Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction

Internalists place a special emphasis on what you can do with resources that are available from the first-person perspective: if you can’t see for yourself why you should believe something, you don’t actually know it. The subject’s own awareness of good grounds is an essential part of what distinguishes knowing from lower states like guessing.

A fire has just been lit to roast some meat. The fire hasn’t started sending up any smoke, but the smell of the meat has attracted a cloud of insects. From a distance, an observer sees the dark swarm above the horizon and mistakes it for smoke. ‘There’s a fire burning at that spot,’ the distant observer says.

Does the observer know that there is a fire burning in the distance?

However, it’s not always true that the more common thing is more basic. Consider the concept of a perfect circle: very simple, and perhaps quite rarely found in nature. Now, if by the word ‘rounded’ we mean ‘at least roughly circular’, then there will be many more rounded things than circular things, but the concept of the circle would still be more basic. The circle is our fundamental starting point, something we used in defining ‘rounded’.