Inferring and Explaining

19 Speaking a language is much more like hit- ting a baseball than being a good hitting coach. Language is a skillful activity that human beings master with remarkable facility in ways that philosophers, psychologists, and linguists are only beginning to appreciate. I can safely assume that any reader of this book is an accom- plished enough user of English that you know full well the meaning of almost every word that philosophers have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to analyze or defne. You all know the meaning of terms such as beauty , justice , and knowledge because you can use sentences such as the following to communicate with other Eng- lish speakers. 1. Tat’s a beautiful painting. 2. Simple justice demands that all the kids get to play. 3. You don’t really know that the Dodgers will win the pennant; you just hope they will. All this is important because it is so easy to forget in the middle of philosophical battles. We are going to analyze the concept of knowl- edge in this chapter. We will see that this task is difcult, controversial, and perhaps in the end, impossible to complete satisfactorily. Tis doesn’t mean for a second that you or the great minds of Western philosophy do not know how to use words such as know and knowledge for the purposes of clear communication. The Need for Conceptual Clarity Although I stand 100 percent behind what I said previously, thisdoesn’tmeanthat careful concep- tual analysis is not important. People sometimes make remarkable claims about knowledge. We have just seen how the skeptic can put together plausible and disturbing arguments that we know next to nothing. Te arguments of the last chapter are classical examples of the sorts of intellectual concerns that occupy the attention of professional philosophers. Disputes about knowledge are not limited to philosophers, however. We ofen hear that modern scientists do not know that evolution by natural selection is true. Many claim that it is only a “theory.” Tis is sometimes backed up with an argument. Science, so this line of thinking goes, is only con- cerned with what can be directly observed or proved with laboratory experiments. But evolu- tion, it is sometimes claimed, cannot be directly observed, both because it is too slow of a process and because the most interesting observations would have needed to take place in a time before there were human observers. Furthermore, creationists claim that no controlled laboratory experiment can prove that evolution is true. If we are tomake any progress inunderstand- ing, let alone resolving, these kinds of intellec- tual disputes, we are going to need to be much clearer in our own minds as to what counts as knowledge. I claim to know that I am at my com- puter composing this chapter. Te skeptic tells me I don’t know this afer all; it might only be a dream. I am quite sure that I know that natural selection is true. Creationists claim that I don’t and that my “faith” in the theory is no diferent from religious belief. How can we possibly hope to make progress toward resolving these dis- putes without some fairly specifc agreement as to what counts as genuine knowledge? For some, the kind of conceptual analysis in which we engage in this chapter can be fun and the ConCePt of knowledge