Is Knowledge Possible?

     When I was a child, I’ve always been curious about the world and in order to explore it and have a full grasp it, I read a lot of books.  I accepted all facts presented on every page as true. From elementary to high school, I grew up being bookish, because page by page I feel like I am getting closer to getting a full grasp of world I’m living in. I always believe that books sustained my epistemic demand on learning. After encountering the question “Is knowledge possible?” it made me question the all the things I’ve learned from the books I love. This question provoked me a lot since knowledge is very central to my life and it is my passion to learn new things about the ever transforming world. This conundrum is not easy to answer even though it’s a simple yes-or-no question. After figuring out the answer to the question, it demands an explanation which is a lot harder because it requires us to define what knowledge is.

     The possibility of the existence of knowledge will depend on how we define “knowledge” in the first place. We always use this term and its meaning differs from time to time and from person to person. Since there are a lot of definition of knowledge out there, the possibility of its existence vary. This is one of the main reasons why the question is very hard to answer. In defining a term, you can specify its connotation, which is a set of things that can be associated with the term, or a term’s denotation, which is a set of characteristics similar to every element of its connotation. A term that labels physical objects like “tree” is easy to define since you can give “mango tree, narra, mangrove tree etc.” as the connotation of it and the denotation will then easily follow. Defining “knowledge” is a difficult task to do, for it’s an abstract concept that we always encounter like “life” and “love,” but we always take them for granted. This results for them to be oftentimes used erroneously in statements.  “Knowledge” certainly is hard to define since it’s a term wherein the connotation and denotation depend with each other i.e., you can’t dictate examples of knowledge without stating knowledge’s characteristics and vice versa. We have to rely mainly on how “knowledge” is used in any of our statements in order for us to come up in a definition.

     In both definitions I will present, they will entail assumptions about knowledge. We will assume that knowledge involves beliefs, that is, our set of knowledge is inside our set of beliefs. We will also assume that knowing is a higher form of believing since these beliefs should be justified. We also assumed that knowledge is used to bridge the gap between our mind and the world; to make sense of our reality and have a full grasp of it. Knowledge that are propositional are the central subject of this essay.

     The most popular definition of knowledge today is knowledge being a “justified true belief.” Although there are other modifications of this definition, the central idea of knowledge being a true belief with justification still holds. If one believes that this is the right definition of knowledge, then the possibility of knowledge would then be nullified. The problem mainly arose from the inclusion of “truth” in the definition. With this definition, our main question, “Is knowledge possible?” will be reduced to “Is truth possible?” The answer to this question will differ from different kinds of truth. To illustrate, we can divide the concept of truth into two categories: truth grounded from concepts created by human minds and truth grounded from reality.

     Truth from concepts created by human minds is certainly possible because these concepts are systematic and the rules concerning about truthfulness of a statement are made by human beings. For example, in Pure Mathematics, “2 + 2” would always be equal to four, making “2 + 2 = 4” true. The statement “2 + 2 = any other number other than 4” is false. Since truth is possible in concepts conceived by humans, then it follows that knowledge is also possible in this area of truth. These human concepts are in a way created in the first place because of the need to make sense of our reality, so the essence of these knowledge being used to have a full grasp of our reality still holds.

Truth grounded from reality is something that is not possible. This is mainly because of the separation between our mind and the world. Our faculties, which we use to make sense of our reality, are oftentimes incorrect. We always verify these incorrect experiences by using other faculties, which we already deemed to be not reliable all the time. This makes everything in our reality uncertain. Some people even raises their skepticism up to the level that they doubt everything in the world. Rene Descartes is one of the most famous of these skeptics. He proposed the existence of an evil genius who basically wants to deceive us every time. These levels of skepticism cannot be proved or disproved, which makes truth grounded from reality impossible. This implies that knowledge grounded from reality is impossible to be achieved by the human mind if we will use this definition.

I created another definition of “knowledge” by weakening the “truth” part of the “justified true belief.” We will have knowledge being “a justified belief that is as close as possible to the truth.” In this definition, knowledge is clearly possible to exist even those grounded in reality since the criteria is less restrictive than the first one. This definition makes knowledge vary from person to person since all human beings have different sense of reality and different takes on what for them is close to the truth. This makes sense since knowledge is a form of belief, and we know that human beings may have different beliefs. In the first definition presented, a single proposition can only have one knowledge since only one thing is the absolute truth about that proposition.

How do we keep our beliefs to be as close as possible to the truth? We can do it simply by being conscientious all the time to our beliefs or find evidences that supports our belief. If a new belief is presented to us that has more strong evidences than our new belief, then we must let go of our previous belief and make the new belief our new “knowledge.” A criterion on the strength of evidence for our knowledge will be its ability to be used in real-life situations. For example, you are conflicted with two beliefs from the same propositions, A and B, A being the previous belief and B being the new belief presented to you. If B managed to be more usable to the reality you’re in than A in terms of decision making, you should make B your new knowledge, because B gives you a better grasp of the reality you’re in. In this case, the skepticisms on the nature of our reality would not be a problem to the concept of knowledge since we are only concerned with the reality in our own perspective.

The first definition is a lot stricter than the second one in a sense that it limits almost every usage of the word “knowledge” in any statements. This also blocks “knowledge” from the act of “knowing.” If we define knowledge this way, “knowledge” will then be on a much higher level than the term “to know,” basing on how we use this verb in statements. In a way, defining knowledge as “a justified true belief” weakens the whole purpose of it to become a label to the concept we now think is “knowledge.” Another main problem is this: the “truth” part of the definition diverts the whole purpose of the term “knowledge” from being an epistemological issue to a metaphysical one.

     Now, we see that the possibility of knowledge depends on the definition we choose. If I am to choose what definition that is more appropriate for knowledge, I will choose the second definition I presented. The second definition of knowledge, although less restrictive than the first one, makes “knowledge” more usable as a term we can use every day. It also solves the issue of having a gap between the act of “knowing” and “knowledge” that we encountered in the first definition. This is because we don’t need for our beliefs to be true in order to be knowledge; we only need them to be as close as possible to the truth or for them to be reliable in application. This definition introduces us to the concept of a “false knowledge.” False knowledge applies when what a person knows is far from being true. The example for this are situations when what we know will be revealed to us after some time as false. This makes knowledge ever changing based on the ever changing world. You can avoid having false knowledge by being conscientious to our beliefs. In this definition, “knowledge” will not be diluted fully into being synonymous to “belief,” since a belief that isn't knowledge certainly can have no evidence or justification for it. A belief that isn't knowledge is a belief that you believe for what it is without any justifications.

     I therefore conclude that knowledge is possible to be achieved if we change the current conventional definition of it. If we let knowledge be a "justified true belief," it would then make knowledge weaker in substance and the whole concept of it would be swallowed by the metaphysical issues of truth. We want knowledge to be possible since we always use them for many situations that require decision making. If we already have in our mind a thought that knowledge is not possible, it could lessen the level of caring for the things that we care, therefore making us unconscientious about our beliefs. This will result to a human civilization living in a reality they can't live in normally. Believing that knowledge is possible since knowledge doesn’t entail absolute truth lets us continue in pursuing on finding new knowledge, and it opens the door to limitless discoveries for the betterment of society.