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Theory of Knowledge

Theory of Knowledge Concepts

1. Knowledge: justified true belief

o Justification: involves providing evidence or support for a particular knowledge
claim; answering “How do you know that x is the case?”
o Truth: the quality of being true or correct according to some ground
o Belief: belief that x is the case is necessary for knowledge; knowledge must be
believed
2. Characteristics of Truth: public, independent, eternal
o Public: true for everyone
o Independent: true despite what others may believe to be true
o Eternal: true for the entire time frame of reference, such as “It’s raining outside”
2. Theories of Truth: correspondence, coherence, pragmatic
o Correspondence: a proposition is true if it refers to something that exists in reality,
apart from the statement itself
o Coherence: a proposition is true if it is logically consistent with a body of
knowledge already known to be true
o Pragmatic: a proposition is true if it works or has practical results
3. “A priori” knowledge: based on theory, logic—can be thought of as “book learning”
4. “A posteriori” knowledge: based on sense experience
5. Inductive logic: begins with specific facts and draws a general conclusion
6. Deductive logic: begins with a general conclusion and draws a specific fact
7. Objective: existing independently of perception, usually implies something that is publicly
observable and the same for those who experience it, exists in the external world
8. Subjective: derived from the mind rather than external sources, relative to the knower’s
own individual experiences, has no possible confirmation
9. Confirmation bias: tendency for people to gather information that confirms their
preconceptions and ignore contradictory evidence
10. Psychological certainty: mental spectrum describing the degree to which one believes
something is true
11. Proposition: any kind of assertion or claim, a declarative statement
12. Knowledge issue: insights into knowledge that relate to the question “How do we know
what we know?”; explorations into the limitations of knowledge and methods of
verification of knowledge
13. Opinion: judgment based on fact
14. Relativism: theory stating that there can be no absolute truth, that everything is on a
relative scale
15. Prejudice: preconceived judgment or opinion made without sufficient knowledge
16. Absolute: unquestionable, not to be doubted or questioned
17. Epistemology: the study of “How do we know what we know?”
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Theory of Knowledge

Theory of Knowledge Concepts

18. Empiricism: the view that sense observations are the only source of knowledge
19. Causation/correlation: correlation does not imply causation; it is difficult to say that one
thing causes another even when there is a correlation, since cause-effect situations often
involve multiple factors
20. Connotation: associated meaning of a word
21. Denotation: explicit, dictionary definition of a word
22. Fallacy: any error in thinking or logic
23. Scientific realism: there is an objective reality that exists without direct human perception