Investigating knowledge and opinion

John Corcoran

Idris Samawi Hamid

pp. 95-126

in: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum (eds), The road to universal logic I, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2015

Abstract

This work treats correlative concepts of knowledge and opinion, in various senses. In all senses of "knowledge" and "opinion", a belief known to be true is knowledge; a belief not known to be true is opinion. In this sense of "belief", a belief is a proposition thought to be true—perhaps, but not necessarily, known to be true. All knowledge is truth. Some but not all opinion is truth. Every proposition known to be true is believed to be true. Some but not every proposition believed to be true is known to be true. Our focus is thus on propositional belief ("belief-that"): the combination of propositional knowledge ("knowledge-that") and propositional opinion ("opinion-that"). Each of a person's beliefs, whether knowledge or opinion, is the end result of a particular thought process that continued during a particular time interval and ended at a particular time with a conclusive act—a judgment that something is the case. This work is mainly about beliefs in substantive informative propositions—not empty tautologies.We also treat objectual knowledge (knowledge of objects in the broadest sense, or "knowledge-of"), operational knowledge (abilities and skills, "knowledge-how-to", or "know-how"), and expert knowledge (expertise). Most points made in this work have been made by previous writers, but, to the best of our knowledge, they have never before been collected into a coherent work accessible to a wide audience.