Yesterday I posed the question – “Is the word ‘knowledge’ content free? ” I addressed the propositions that knowledge consists of facts, and facts represent either analytic or synthetic truths. I now want to introduce beliefs to the equation, because most, but not all, knowledge management models have a ‘justified true belief’ foundation.

Beliefs are something that we hold to be true. To the individual beliefs are facts that are derived from either analytic or synthetic truths, or some other source such as an authoritative reference or person. Our dictionary definition of knowledge says it consists of facts and truths. So a belief is a truth; yet it is possible to hold a mistaken belief – that is we believe something to be true when in fact it is false. Clearly then a mistaken belief should not be considered to be knowledge. But how do we determine whether a belief is true or otherwise?

Philosophers test their arguments using a conditional equation where S is a person and p is a proposition. According to this philosophical approach belief becomes knowledge if, and only if, the following conditions are met:

p is true, and

S believes that p is true.

The first condition requires something to be true, and that someone cannot know that it is true if in fact it is false. In this sense the condition is absolute. The second condition requires that the person actually is aware of the proposition and believes it to be true. We have already established that it is possible to have a mistaken belief; therefore the equation requires an additional statement. Philosopher’s who subscribe to the notion of justified true belief change the equation to:

p is true, and

S believes that p is true, and

S has adequate justification for believing that p is true.

The final condition requires justification for the belief. But we are still left with a problem because the justification for the belief could be wrong resulting in the justified true belief being false and hence the failure to end up with knowledge. Such a situation might arise because the source of much of what we know is the written or spoken word, and these written or spoken words may be factually incorrect despite us believing that the source is authoritative. Some philosophers have tried to resolve the justified true belief problem by linking knowledge to causality. This changes the equation to:

p is true

S believes that p is true, and

What p is about is causally connected in an appropriate way to S’s belief that p is true.

It means that to distinguish knowledge from beliefs and opinions the key is not justification, but rather the causal connections. At first blush this appears to solve the problem, but it does not account for situations where we know something but the ‘knowing’ is not caused by the thing. For example we can know that 13 is a prime number, perhaps because we are told this by an authoritative mathematician, or perhaps by using the fermata formula to work it out for ourselves. In both cases, however, it is not the number 13 itself that causes us to know it is a prime number.

Clearly it is extraordinarily difficult to define what a true belief is, and provide a test that accounts for all possibilities. So where does this leave us? We don’t have a clear-cut definition of true belief, which makes our definition of truth incomplete, resulting in an inability to precisely define knowledge.

It is perhaps better, therefore, to look at what we have established in this blog-pot and the previous blog-post . Our dictionary definition says that knowledge is ‘body of truths or facts accumulated by human beings in the course of time’, and that a fact is ‘something said to be true or supposed to have happened’. We can safely say that truth is a universally agreed component of knowledge. We also understand that truth can be broken into analytic and synthetic truths with the former being an absolute fact, and the later being based on a true belief.

What we are unable to define is what a true belief is, and this leaves us with a conundrum – knowledge can be whatever we believe it to be! I believe this is the reason why 80% of knowledge management initiatives fail. For me establishing common understanding and meaning at the start, and constantly re-establishing understanding and meaning, matters! Failure to do so guarantees disappointment.

Regards, Graham