Heather Salazar was kind enough to create the cover art for the Introduction to Philosophy series. Her wonderful piece for this book, titled Here Is a Hand, was inspired by G. E. Moore\u2019s famous \u201cProof of an External World\u201d from his 1939 essay by that title. Moore\u2019s \u201cproof\u201d is featured in Chapter 4 of this volume. The cover design for this book and others in the series is by Jonathan Lashley.<\/p>\n
Knowledge is the central concept of traditional epistemology<\/a>. But what is knowledge? This is the most basic question about the central concept, and so the appropriate starting place. Answers traditionally come in the form of conceptual analysis: a set of more basic concepts out of which the analyzed concept is built, arranged to form a definition. The concept \u201csquare,\u201d for example, is analyzable into components such as \u201cfour-sided figure,\u201d \u201cright-angled,\u201d and \u201cequilateral.\u201d What the first three have in common is that they require direct experience with their objects. I know how to ride a bike because I\u2019ve had practice; I don\u2019t know how to fly a plane, since I lack training\u2014despite having memorized the manual. Plato knew Socrates and Athens because he studied under the man and lived in the city; Plato knew neither Homer nor London because he neither met the poet nor visited the place. Plato knew of Homer, and propositions about him, but nothing concerning London. Stella knows what strawberries taste like (having eaten them before), but not what it\u2019s like to be a bat given her lack of batty experiences (see Box 1).<\/p>\n In his influential 1974 paper \u201cWhat Is It Like to Be a Bat?\u201d philosopher<\/a> Thomas Nagel explains that for something to be conscious, \u201cthere is something it is like to be\u201d that thing\u2014\u201csomething it is like for\u201d that thing to be (436). Thus, consciousness essentially has a \u201csubjective character\u201d in that it requires a first-person \u201cpoint of view.\u201d As such, no conscious state can be fully grasped or explained from the purely objective third-person perspective (nor from a God\u2019s eye \u201cview from nowhere\u201d). From this, Nagel draws a metaphysical conclusion: that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. More pertinent to this chapter is an important epistemological implication: that we cannot know \u201cwhat it\u2019s like\u201d to have experiences that are radically unlike those we\u2019ve actually had. He uses his now-famous bat example to illustrate:<\/p>\n Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection<\/a>, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n1 Our focus here is the analysis of knowledge. But we\u2019ll also consider critiques of this focus, which yield useful insights and prompt new directions of inquiry. The chapter closes with a reflection on the value of epistemological conceptual analysis.<\/p>\n