, when it is combined with others, the interlocking strength bolsters each other. It is akin to a crossword puzzle where more answers means a greater likelihood of being correct on one particular answer.While much of the forthcoming discussion will be focusing on foundationalism, it should be important to notice where coherentism can enter into the mix.

Foundationalism began with the simple assertion that an assertion is known if and only if the assertion is true and the knower believes that assertion. For instance, i know that i have a cat if and only if i really do have a cat and i believe that i do have a cat. See how correspondence fits nicely into this argument as i can then assert that “i really do have a cat” because i am in possession of one. Yet, there is difficulty here because of “lucky guesses.” Let’s say we are playing a game and you tell me to tell you how many straws you are holding behind your back. If i were to guess correctly, it is hardly the case that i knew it. i just guessed and happened to be right. It doesn’t seem wise to consider my guess knowledge. Also, what if i were to walk into a room and the clock read “2:02 pm,” but it was stopped at that time. If i believed it to be 2:02 pm and it happened to be such, can that still be considered knowledge? Or, was it that i was just lucky for believing it to be that time. After all, if it were in actuality 3:21 am, i would have been wrong. The problem is that my justification for my belief was faulty. i was right, but not for the right reason.

Justified

For that reason, foundationalists modified their theory a little to try to iron out those two difficulties. The result is called Justified True Belief. Here, a person knows an assertion if and only if, like above, it is true and she believes it, but also that she has justification for believing it. In other words, there is some evidence to believe the assertion. In this way, consequential assertions (such as the stopped clock and the guessing game) are excluded from knowledge. Beyond that, even pre-conceived assertions are excluded. For example, let’s take the OJ Simpson case. Let’s assume that someone (say, OJ’s father), before the trial even started, said that he believed OJ to be innocent regardless of the trial. Once the trial ended and OJ was declared innocent, that additional evidence would not have mattered to OJ’s father. Regardless of the trial, OJ’s father would have believed OJ to be innocent, even if he had no evidence to do so. Justified True Belief removes that from possibly being an object of knowledge. But, there are some problems with it. Edmund Gettier has given us a really good example of this.

Let’s say Mr. Smith has a family. Mr. Smith’s daughter tells him that she just bought a car. She is honest and he sees no reason to believe she is deceiving him. Therefore, Smith’s belief that his daughter bought a car should count as a true belief (and therefore, knowledge). Because of that, Mr. Smith is also justified in believing that “a family member just bought a car.” Yet here’s the rub: Smith’s daughter is lying to him in order to cover up the fact that Smith’s wife bought a car for Smith for his birthday. Now, it is still true that “a member of Smith’s family bought a car” and Smith still believes it. Smith even has justification for believing it, but we don’t want to call this knowledge because the justification is still faulty even though it gives the same result. As a result, more refinements of the foundationalist theory comes from an attempt to restrict knowledge to assertions that are justified via correct and true justifications, but none have completely escaped Gettier’s counterexamples yet.

In the upcoming posts, we will look at some major thinkers and their contributions to epistemology and hopefully come to some conclusions as to what is known, what can be known, and how do those relate to truth.