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Knowing and Believing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Michael Welbourne
Michael Welbourne
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

Prichard held, like some others before and since, that there is a categorial difference between knowing and believing:

To know is not to have a belief of a special kind, differing from beliefs of other kinds; and no improvement in a belief and no increase in the feeling of conviction which it implies will convert it into knowledge. Nor is their difference that of being two species of a common genus. It is not that there is a general kind of activity, for which the name would have to be thinking, which admits of two kinds, the better of which is knowing and the worse believing, nor is knowing something called thinking at its best, thinking not at its best being believing.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 55 , Issue 213 , July 1980 , pp. 317 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

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References

1 Prichard, H. A., Knowledge and Perception (Oxford University Press, 1950), 87–88Google Scholar. (Also in Griffiths, A. Phillips (Ed.), Knowledge and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1967) 62Google Scholar. All bracketed references hereafter refer to this volume.)

2 Ibid., 88 (63).

3 Ibid., 96–98, esp. 98 (66–68, esp. 68).

4 Malcolm, Norman, ‘Knowledge and Belief’ in his Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963)Google Scholar, reprinted in Griffiths, Phillips, Hintikka, Jaakko, Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), ch. V.Google Scholar

5 Cf. my ‘The Transmission of Knowledge’, The Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1979)Google Scholar, where I argue for what in this article is assumed, that to believe the speaker when he tells you that p is to regard him as a source of the knowledge that p, as someone from whom you have learnt, come to know, that p. Believing the speaker is the uptake condition in the ‘game’ of communicating knowledge.

6 This problem is extensively and differently treated by Hintikka, in Knowledge and Belief, ch. IV, esp. 4.4, 4.13.Google Scholar

7 Hintikka, , op. cit., 81.Google Scholar

8 Prichard, , op. cit., 88 (62–63).Google Scholar

9 Williams, Bernard, ‘Deciding to Believe’ in Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1976), 140.Google Scholar

10 Moore, G. E., Ethics (London, Home University Library, 1947), 78.Google Scholar

11 Malcolm, , op. cit., 62 (72).Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 60 (71).