Цитаты из книги 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’.

Knowledge is true belief produced by a reliable belief-producing mechanism, where by ‘reliable’ we mean ‘likely to produce a true belief’. Known as reliabilism, this analysis of knowledge rapidly won many fans.

Beyond the limits of what could be known, Locke argued, human beings could certainly have faith or opinion, but they should neither claim certainty, nor attack those who differ in matters of opinion or faith (the promotion of tolerance was a large part of Locke’s agenda in figuring out the limits of knowledge).

We could reasonably be alarmed by someone claiming to know a controversial philosophical claim despite an inability to prove it; we should not feel such resistance to someone who claims to know a simple observable fact about his immediate environment.

Explicit reasoning or proof has a clear role to play when we are supporting general philosophical claims: we can engage in extended reasoning about exactly what it means for something to be an ‘external object’. By contrast, an ordinary claim like ‘Here is a hand’ is so basic that it is hard to find simpler and better-known claims we could use to support it. (There is a parallel with mathematics here, where some basic claims are taken as axioms, not themselves in need of proof.)

If knowledge is easy to get, so is mere opinion, and it can be hard to spot the difference.