So what do we REALLY know?

Since we have realized as conscious beings that we know stuff, it has dawned on some to ask the bigger question: What exactly do we know? It seems like a silly question at first but it is an ultimately important one and not just in the realm of philosophy.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge; it is concerned with two core questions: What do we know? How do we know it?

When we analyze things that we know they can generally be categorized in two groups, "that" statements and "how to" statements, for example:

I know that spiders have eight legs.

I know how to distill whiskey.

"How to" statements are the less interesting of the two types; if what we know is how to distill whiskey, how we know that is because we either learned somewhere how to do that or taught ourselves.

"That" statements are a little more tricky to analyze. If what we know is that spiders have eight legs, how do we know that is so?

The ancient Greeks came up with a rubric with which to determine what knowledge is. For something to be counted as knowledge it must be a justified, true, belief. The statement that spiders have eight legs is my belief. It is true because one of the requisite characteristics of being a spider is having eight legs. I am justified in believing so as I have seen a spider and counted its legs. That last step is it is the most important.

Say someone asked me who the fathers of calculus were and I immediately answered "Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton." That statement happens to be true. Can I be justified in saying so? What if I knew the names of two mathematicians (Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton). Had you asked me who the fathers of algebra or game theory were I would have answered, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, or both. On the other hand I could have just guessed. In either case I would not be justified in providing my statement and thus be able to count my answer as genuine knowlege.

It was this way until a man named Gettier published an important paper (more on this next time)... In the mean time here is some reading I used to prep for this lesson.

So, who cares? Well, as philosophy is concerned with posing questions and answering them the veracity of the answers becomes an issue. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy unto itself, and yet every branch of philosophy has some sort of epistemic skeleton.