Knowing and Seeing

Abstract

Abstract Knowing and Seeing explores the insight behind the distinction of kind between knowledge and belief drawn by most philosophers from Plato to Locke. Judging that S is P (with or without good reason) is distinguished from seeing that S is P (when reasons are unnecessary), having evidence that S is P from its being immediately evident that S is P. After a historical account of the rise and fall of the distinction, a detailed, careful phenomenological analysis of perceptual experience, consonant with recent empirical psychology, suggests that a distinction is indeed needed at the traditional place, on broadly traditional grounds, if not between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ then between what are here called primary and secondary knowledge. Primary knowledge is immediate awareness or grasp of reality or truth, and consciously so. The explanation given of these features is contrasted with McDowell’s conceptualist, rationalistic explanation. Part I ends with the traditional question, approached through an examination of ordinary language, whether knowledge and belief have different objects—for example, do nominalized sentences of the form ‘that S is P’ refer to the same kind of entity after ‘believe’, ‘know’, and ‘see’? Employing the results of Part I, Part II is a sustained critique of sceptical argument and its current ‘methodological’ use in philosophy, in particular by ‘externalists’, ‘fallibilists’, ‘contextualists’, and ‘reliabilists’. The relationship between ascriptions of knowledge and judgements of certainty, probability and fallibility is analysed, and a particular understanding of ‘defeasibility’ is defended. The thesis of ‘disjunctivism’ is assessed.