Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness or understanding of
someone or something, such as facts, information, descriptions, or skills,
which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering,
or learning.
Knowledge can refer to a theoretical or practical
understanding of a subject. It can be implicit (as with practical skill or
expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); it
can be more or less formal or systematic. In philosophy, the study of knowledge
is called epistemology; the philosopher Plato famously defined knowledge as
“justified true belief”, though “well-justified true belief” is more complete
as it accounts for the Gettier problems. However, several definitions of
knowledge and theories to explain it exist.
Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes:
perception, communication, and reasoning; while knowledge is also said to be
related to the capacity of acknowledgment in human beings
The definition of knowledge is a matter of ongoing debate
among philosophers in the field of epistemology. The classical definition,
described but not ultimately endorsed by Plato, specifies that a statement must
meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified,
true, and believed. Some claim that these conditions are not sufficient, as
Gettier case examples allegedly demonstrate. There are a number of alternatives
proposed, including Robert Nozick’s arguments for a requirement that knowledge
‘tracks the truth’ and Simon Blackburn’s additional requirement that we do not
want to say that those who meet any of these conditions ‘through a defect,
flaw, or failure’ have knowledge. Richard Kirkham suggests that our definition
of knowledge requires that the evidence for the belief necessitates its truth.
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