An essential part of good mental hygiene is having a clear understanding of the role language plays in leading us astray when reasoning about complex questions. The deceptively simple question 'What is knowledge?' attracts more than its fair share of linguistic confusions so today's Mind Patch™ will use it as a pretext to expose some common misunderstandings that people have about word meanings. And while the main point of this essay is to correct these misunderstandings, it will provide what I think is a fairly definitive answer to the knowledge question, and hopefully awaken the non-specialist reader to the scale of the rabbit hole that is language, and perhaps thereby cultivate in them a level of interest befitting these phenomena.
Philosophers may struggle to understand precisely what it means to know something, but the everyday intuitions of very small children are sophisticated enough to allow them to get away with using this word without anything remotely bad happening.
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| The perils of knowing too much. |
Philosophers of knowledge generally agree that to know something is to believe something that is true but tend to make an exception when the belief in question arises by dumb luck. It doesn't seem quite right to say that a person knows something when the basis of their belief is a faulty or deceptive argument that only stumbles upon the correct conclusion by chance, or a rumor that turns out to be true only by coincidence. Since Socrates, there has been a tradition of dealing with these cases by arguing that knowledge isn't just true belief, but justified true belief. Modern theories of knowledge have picked some holes in the justification condition but they still typically insist that there has to be some kind of legitimate connection between something being true and it being believed.
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| A thought experiment featuring a somewhat justified true belief that it doesn't feel quite right to call knowledge. |
LESSON 1: Truth vs. acceptability
Consider the following pair of sentences:1. Jill has two sons and a daughter.
2. *Jill has two sons and a female.
The first sentence sounds fine, but the second sentence, although very similar to the first, doesn't seem quite right. (In case you're wondering, the convention in linguistics is to mark such problematic sentences with an asterisk.) The interesting thing to note about this is that the set of all daughters and the set of all females happen to be identical. That is, all daughters are females and all females are daughters. Despite this, it's clear that these words cannot be used interchangeably. In a discussion about Jill's family structure, we need to use the word daughter rather than female, not because Jill's daughter isn't a female but because the word female doesn't reference the relevant relationship. In the same way, the word knowledge might be the wrong word to use in certain communicative contexts without necessarily being an inaccurate description of whatever it's meant to refer to. The upshot is that we can't reject the possibility that a given belief is an instance of knowledge purely on the basis that it doesn't feel right to call it that in one particular sentence. We need to consider instead whether there could be any sentence at all in which a particular belief can be appropriately called knowledge. We'll look at this in more detail shortly, but we need to cover a few more lessons first. Lesson two concerns a much more famous issue within the philosophy of language.
LESSON 2: Family resemblances
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued in his Philosophical Investigations that the many and varied things we call games only share a family resemblance with one another (having a strong overlap in the features they possess) without there being any particular features that every single game has in common. He observed for instance that there are both games of skill and games of luck, that there are games involving competition between players, and games, like solitaire, that are played alone, and while many games involve an element of winning or losing, there are again exceptions like ring-a-ring-a-roses. Based on these observations, Wittgenstein concluded that there simply couldn't be any single characteristic that is shared by such a diverse set of activities, and that the convention of calling them all games is only our way of saying that they form a family of related activities.He preferred the metaphor of family resemblances to describe categories like this, but this could be misleading insofar as it suggests that it's only the number of shared characteristics that determine whether something is or isn't a member of a category. Categories also have structure, and they have this structure because of the way they are built up over time. Existing words are constantly being put to novel uses by metaphorical extension in ways that are often useful enough to eventually become conventionalized senses of a word. Each time this happens, a category grows a new limb related to the one it grew out of so that after several iterations of this process, a category will assume a tree-like structure where neighboring limbs are very similar, and very distant ones, less so.
In any case, Wittgenstein's key insight was that entities don't all have to share a set of properties to belong to the same category, which means we should consider the possibility that the things we call knowledge might not all have a single set of properties in common either, like being justified, true and believed. Instead, it may be that the collection of things we call knowledge are merely grouped under this term because they share a particular kind of family resemblance.
LESSON 3: Defining vs. non-defining features
Even if all instances of knowledge have a core set of features in common, there would be no reason to expect all of these features to be relevant to the meaning of the word. We can illustrate this again with the words female and daughter. If there is a set of features shared by all females, exactly the same set of features must necessarily be shared by all daughters, so thinking about this set will not help us account for the difference in meaning. To understand how these two words succeed in meaning different things, we have to make a distinction between the features that the members of a category possess, which are the same for females and daughters, and the subset of these features that function as defining features, which are different for the words female and daughter.The distinction between defining and non-defining qualities can be obscured in a question like What is knowledge? which could either be about the definition of the word knowledge as encoded in the minds of speakers, or about the nature of whatever this word refers to. Compare this with the question What is a star? This could be about the nature of stars (what they're made of, what makes them shine, and so on), but even if we knew nothing about these things, we'd still be able to tell whether a given object was or wasn't a member of the category star. We could use the word without anything remotely bad happening, as did everyone who lived before astrophysicists finally figured out that stars are objects like the Sun at much greater distances, or that they shine because of nuclear fusion. These properties were only discovered as recently as the twentieth century. Prior to that, people were able to use the word star without knowing any of this because only some of the qualities we now associate with stars are what we might want to call defining qualities. This is also one of the reasons why H2O is an inadequate definition of water. English speakers were unquestionably using the word water before there was any scientific understanding of the molecular structure this formula describes, so the formula simply cannot have had anything whatsoever to do with what the word meant, at least prior to such discoveries. Like our unenlightened ancestors, small children can speak meaningfully about stars and water well before they've had an opportunity to learn more than a tiny fraction of the vast number of things that are true of them, certainly before they've learned about nuclear fusion in stars or what hydrogen and oxygen might have to do with water. Some people get away with using these words successfully at parties without ever learning about such details so we shouldn't expect these things to be particularly relevant when it comes to understanding how the meanings of these words are encoded in the minds of native speakers.
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| A star is in fact indistinguishable from an idealized spherical sheep that is extremely massive and hot, and which radiates vast amounts of energy by converting lighter elements into heavier ones deep inside its belly. |
LESSON 4: The two ways of saying what something is
It can be unclear whether a what-is question is asking about the meaning of a word or about the nature of the thing it refers to, but these questions need to be approached in entirely different ways. When inquiring into the nature of a thing, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference what you call it. You don't have to call it anything if you don't want to. Certainly if there is a conventional label for the thing you're examining, you can make life easier by using it when describing your findings, but you could equally single out the object of your inquiry using a multi-word description of it, or by pointing at it. It doesn't really matter. Words won't get in your way.Figuring out the meaning of a word is an entirely different process. Linguists do this by collecting examples of how words are actually used in the wild, which means analyzing how native speakers use them in writing and conversation, and by probing their intuitions to clarify which conventions they're using. They don't need to examine physical examples of whatever the words might refer to in the real world, take measurements, or anything like that. The irrelevance of the real world is particularly obvious in the case of words for things that don't exist, fictional things like unicorns and teleportation. These words succeed in having perfectly intelligible meanings despite the non-existence of the phenomena they label. The word spaceship had a meaning too before humankind had ever made a functioning example of one. And the word star would also be perfectly intelligible even if there were no such things as stars or in the unlikely event that our understanding of the nature of stars turns out to be completely wrong and those shimmering objects in the night sky are icy rather than fiery, or made of wool.
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| This description could have been used to define the word spaceship had it been the intended function of the technology rather than an incidental one. |
LESSON 5: Blurry words
Discovering the meaning of a word isn't guaranteed to be a particularly satisfying experience if what we're seeking is precision because a definition can only be as precise as the meaning it's attempting to capture, and some meanings are inherently vague. It's a bit like that scene in Deconstructing Harry where a film crew is having trouble focusing on an actor until they realize that the problem isn't with their lenses but with the actor himself who is just having a blurry day.The out of focus scene from Deconstructing Harry (1997) by Woody Allen
There are a few ways that the meaning of the word knowledge could be inherently vague. One way is if there is a gradual transition from beliefs that aren't knowledge to beliefs that are, much as day fades into night. If describing a moment around dawn or dusk, we might hesitate to use either of these words because using it under these circumstances might mislead a listener into thinking we're speaking about a more prototypical case. We might hesitate about using the word knowledge on the fringes of its category too for the same reasons.
We don't generally specify the meaning of words any more than we have to either, which means that questions that probe beyond the necessities of daily life will typically reveal a certain amount of vagueness about just about everything. Our distant ancestors were running around using the word life without any need for a definition that was precise enough to determine whether viruses fitted the bill. Why would they? They didn't know viruses existed. The question What is life? has occupied (or distracted) some great minds, but it's only difficult to answer because it contains a word whose meaning is inherently soft around the edges. Words are our servants, not our masters so we could simply choose to define life in a more precise way if we wanted to. According to taste, we could define it in such a way that it included viruses, or in a way that excluded them. It would be completely up to us. Whatever decision we made wouldn't affect the nature of viruses, or make them more or less morally significant. It would only affect what we called them.
Likewise, we could simply choose to define the word knowledge as true belief to get around the messy business of justification entirely, but if we want to actually understand how language works in the mind, then we have to probe the intuitions of native speakers about meanings that emerge naturally within a linguistic community.
In principle, a successful account of what the word knowledge means to native English speakers in the wild might include some mention of inherent vagueness. It would certainly explain the awkwardness we feel about using the word in some of the highly contrived circumstances that are described in the thought experiments philosophers use to explore the issue. As it happens, I don't think this is the key to the problem, but it's a possibility that ought to be considered, not just in this instance but whenever we're attempting to capture a precise definition.
LESSON 6: Round squares
Another reason we might not be able to tell if a belief qualifies as knowledge would be if the concept of knowledge actually turns out to be incoherent. There are arguably many terms in common use that are muddled in ways that require very subtle reasoning to disentangle. Perhaps knowledge is one of them. Perhaps knowledge isn't the sort of thing that could exist, even in principle. The difficulty of defining knowledge is certainly an enduring problem, but questions don't always have to be about deep, impenetrable mysteries to be difficult to answer. Some can achieve that honor simply by failing to make sense. Perhaps philosophers of knowledge have merely snagged themselves on a particularly subtle form of nonsense.One kind of nonsense is the self-contradictory kind that round squares belong to, and there is no law that prevents us from assigning a self-contradictory definition to a word. If we had nothing better to do, we could for example, define the word nonut to mean something that is simultaneously both a donut and not a donut. This is probably useless as an idea (except perhaps as a description of every policeman's favorite quantum superposition), but we have no trouble formulating the concept and assigning a label to it.
Another way to produce nonsense is to presuppose something that is untrue. To get a sense of the trouble that false presuppositions can cause, consider the states that a door can be in. We tend to think that if a door isn't open, it must be closed. We might have doubts about precisely where the boundary lies between these two states, but they're opposites, so we could easily be seduced into thinking that when a door isn't in one state, it must be in the other. But if you saw an unattached door lying on a rubbish heap, would you say it was open or would you say it was closed? Would such a door really be in one or the other of these two states? It's unlikely anyone seeing it there would spontaneously use either adjective to describe it, nor would they be in any danger of thinking it was teetering on the boundary between being open and closed, but philosophers who were sure that doors must be in one or the other of these two states might nevertheless end up discussing the door on the rubbish heap in increasingly unhinged ways.
In practice, we only ever talk about a door being open or closed when it's mounted over some kind of gap that the door is intended to block. We presuppose that the door we are talking about is mounted when we use words like open and closed, and it wouldn't make sense to use them otherwise. To do so would be the linguistic equivalent of dividing by zero.
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| Assigning truth values to sentences that contain false presuppositions is asking for trouble. |
LESSON 7: Presuppositions and negation
Presuppositions are also interesting when it comes to negation. Negating a sentence will flip the truth value of whatever it directly asserts but not what sneaks into the meaning via presupposition, so while The door is open and its negation The door is not open express different relationships between the door and the gap it's mounted on, the negated version still presupposes that the door exists, and that the gap exists, and that the door is mounted so that it can be closed over the gap, even if it isn't closed over the gap at this precise moment.Armed with this insight, we can begin to see something important about the meaning of the word knowledge given that one of the traditional conditions for knowledge behaves very much like the presupposed information in the door example, and it isn't the justification condition, which has traditionally attracted the most controversy, but the truth condition. Notice that in the context of an ordinary non-philosophical conversation at a party, the proposition Dick Laurent is dead would normally be presupposed both when embedded in sentence (3), and within its negation (4), which means that the truth of this proposition can't be what is directly asserted by claiming to know it.
3. Fred knows that Dick Laurent is dead.
4. Fred doesn't know that Dick Laurent is dead.
5. Fred doesn't know if/whether Dick Laurent is dead.
We would typically understand the negated version (4) to mean that while it is true that Dick Laurent is dead, Fred happens to be unaware of the fact. The part of the meaning that is negated is just Fred's awareness. If we wanted to avoid any presuppositions about whether Dick Laurent was alive or dead, we would normally speak of knowing if or knowing whether instead of knowing that, which for the present example would give us sentence (5).
This makes the truth condition of the traditional account of knowledge quite unlike the belief condition. Sentence (4) doesn't negate the truth of the subordinate clause but it does negate that Fred believes it. Belief, unlike truth, is therefore part of what the statement asserts rather than what it presupposes.
Suppose that I am the person who utters sentence (3). By saying this, I would be the one who is presupposing the embedded proposition Dick Laurent is dead so a listener could infer that I believe the embedded statement in addition to what I'm directly asserting in the main clause. Likewise, if I uttered (4), which is simply the negation of (3), I would still be presupposing that Dick Laurent is dead, so a listener could again infer that I believe this. But things are a little different when speaking of knowing in the first person. If Fred himself uttered sentence (6), he would be doing both the presupposing and the knowing simultaneously, which means that if we interpreted the negation of this sentence (7) along the same lines as we interpreted the negation of the third person version (4), we'd be forced to conclude that Fred was presupposing that Dick Laurent was dead while simultaneously claiming to be unaware of this fact, which is obviously a contradiction.
6. I know that Dick Laurent is dead.
7. I don't know that Dick Laurent is dead.
8. I didn't know that Dick Laurent was dead.
Note that this is actually only a problem when negating a first person claim to knowledge in the present tense. If Fred spoke about not knowing something in the past tense as in (8), it would not lead to a contradiction because his past self could easily have a different state of knowledge to his present self.
But what about the present tense version (7)? In principle, there are at least a couple of ways around the logical inconsistency. It may be that native speakers simply avoid speaking of not knowing that in the first person present tense, or alternatively, that they still use it but with a different meaning. A brief search for I don't know that in an English language corpus reveals plenty of evidence for the latter in the wilderness of English usage. Indeed, I don't know that is often used to mean something akin to I doubt that as in I don't know that I will ever be able to convince you, which is a meaning that does at least share a family resemblance with the sense that we have so far considered (cf. Lesson 2).
There are some unusual cases though, including some that you might hear in a non-philosophical conversation at a party, although perhaps not your typical party. Conveniently, the film Lost Highway features such a party. Conveniently, there is also a character called Fred who, speaking in the first person, and in the present tense, says that he doesn't know that Dick Laurent is dead.
The party scene from Lost Highway (1997) by David Lynch.
(The relevant dialogue begins at the 3m40s mark)
It's a brilliantly subtle exchange between Fred and the party's host, Andy. Fred approaches Andy to ask about one of the other guests at the party with whom he has just had an extremely unsettling conversation. Andy tells him he thinks the mysterious man in question is a friend of Dick Laurent, and those who have seen the film will know why this name is significant. It is because, in the film's opening sequence, an unknown person buzzes at Fred's door and inexplicably relays over his apartment intercom only the words Dick Laurent is dead, and before Fred can get a clear view of his doorstep, the bearer of this mysterious message has gone. So when this name comes up again at the party, it further contributes to Fred's already heightened feeling of unease. Given the strange circumstances in which Fred came by the news about Dick Laurent, he can hardly be sure that it's true, but he's curious, and his way of probing the issue is to pretend he knows more than he does, so in a reply that is part bluff, part question, he says to Andy But Dick Laurent is dead, isn't he? In the lines that follow, the conversation switches from presupposing that Dick Laurent is dead to questioning whether he is, which isn't the order these things usual take. The word know enters the exchange when Andy asks How do you know he's dead?, a question that takes what Fred said seriously enough to presuppose that it's true. However, Fred ends up backing away from this presupposition by answering I don't, which for our purposes, is the key sentence, being as it is an elided version of (7).
The effect of this answer is that Andy no longer treats the claim that Dick Laurent is dead as a given, but this doesn't mean that Fred has succeeded in negating the content of the presupposition. By saying that he doesn't know that Dick Laurent is dead, he hasn't claimed that Dick Laurent is alive. He has merely rejected the presupposition that he's dead so that the conversation can proceed without any presupposition either way.
There are other pieces of evidence about what goes on in the first person that might give us some more hints about what is going on here. Turning to belief for a moment, notice that if I, speaking in the first person, say that I believe something, it follows that I think it's true (otherwise, I wouldn't believe it) and, if I'm consciously aware that I hold this belief, as I surely must be if I'm going around saying that I believe it, I will presumably also feel justified in believing it. So if my mental representation of the meaning of the word knowledge is structured in terms of something like justified, true belief, I would have to regard everything I consciously believe to be something I also know. What distinction then might a speaker be attempting to make with a sentence like (9)?
9. I don't just believe it, I know it!
The function of (9) in a conversation seems to be to muscle past any concerns a listener might have about whether something is true and onto whatever consequences follow from accepting that it is. Fred, in the aforementioned scene, is effectively doing the reverse, backing away from the presumption that a claim is true so as to open up discussion of whether it is true. Again, this is not negating the content of a presupposition but rather that a presupposition can be allowed one way or the other.
LESSON 8: Learning word meanings from examples
If knowledge is justified, true belief, the justification condition would also present a problem for explaining how infants manage to learn the meaning of the word from the sentences they're exposed to. Consider what would be required for an infant to distinguish between the hypothesis that knowing means holding a true belief, and the hypothesis that knowing means holding a justified, true belief. Naively, we might assume that the infant determines which hypothesis is true by comparing the set of true beliefs that are called knowledge with the set of true beliefs that aren't, but the only circumstances that could provide the relevant contrast are the exceedingly rare occasions when there is talk of people holding beliefs that happen to be true by dumb luck. The infant would have to keep track of the fact that know is among the countless words that are never used to describe this unusual state of affairs, and infer that because it is never used in these contexts, it can't be. What's worse is that given a choice between true belief and justified, true belief, the definition without the justification condition is the simpler and more general one, which ought to make it easier to learn, so unless an infant is raised by a pack of wild epistemologists who nurture them with linguistic data that is precisely tuned to making this distinction, it would seem the odds are stacked in favor of children acquiring the simpler meaning over the more complex one and certainly often enough to observe at least some children acquiring the simpler meaning. But they don't, so if a justification-like condition is part of the definition of knowledge, something must be wrong with this view of how words are acquired. Indeed, it's easy to demonstrate that at least some words would be impossible to acquire if this were how infants were going about it.To see why this is the case, let's look at the words female and daughter once more. An infant (or a computer model of one) could not, even in principle, distinguish the meanings of these words by comparing images or physical examples of one against the other because every female encountered in the real world is also a daughter and vice versa. To compare the set of females with the set of daughters would be to compare a particular set of individuals with itself. As we've seen, we don't actually have to confine ourselves to the real world when talking about the meanings of words (Lesson 4), so we could also consider the possibility that the infant is exposed to a fictional account of a female who was nobody's daughter, having somehow sprung into existence without having any parents, in which case, the sets would be slightly different, but this still wouldn't help because no description of her physical features or behavior would be relevant for understanding the difference in meaning. Despite this, the terms female and daughter are very far from being interchangeable.
It's not too difficult to find other pairs of terms like this. It's also true that all memes are ideas and all ideas are memes, memes being ideas from the perspective of their role as cultural replicators just as daughters are females from the perspective of their roles in a particular familial relationship. But we don't need to confine ourselves to terms that always pick out the same set of things. It's also possible to be both a linguist and a philosopher at the same time but that doesn't mean you can substitute one description for the other when talking about a person who happens to be both. The sentence Jill is an excellent linguist and the sentence Jill is an excellent philosopher obviously do not mean the same thing, and they still wouldn't mean the same thing if all linguists decided to take up philosophy and all philosophers decided to take up linguistics. Even under such conditions, one statement could easily be true while the other was not. This is because the purpose of terms like linguist and philosopher is not to bring whole sets of individuals to the mind of the listener but to describe particular individuals from the perspective of different features, and in so doing, corral attention towards different ends.
We only succeed in confusing ourselves by thinking about meanings in terms of sets. To learn the meaning of a word, an infant need only recognize which features speakers are attempting to draw attention to when using it. It's of no consequence if the features that speakers are drawing attention to when using the word female and the features that speakers are drawing attention to when using the word daughter happen to provide alternate ways of defining the same set of individuals.
Under this more nuanced view of how words are acquired, infants do not need to compare the set of true beliefs that are referred to as knowledge with the set that aren't, so the aforementioned difficulty of explaining how infants could acquire a justification-like condition goes away. An infant could acquire a justification-like condition simply by detecting that listeners are having their attention drawn to it when the word knowledge is used.
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We are now ready to put all of the pieces of the knowledge puzzle together.
As noted, we use the word daughter when we want to talk about a female in the context of her role in a particular familial relationship, and a speaker wouldn't succeed in conveying that such a relationship exists if they said I have a female. The point of contact with our discussion about knowledge is that if the word female seems anomalous in this sentence, it isn't because the intended referent isn't female, and if we judge the word knowledge to be an inappropriate description of a belief under certain circumstances, it isn't necessarily because it isn't knowledge (Lesson 1). It may be perfectly appropriate to describe the exact same belief by the exact same person at the exact same time as knowledge in one communicative context, and as a belief in a different communicative context. For example, a belief that qualifies as knowledge might still be introduced as a belief by a speaker whose purpose was to convince us of its truth. To call it knowledge from the outset would prejudge the issue.
Let's consider a detailed example of where one and the same mental state could be described as either a belief or as knowledge depending on the perspective of speakers. Imagine Jill has just left a very interesting party early because she has to catch an overnight train to Edinburgh which leaves at 11 pm, but back at the party, two separate conversations are going on about her train trip. One is between Mr and Mrs Smith and the other is between Mr and Mrs Jones. The Smiths enter into their conversation with Mrs Smith having consulted the train timetable so that she is aware that the only train to Edinburgh leaves at eleven, and with Mr Smith having been told this fact directly by Jill herself but without Mrs Smith being aware that he and Jill have spoken about it. Mrs Smith expresses concern that Jill will reach the station in time so Mr Smith reassures her by saying the following:
10. But darling, Jill knows the train will leave at eleven!
Let's call this the know sentence.
Meanwhile, the Joneses enter into their conversation with nearly the same information. Jill has told Mr Jones the same thing she told Mr Smith, namely that the train leaves at eleven. And like Mrs Smith, Mrs Jones has consulted the train timetable but with the difference that she has misread it as saying the train will leave at ten instead of eleven. In the course of their conversation, Mrs Jones casually mentions what she believes to be the departure time, and realizing it does not match what Jill told him, her husband responds with the following sentence:
11. But darling, Jill believes the train will leave at eleven!
Let's call this the believe sentence.
The know sentence (10) and the believe sentence (11) are both appropriate responses in their respective contexts and you'll notice that they differ only in the choice of know or believe as the main clause verb. The word know was used when the issue of contention was whether Jill was aware of the departure time (the facts of which were presupposed for the Smiths), and believe was used when the issue of contention was the departure time itself. These factors prevent the sentences being interchangeable in either context. Notice that these word choices didn't depend on the speakers having different information about what Jill believed, how justified she personally felt in her belief, the strength of her belief, or anything else about her mental state. The belief that was attributed to Jill in both sentences (that the train will leave at eleven) was also correct. Nevertheless, the communicative context demanded that Mr Smith and Mr Jones made different word choices.
It's worth stressing that we could ramp up the certainty of a belief as much as we like without it necessarily becoming synonymous with a similar statement phrased in terms of knowledge. The sentence I believe with absolute certainty that Dick Laurent is dead could be perfectly true even if Dick Laurent was alive while I know that Dick Laurent is dead would have divide-by-zero type problems under the same conditions (Lesson 6). Certainty is still a relevant factor in the word choice though. A person who is certain that Dick Laurent is dead will likely choose to speak of knowing rather than believing to push a conversation past any concerns about whether Dick Laurent is dead and onto whatever consequences follow once we presuppose that he is. It shouldn't be surprising then that a related sense, indicating certainty, has grown out of this sense of knowing that with the negation of this sense being synonymous with doubting that.
Another thing worth noting about the way the word know is used, which should be perfectly evident to infants who are learning the word, is that we view knowing as a form of competence that is more worthy of respect than mere belief. When Mrs Smith expressed her concerns about whether Jill would succeed in such a simple matter as catching a train on time, she was doubting Jill's competence in a way that might have irritated Jill if she'd overheard it, but when Mr Smith responded by saying that Jill knew the departure time, he provided some redress. Somewhere within that word, Jill's honor was being defended because it credited her intellect.
Things would be different if Jill had mistakenly read the departure time from the bus timetable instead of the train timetable. In that case, we wouldn't want to credit Jill with knowing the train's departure time even if, by a lucky coincidence, the bus timetable happened to list a bus departing to Edinburgh at exactly the same time as the train to Edinburgh. Under these circumstances, it would only be by dumb luck that Jill had the correct departure time in mind. Mr Smith would have no problem crediting his wife with knowing the departure time because she had consulted the correct timetable, but in Jill's case, the credit could only go to chance. So whether we're comfortable calling a belief knowledge depends on who we're attributing it to and whether we think they deserve credit for holding it rather than whether there exists a possible justification for it in general.
Whether a speaker is comfortable crediting someone with knowledge will depend on the speaker's beliefs about the world. Jack might be happy to say that Meg knows P after she told him that P was revealed to her in a dream because within his view of how the world works, Meg is in tune with various supernatural forces that allow discoveries to be made this way. Meanwhile, Jill might dismiss this as superstitious nonsense so wouldn't describe this state of affairs as Meg knowing P even if P turned out to be true. If it was true, Jill would attribute it to coincidence before giving Meg the credit. In this case, Jack and Jill would have different beliefs about how the world works that determine whether they think Meg is deserving of credit rather than different definitions of the word know in mind.
If there is a justification condition that governs the everyday sense of the word know, it can't be very rigorous. It's not uncommon for people to cry I knew it! when confirming a mere suspicion, and most of us are generally quite happy to credit a person we respect with knowing something in the complete absence of any information about how they arrived at their belief simply because we trust them enough to assume they arrived at it in a reliable way.
Philosophers learn to apply rigorous standards of evidence and argument to claims, so it shouldn't be surprising that valid justifications are generally present when they credit individuals with knowing things. But even if all instances of knowledge were accompanied by valid justifications, we still couldn't conclude that a justification condition is part of the meaning of the word. As we've seen, not everything that is true of a thing is part of the definition of the word for it (Lesson 3). What is relevant to the meaning of a word is any quality or connotation that speakers are attempting to draw attention to when using it (Lesson 8). Justifications are hardly ever spelled out when using the word know, but attributing knowledge to someone is nearly always a way of respecting their intelligence. Therefore, it is respect rather than justification that ought to be salient to the infant learning the word. If that is the connotation of the word, then we have accounted for why we avoid using it to describe when a person Forrest Gumps their way to a correct solution. To know is simply to grasp something that we are presupposing is true in a manner deserving of credit or respect.
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