What Is Knowledge? (Based on Modern Philosophy)

The study of knowledge, known as epistemology, is one of the important philosophical disciplines, and it gives us great insight into the history, meanings and understandings we have of knowledge. In part, this is because philosophy is – at least on some accounts – about the pursuit of knowledge, and any philosophical investigation is going to contend with what it is to know, be that in a particular context or in general. The questions which epistemology is concerned with include those such as ‘what does it mean to know something?’ and ‘what are the limits of human knowledge?’.

This article focusses on two distinctly modern approaches to the question of knowledge. These are approaches developed in the latter part of the 20th century (or at least developed in their current form during this period), and should be seen as an indication of the possible directions modern day epistemology might take. These new directions are, at the same time, old directions – they are modern reinterpretation and returns to older ways of thinking about these problems. 

One approach of this kind is pragmatism. Pragmatism was developed by William James and C.S. Peirce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but has been resurgent in no small part due to the influence of Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Pragmatism in general is an attempt to introduce (or reintroduce) the idea of agency or choice into areas of philosophy typically inhospitable to that idea – knowledge is a good example. 

Perhaps the most canonical expression of this comes from C.S Peirce, whose ‘Pragmatic Maxim’ reads as follows: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object”. Pragmatists are also generally fond of the idea that our natural capacities of knowledge and sense-making are better heeded than ignored, and that much of the philosophical tradition has made the mistake of distancing itself from those capacities. Ideas like ‘common-sense’ are pretty paradigmatically pragmatist. 

Knowledge and the Virtue Theoretic

Another approach, due primarily to Ernest Sosa, is the virtue theoretic approach to knowledge. This is an attempt to describe knowledge in terms of the epistemic virtue of the knower. There is an analogy being drawn here between virtue ethics, which is a very prominent way of conceptualizing ethics in modern philosophy. Virtue ethicists place their emphasis, when describing what is good or bad from a moral point of view, on characteristics held by a moral agent. Sosa’s virtue theoretic approach to knowledge attempts to avoid some of the difficulties with describing what it is for a proposition to ‘be knowledge’, and turns rather to what it is for an agent to be a ‘good knower’. 

Here Sosa’s (quite famous) use of the analogy of an archer is helpful (it is worth stressing that this is separate to other archer analogies, popular among certain Ancient Greek philosophers). Sosa points out that when an archer has taken a shot, we can evaluate that shot both according to how accurate it is, and according to how far it manifests skill at archery. In other words, it isn’t hard to imagine a first time archer with terrible technique happening to hit the target, but (Sosa would urge us) it would clearly be mistaken to think that this newbie is likely to keep hitting the target. Sosa argues that there is a parallel to be drawn with knowing – it is possible to get things right using terrible reasoning, dull perceptions and just generally by doing the wrong things. The question is one of repetition. 

What we can take from all of this is that the modern conception of knowledge is a fractured one. There are so many different ways in which philosophers use the term knowledge that it is almost impossible to reduce knowledge down to any one individual approach.