Episode 47: Alexandru Baltag discusses the logic of knowledge
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What is the distinction between knowledge and belief?
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Amsterdam. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Alexander Baltog, Associate Professor of Logic at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam. And he's here to talk to me about the logic of knowledge. Alexander Baltog, welcome. Hi. Maybe we can just start off by talking about the distinction between knowledge and belief. So for people who haven't thought about this before, it might at first seem like knowing something is kind of like the same thing as believing it, or so what's the difference there?
I I personally have no clue but um I can offer opinions that were offered by various philosophers on it. in connection with which uh I as a logician am interested in the What are the logical distinctions between these concepts or or more specifically if there are more than one concept of knowledge or there are many and similarly for belief. So the standard common wisdom in philosophy and w is that knowledge is factive. In other words, if you know something then that thing is actually true. by definition, so to speak. While uh belief is uh not necessarily so, right? So that's the fundamental distinction on which I think most philosophers and I think even people on the street would agree that that is kind of a meaningful distinction.
Now beyond that, um all hell breaks loose. People don't agree on more than that. So um Until nineteen sixties get year uh counterexamples. It was kind of part of the common wisdom among some philosophical circles that Plato claimed uh that knowledge is nothing but justified true belief. Now that this is is no longer accepted by the majority of epistemologists and actually people who know more about history and about Plato than I do. uh nowadays tend to believe that in fact Plato never claimed that. Uh yeah, so the identification between knowledge and justified to belief is now kind of almost universally rejected. The main question epistemology I would say in the last thirty years or forty years was uh essentially what is the missing ingredient in this equation.
Knowledge equals justified through belief plus what? On the other hand of course there are some assumptions in the very equation, namely that knowledge is a species of belief. There are people uh there are philosophers who deny that, that actually say that that's not the case. But the majority do agree that knowledge is a species of belief that is truthful, it's effective, so it's true belief, and is in some sense justified. The question is what's the rest? And this is where every philosopher worth his name in epistemology has a different opinion. My view on this is that the work done by epistemologists in in these last decades on this issue is extremely valuable, not necessarily because of really solving the problem in a definitive manner.
so to speak, kind of giving the perfect definition of what knowledge is or should be, but because of all the fine distinctions that come with these various conceptions. So each conception of knowledge proposed by people like Nozick, Sosau, Dretzke, Lehrer, Williamson, Each of these conceptions comes with some type of characterization that seems to capture, according to many people, some features of what day to day usage of knowledge mean, maybe missing others. And my point is that in certain contexts these features are enough for us to meaningfully identify it with with knowledge, with capital K, although in other contexts they might not be enough. So while philosophers are engaged in debating each other on the issue and finding counterexamples to each other's definitions.
Which I think is an interesting game but can go forever because there are always some exceptions to almost any definition in science or philosophy.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the distinction between knowledge and belief?
0:00–5:45
2
How did philosophers challenge the justified true belief account of knowledge?
5:45–10:27
3
What are the main formal definitions of knowledge in epistemic logic?
10:27–15:21
4
How do positive and negative introspection principles affect knowledge modeling?
15:21–19:17
5
What is belief revision and how does it relate to knowledge robustness?
19:17–24:53
6
How does game theory use formal notions of knowledge and belief?
24:53–30:15
7
What does the Condorcet Jury Theorem imply for collective epistemic decision‑making?
30:15–34:47
8
How can search engines improve information reliability using epistemic insights?
34:47–39:33
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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