On November 23, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library hosted the third in a monthly series of Very Short Introduction Discussions. November’s topic was “Knowledge.”

Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions offer concise overviews of a diverse range of subjects. The books in the series are written by experts in the field who combine facts and analysis with their enthusiasm for the subject to make for engaging and educational nonfiction. They are available to borrow in print form as well as read online with your library card at nypl.org/vsi.

What is knowledge? How does it differ from mere belief? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction considers these epistemological questions alongside new puzzles arising from recent discoveries about humanity, language, and the mind. It explains the formation of major historical theories of knowledge, and shows how contemporary philosophers have developed new ways of understanding knowledge, using ideas from logic, linguistics, and psychology. Covering topics ranging from relativism and the problem of scepticism to the trustworthiness of internet sources, this VSI uses everyday examples to explain the key issues and debates. If you couldn’t make it to the live discussion, here are some questions to consider while reading Knowledge. Feel free to respond by leaving a comment on this post.

1. When you think of knowledge, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
2. Did you learn anything new? What issue do you feel you became more knowledgeable about after reading the book?
3. Describe a moment in your own life when you were convinced that you knew something, and later found out that you were wrong about it.
4. Do you have any evidence that you are awake right now, and not dreaming? Does it matter? Would you be deeply disturbed to discover that you are living in a computer-generated virtual reality, rather than an ordinary physical reality?
5. Do you think it’s possible to know something while having no idea how it is that you know it? How much would it limit your body of knowledge if you couldn’t get knowledge secondhand, through the testimony of other people?
6. When, if ever, does Wikipedia succeed in transmitting knowledge to its users?
7. Are the standards for knowledge higher in a court of law than in a casual street encounter? Imagine that it’s suddenly a life-or-death matter whether your front door at home is locked right now. Do the high stakes make it harder for you to count as knowing that your door is locked?
8. What kind of signals do you think we pick up on when we get an intuitive sense that someone knows something?
9. To what extent do you expect other people to share your intuitions about knowledge?
10. Do you have any lingering questions about knowledge? What are they? Has this inspired you to read more?

After you’ve finished the Very Short Introduction, you might be interested in continued reading on some of the themes explored in the text. We have made it easy for you by linking the author’s “Further Readings” section to our catalog below.

Interested in attending our next online program? Register now for the Very Short Introduction Discussion on “Peace,” happening December 30 at 2 PM.

Further reading from Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction by Jennifer Nagel:

Chapter 1: Introduction

• There is a good discussion of group knowledge attributions in Alexander Bird’s ‘Social Knowing’, in Philosophical Perspectives
• For a clear survey of work on the relationship between individual and group judgement see Fabrizio Cariani’s ‘Judgment Aggregation’, in Philosophy Compass (onsite only)
• For a thorough examination of Protagoras’s relativism, and Plato’s response to it, see Myles Burnyeat’s edition of Plato’s Theaetetus, which includes a detailed and helpful introduction.

Chapter 2: Scepticism

• The lives and main ideas of ancient Greek sceptics are well covered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• One of the few positive contemporary defences of scepticism is Peter Unger’s book, Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism.
• Barry Stroud’s The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism doesn’t advocate scepticism, but Stroud takes the Dreaming Argument very seriously, and argues that there is still no fully satisfactory response to it.
• Readers interested in Indian scepticism will enjoy Chapter two of Bimal Matital’s book Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge.
• Moore’s position on the sceptical problem is now sometimes known as ‘dogmatism’. For a revival of the Moorean way of looking at things, see James Pryor’s ‘The Skeptic and the Dogmatist’, in Noûs.

Chapter 3: Rationalism and empiricism

• Gary Hatfield’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Descartes provides a good overview, as does Tom Sorrell’s Descartes: A Very Short Introduction.
•  For more philosophical detail, readers can consult the essays in Janet Broughton and John Carreiro’s A Companion to Descartes.
• Descartes’s Meditations were published with a series of objections by Descartes’s contemporaries (including the prominent French theologian Antoine Arnauld and the prominent English philosopher Hobbes), together with Descartes’s replies. These are freely available online, and in most full published editions of the Meditations. Descartes’s correspondence with Elizabeth was not published in his day, but is now available in a translation by Lisa Shapiro: The Correspondence Between Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes.
• On Locke, after starting with the Stanford Encyclopedia entry by William Uzgalis, readers can consult the Cambridge Companion to Locke, and for more detail on the theory of knowledge, the Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 

Chapter 4: The analysis of knowledge

• Robert Shope’s book The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research is a great survey of all the early fights over Gettier’s definition of knowledge.
• More recent work is well covered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the analysis of knowledge, by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Matthew Steup.

Chapter 5: Internalism and externalism

• Externalism is defended in Alvin Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition and in Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits.
• For a clear summary of the internalism–externalism controversy, see James Pryor’s 2001 paper ‘Highlights of Recent Epistemology’ in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (onsite only).

Chapter 6: Testimony

• For a concise introduction to reductionism and non-reductionism, see Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Knowing from Testimony’, in Philosophy Compass (onsite only).
•  Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa’s edited collection The Epistemology of Testimony contains essays representing a broad spectrum of philosophical perspectives on testimony.
• For more on the classical Indian line on testimony, see Stephen Phillips’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Classical Indian Epistemology.

Chapter 7: Shifting standards?

• Patrick Rysiew’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on contextualism is an excellent overview of the position.
• For a collection of influential essays for and against contextualism, see Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning and Truth, Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter.

Chapter 8: Knowing about knowing

• For various perspectives on experimental philosophy, see Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, edited by Edouard Machery and Elizabeth O’Neill.
• There are interesting discussions of the role of intuitions in philosophy in Hilary Kornblith’s Knowledge and its Place in Nature, in Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy, and in Tamar Szabó Gendler’s Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.