­­­­­­­­­Knowledge:

Oxford English Dictionary defines knowledge as (i) expertise; it is the skills that is acquired by a person through education or experience; the practical or theoretical understanding of a subject; (ii) familiarity or awareness that is gained by experience of a situation or fact; or (iii) the knowledge in a particular field.

There are also philosophers who argue that knowledge start with the formulation given by Pluto which means that the knowledge is formulate as “justified true belief”. With this debate continuing there is still no single definition to solve the problem.  There is cognitive process which is involved in the acquisition of knowledge. This cognitive process is complex and includes the association, perception, reasoning and the learning. How a subject is understood is the basic meaning that the term knowledge derives in accordance with the ability of that understanding to be used for a specific purpose. 

Aristotle in his book Posterior Analytics says about the definition of knowledge “We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is.”

With the debates on defining the knowledge going on in the arena of epistemology, there was a classical definition given but it was not completely accepted by Plato. This definition gives an explanation that a statement should be able to satisfy three different criteria for it to be considered as knowledge. These three criteria are that the statement must be true, justified, and believe. There are people like Gettier who denied accepting this classical definition claiming that there are some things left in this and the conditions are not sufficient.

Moore’s paradox which was followed by Wittgenstein who argued against the other approaches saying that one would be able to say “He believes it” but it isn’t so, but he can’t say “He knows it”, but it isn’t so. He also argues that the mental state of the speaker has not brought any difference but the true difference is in the activity that they are engaged in.

There are situated knowledge, communicating knowledge, partial knowledge and scientific knowledge. In indicating the meaning even the symbolic representations can be used. In here the usage of the symbolic representation is the ascription process in which the knowledge is transferred. There are also other forms in which the narrative exchanges and the imitation are involved.

Questions:

• What is knowledge?
• What is the classical definition of knowledge?