Inferring and Explaining

21 Connie knows this, though perhaps she should. When we use the “knows but doesn’t believe” idiom, we are getting at something interesting about Jake and Sarah. Tey seem to be engaging in what philosophers call self-deception. Tis is an important issue in both philosophy and psy- chology but really says nothing about how to defne knowledge. I take it to be settled that knowledge implies some kind of genuine conviction or intellectual confdence. Tus the frst necessary condition of knowledge turns out to be relatively secure, uncontroversial, and philosophically straight- forward. Would that we could say the same about the conditions to follow. The Search for the Truth You are the district attorney, and you’ve got a great case. Te defendant is the kind of lowlife that society needs to do something about. You’ve got the goods on him too, lots of physical evi- dence, a clear motive, and witnesses. Te case will be an easy one to try, and it will be a feather in your cap to be the one who put him away. You just “know” that the slime ball’s guilty. Tere’s only one problem with this scenario; the guy didn’t do it. It does not matter how sincere your belief is nor how good the evidence seems to be—if what you thought you knew turns out to be false, it’s back to the drawing board. Truth is an absolute precondition for knowledge. Unfortunately, truth is a philosophical mess. Contemporaryphilosophy is about as far from consensus about the nature of truth as any issue in the feld. Some believe that truth is correspon- dencewith reality. Others believe that it is coher- ence with other widely held beliefs. Yet others claim that the assertion that “snow is white is true” is just a fancy way of saying that “snow is white.” All these theories of truth have plausible arguments in their defense, and all sufer from serious conceptual problems. Professional phi- losophy doesn’t knowwhat truth is. I don’t know what it is either, but I will nevertheless say a little more about truth toward the end of this book. In spite of all the confusion about the nature of truth, however, the relationshipbetween truth and knowledge is as clear as could be. Te only beliefs that we have that are viable candidates for being knowledge are those that are true. Te surest way to defeat someone’s claim that they know something is to show that what they claim to know is false. Tis suggests a work-around epistemological defnition of truth: the ConCePt of knowledge truth = df not-false Admittedly, this is a pretty trivial defnition. It does, however, have the advantage of separating philosophical disputes about the nature of truth from the noncontroversial connection between truth and knowledge. Tus truth supplies a second necessary con- dition for knowledge. We can expand our evolv- ing model of knowledge as follows: J knows P only if: i. J believes P . ii. P is true. Epistemic Justifcation Perhaps we already have all that we need. Te concept of knowledge seems both subjective and objective. To believe something is to be in a