Listen here, this is all just common sense and, typically, much less interesting and more annoying than people think of philosophy as being.
The philosopher’s point is simply that if you ANALYZE the standard concept of “knowledge” as we use the word in everyday parlance, you will find that the concept is incompatible with the falsity of the proposition in question.
If it happens that you step on an egg and it doesn’t break, then it doesn’t matter how CERTAIN I may subjectively FEEL, as to the truth of “All eggs break when stepped on.” I’m still wrong. Therefore I didn’t/don’t KNOW that the egg will/would break when you step on it. I thought it was true that all eggs break when stepped upon, I really believed it, I may have had good evidence for it, but one of the crucial criteria for knowledge was missing. IT WASN’T TROOOO. So I didn’t know it, after all.
Do you really want to say that someone can know something that isn’t true? Don’t we use the word “know” precisely to pick out those situations where the proposition believed IS true?
Likewise if I have perfectly great evidence that the egg will break when you step on it (I’ve watched people step on 2 billion eggs in the past and they’ve all broken, etc.), AND you step on this egg AND it breaks, AND I believed it would break based on the evidence I had, then it’s perfectly appropriate to say I kNEW it would break. It doesn’t matter that I couldn’t provide a tautological/mathematically CERTAIN justification for it. I don’t even have to have been subjectively certain that it would break. I could know that I MIGHT be mistaken and still know that I’m NOT mistaken (provided that I’m not, objectively, mistaken!). Absolute certainty, either mathematical/logical or subjective, is not required for knowledge. (Otherwise you have to admit you don’t KNOW your wife exists...)
Admittedly there’s a SENSE of “knowledge” that is sometimes used, such that people say things like, “I just KNOW that I will flunk this exam"… and then they pass. When they use the word “know” in this sense, they really mean, “I strongly believe that I will flunk.” THAT is compatible with passing. But actually knowing you are going to flunk when in fact you are going to pass is not possible. Why isn’t it possible? Because knowledge is (by definition) justified TRUE belief.
How do I know this? How dare I just SAY this?? Because I have been to Nite Skool, and the philosophers have been trying to figure out the best way to talk about all this stuff Since the Time of Plato, and the consensus is that this is the most efficacious method of discussing matters epistemological, the method which best reflects the way we use these terms in ordinary talk about things.
Of course, you can stipulatively define “knowledge” and “assume” and “believe” and, say, “shnerk”, and then use them in any way you want, and provided your definitions are clear, it’s no big deal. (When I say “shnerk”, as in, “I shnerk that p,” I mean “I have a justified true belief that p....” )
But, hey...what’s wrong with just using ordinary language. In ordinary language,"I assume p” is a weaker claim than “I believe p” (an assumption is something one might entertain for the sake of argument—you needn’t even believe it); and “I believe p” is a weaker claim than “I am justified in believing p” (You could believe something without having any good reasons for it); and “I am justified in believing p” is a weaker claim than “I know p” (You could have great reasons for believing something without its actually being true, and thus without your KNOWING it). And then “I am CERTAIN that p” (assuming you mean mathematical, tautological, logical certainly and not just the subjective feeling of being sure) is a stronger claim than “I KNOW that p”, because dammit, I KNOW that the sun will rise tomorrow because (1) it WILL rise tomorrow; (2) I believe it will; (3) I have good reasons for thinking it will, eg. it always has in the past. However it might not. A giant asteroid might hit the earth, (cf. my previous publication, in Literal Translations, heh heh). So I can know that the sun will rise tomorrow without being logically certain of it.
2 points:
1) People tend to think philosophy is a lot more interesting than it is. A huge part of analytic philosophy is… whups!—just conceptual analysis.
People who aren’t familiar with philosophy tend to get really MAD when a philosopher says something, because they think the philosopher is making a metaphysical point. Quite often, this isn’t the case; the philosopher is just appealing to consensus arrived at by looking at the way we already use language.
2) There is a point (or two) of metaphysical interest in all this. It comes down to what TRUTH is. The definition of knowledge that I’ve been using appears to have built into it what’s called an EXTERNALIST concept of truth, such that things can objectively BE a certain way, regardless of how we subjectively/"internally" think of them, if we think of them at all. Eg, since we don’t have experiential access to the future (until we get there), the truth of “I know that the sun will rise tomorrow” appears to turn on something I don’t have access to! Are there objective facts about the future? Is it, can it be, objectively TRUE, TODAY, that the sun will rise tomorrow? How about, “Is there a God?” Is there a fact of the matter about this that is true independantly of what anybody thinks? (Your pastor would say yes; some people WOULD say no.)
“As for philosophers who abuse language by, for example, letting some arbitraty level of certainty be the difference between “assume” and “know”, they can go play pool because they’re of no use to me. They’re sloppy and untrustworthy.”
Oh, Dave, grrr! I have to go to the library now, and take my dog training manuals back.
