Knowing, believing and thinking clearly about word meanings

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.

The perils of knowing too much.

To be fair, philosophers are also perfectly capable of using the word know appropriately at parties, but it's one thing to have an intuitive understanding of a word's meaning and quite another to arrive at an explicit account of what we mean by it.