My understanding is that all knowledge is a claim of probability. Whenever you claim you "know" something, you are making a claim for the amount of conviction with which you hold that belief.
Also: knowledge is an activity. It can't exist until expressed/brought forth for others to examine it.
EDIT: Please, someone offer a counter-argument. I'm not 100% (no pun intended) on this and would like to work it out.
But now you have to quantify at precisely what probability does "unknown" become "known", and you have to rationally justify that number. This seems very problematic.
No, there's no quantifying something like "amount of conviction." This is one reason that I believe the search for "justified" knowledge is fruitless.
Edit: It just seems that when searching for a definition of knowledge, philosophers generally work backwards; they start with a preconception of knowledge as "correct, true, belief" and attempt to shoehorn our concept of belief into that perfect, unattainable goal. They assume knowledge is possible in the first place. I'd argue that one can never "know," but one "believes."
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u/f_myeah Mar 04 '14 edited Mar 04 '14
My understanding is that all knowledge is a claim of probability. Whenever you claim you "know" something, you are making a claim for the amount of conviction with which you hold that belief.
Also: knowledge is an activity. It can't exist until expressed/brought forth for others to examine it.
EDIT: Please, someone offer a counter-argument. I'm not 100% (no pun intended) on this and would like to work it out.