When is knowledge bad

Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. Google Books no proxy Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy.

Configure custom resolver. Chapters BETA. Knowing about knowledge Epistemologists usually talk of their theories of knowledge as articulating their understanding of knowledge. Know-How and Gradability. Carlotta Pavese - - Philosophical Review 3 Competence to Know. Going into the experiment, the participants did not know they were going to be given this recognition test. The results showed that the younger the children, the more accurate they were in remembering which pictures of animals they had seen before, and which they had not.

At the same time, adults were not accurate at all. The reason children did so much better than adults was that they had not yet learned to categorize animals, he said. Once adults learned in this experiment that only cats had beta cells, they stopped paying attention to the details of the pictures that would help them recognize the pictures later. Children, on the other hand, looked closely at each picture to determine if it was similar to the picture of the cat which had beta cells.

But without ignoring the details, we would be unable to categorize. Similar results were found in the earlier paper, but Sloutsky said this new paper provided two important details. First, they found that there is a gradual decrease in recognition memory from children to adults — there is no large jump that occurs as people approach adulthood.

That's why adults had accurate, child-like memory in the experiment in which they were tested using the imaginary animals. This can be referred to as epistemic injustice. To give an example, imagine that we are trying to figure out what the price of our lunch is. Suppose you are a woman, I am a man, and that I have the prejudiced and false belief that women are not good at maths.

I disagree, but you are correct when we pay at the till. Finally, suppose that because of my prejudice, I have lower confidence in your testimony than my own in other situations too. By doing so, I wrong you not only by having some prejudiced belief about you, but specifically in your capacity as someone capable of knowing things.

This is a simple example, but imagine how this kind of injustice could arise in even more important situations like court cases, in a job, or a life-or-death scenario. Watch more. Philosophers commonly distinguish between two kinds of knowledge. The first is the kind of knowledge you have when you know that some fact is true. For example, knowledge that grass is green, that the sun is hot, or that the Earth is round. This is often called 'knowledge-that' or 'propositional knowledge'.

The other kind is knowledge of how to do things. For example, knowledge of how to ride a bike, how to play the piano, or how to bake a cake. This kind of knowledge is called 'knowledge-how'. Some philosophers think 'knowledge-how' is importantly distinct from 'knowledge-that'. So, for example, knowing how to ride a bike is not the same as knowing some facts about bikes.

But is knowledge of both kinds capable of being dangerous? For example, perhaps it is a mistake to think that 'knowledge-that' is itself dangerous.

Instead we might think that it is just 'knowledge-how', like knowledge how to build or use a deadly weapon, that can be dangerous in this sense. But this is a tricky topic that's still up for debate…what do you think?

What does it mean to know something? Can we know anything at all? And can knowing one thing somehow stop you from knowing another? Amia Srinivasan University of Oxford discusses the different approaches to this topic in Philosophy and how it can help answer our Big Question. Knowledge is everywhere. You probably know what you ate for your most recent meal, your birthday, who the Prime Minister is, and what the square root of 4 is.

We talk about knowing things and not knowing things all the time. Image above: Prof. Amia Srinivasan who studies the theory and philosophy of knowledge known as 'epistemology'. At the same time, it is hard to say exactly what knowledge is.

Imagine that you flip a coin and immediately cover it with your hand so that neither you or anyone else can see it. Has it landed heads or tails? Unless, that is, there is an all-knowing God who knows all the facts. Now imagine that you really want the coin to come up heads On the basis of wishful thinking, you come to believe that the coin really is heads. Do you know that the coin has come up heads? Presumably not. To know something, in other words, involves not just believing something that is true, but having reason or justification for your belief.

For example, physically seeing that the coin is heads. But what counts as a good reason for a belief? Think about all the things you take yourself to know, for example, what you ate for your most recent meal, your birthday, who the Prime Minister is, or what the square root of 4 is.

Why do you believe these things? In the case of your most recent meal, you probably remember eating it. Memory also probably plays a role in your belief about the identity of the Prime Minister: at some point, you learned who the current Prime Minister is, allowing you to now recall their name. But what if your memory is playing tricks on you?

Now take your birthday: you believe that you were born on some particular day because you were told you were. But why should you believe the testimony of other people? What if they were lying to you, or they misremembered? And how about the square root of 4?

After all, 2 times 2 is 4! But why does that feeling of obviousness show you that the answer is true? Has anything ever seemed obvious to you and then turned out to be false? When you are a small child, did it not seem obvious to you that the sun went around the earth? Why might that be? Take the flipped coin. If you know anything, you surely know that there is a coin in front of you. After all, there it is, sitting in your hand.

You can see it and feel it; if you drop it you can hear it, and if you bring it to your nose you can smell it. Why is this? Well, it seems that there is deep disagreement, across cultures and history, about many moral questions: for example, whether slavery, homosexuality or abortion is wrong.

If so, then what makes your moral beliefs any more justified than the beliefs of people in different times and places? Suppose that there is no God, and that you came to know this. But suppose also that, once you come to know there is no God, you become depressed, and lose your interest in learning new things. In this way, your coming to know one new thing that there is no God stops you from coming to know other new things.

In this way, some knowledge can actually destroy other knowledge! Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Show Summary Details. Subscriber Login Email Address.