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So this week's topic is mainly knowledge, with a little bit more to say to round scepticism.

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Our four luminaries there. We've got Freddie Air, AJ Air, who was professor at New College when I was an undergraduate,

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edman getting a famous for writing a three page paper in the Journal analysis in 1963.

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I'm not sure whether he's published anything since, but it suffice to make him very famous.

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Then we've got Hillary Putnam, who will come to the very end.

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And Tim Williamson on the right, who is professor here.

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A successor to AJ. Tim's work isn't actually going to feature in this lecture or indeed in the readings you have.

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But he's one of the most prominent epistemology states in the world. So it's as well to know that he's around.

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If you find yourself giving a paper and you see him in the audience, beware.

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He's universally feared for the sharpness and precision of his questions.

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OK, so we've seen some sceptical arguments.

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Most famously, those of Descartes and those sorts of arguments, rather suggest that if we put a threshold for knowledge very high,

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then we're quite likely to be driven to the conclusion that we do not know anything at all.

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Descartes own answers don't seem to work very well. Other answers are all very controversial.

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It's rather tempting to try to get round this problem by redefining the notion

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of knowledge to provide a useful distinction amongst the beliefs we have.

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Maybe none of them, or only very, very few like I exist, will actually reach the highest threshold.

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But surely it makes sense to try to define a more moderate, more reasonable threshold,

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because we do want to distinguish between things that we know in a perfectly ordinary sense and things that we do not know.

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So we naturally get the question, what is knowledge? How should we understand the notion of knowledge?

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Now, questions of the form. What is X feature quite prominently in philosophy.

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If you go back to Plato and look in his dialogues, you'll see that Socrates is always asking this sort of question.

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In fact, it used to be the case. I think that people thought of this sort of thing as absolutely paradigmatic of what philosophers do.

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Philosophers search for essences by trying to define things.

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I don't think you'll find it's nearly as prominent these days,

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but such questions still come up quite a lot in topics like personal identity or freedom.

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What do we mean by freedom? What is freedom? No such questions, if you think about it's a rather puzzling.

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Because they could just be asking, when do we apply the word X, where X is freedom, knowledge or whatever?

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But that sort of question seems to be just about our use of language that we want to go deeper than that to ask what is a genuine case of X?

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If that question isn't just about our use of language, then what is it?

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It seems rather peculiar. What could knowledge be other than what we refer to using the word knowledge?

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So let me give you an example. Take the discipline of geography.

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Suppose that the study of geography started out as the study of places in terms of their location,

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physical characteristics, mineral, mineral resources, the natural environment, that sort of thing.

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I'm not sure whether that was true, but let's suppose that it was then over time,

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people became interested in things like land use, economic considerations, maybe even culture.

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And if you study geography now, you will find that culture is one of the things that gets studied.

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Now, you can imagine someone saying, that's all very well. You now study culture as part of geography, but his culture really part of geography.

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Does geography really include cultural things?

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Well, if the word geography is now used to cover cultural matters, amongst others, then sure, the discipline of geography includes culture.

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How could it not?

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So it might well look as though the kinds of questions we're asking when we ask what is X, what is knowledge, just come down to language.

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And in the 1950s and 60s, Oxford philosophy was famously identified with ordinary language philosophy as though

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the purpose of philosophy was just getting clear about how we use ordinary language.

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If that were all there is to it, then it would be rather an uninteresting kind of question.

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But with most of the concepts that interest philosophers, there is something deeper at stake.

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Take the case of freedom, which we'll be looking at in a week or two, that we're not just interested in how we use the word freedom.

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We want to know what kinds of acts we should describe as free because the notion of freedom is tied to moral responsibility.

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We think it matters whether somebody is free. It could turn out that we describe actions as free when really from a God's eye point of view,

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then not maybe we described people as free in certain circumstances in ordinary life.

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But actually, if we knew about it, there's no moral responsibility there, no genuine freedom.

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So there is a deeper metaphysical question underlying the linguistic question.

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Now, likewise, in the case of knowledge, the concept of knowledge has a normative aspect when we say is knowledge.

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We're not just categorising it as something that is called knowledge.

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We're saying that it's reliable, that it has a certain authority. So it is possible to ask of a particular belief.

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Well, everyone says they know this. But is it really knowledge?

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Do they really know it? Again, a similar issue arises with Strauss' response to the problem of a problem of induction.

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On your induction reading list. He famously says that inductive methods just are what we mean by reasonable.

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When we describe an inference about the world is reasonable, that just means it meets inductive standards.

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But a very well-known answer to Straughan is to say, hang on a minute.

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No. When we say that a method of inference is reasonable, we're not just saying that this is the kind of inference that everybody calls reasonable.

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We actually mean that it is reasonable that it has normative force, that this kind of inference really does convey assurance to the conclusion.

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The kind of conceptual analysis that we're doing on the concept of knowledge provides a nice example of this,

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and that's a good reason for having it in this general philosophy.

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Course, from this example, you can get an idea of the kinds of things that typically pop up in these sorts of discussions.

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So one of the things that often comes up is appealed to linguistic intuitions.

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Now, when people talk about intuition, it's sometimes a bit sloppy, as though they're saying, oh, well, this is just something, I think an intuition.

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You've got to accept it. But actually, linguistic intuitions have a particular authority, because if you're a native expert,

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speaker of your language, then certain things do just come naturally to you to say.

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And that does carry some authority that the standard use of language.

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Now, obviously, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about philosophical truth, but it does keep you on the rails of using language correctly.

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Puzzle cases also feature a lot, as we'll see in this lecture. Some people call these intuition pumps.

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The idea of a puzzle case is that you sketch out some hypothetical scenario and then you ask, well, what would you say about that?

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And clearly, what you try to do is devise puzzle cases which steer your hearers intuitions

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in the way you want to take them so often you'll find in philosophical debate.

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Each side is producing puzzle cases to favour their own particular point of view.

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You'll find in personal identity, for example, puzzle cases feature quite highly.

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Then obviously we get argument and we get systematise Asian.

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We try to pull all these intuitions and thoughts together to make sense of them altogether.

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So let us now embark on a discussion of knowledge and its variants,

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trying to employ some of these methods to straighten out what we want to say about it.

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So, first of all, let's distinguish between three different kinds of knowledge, acquaintance.

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Knowing how and knowing that what we're interested in here is propositional knowledge,

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knowledge that p a strange phrase that you'll find philosophers use it quite a lot.

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So here's a proposition. Could be any old proposition.

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But notice, knowing that P is the case is quite different from having acquaintance with somebody or something or having practical knowledge.

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For example, I know how to ride a bike. I don't exactly know how I do it.

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I'm ignorant of all sorts of propositions that would explain how I managed to remain upright on a bike.

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But I have the practical knowledge that is I can actually do it.