PHIL 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Descriptive Knowledge, Jargon
Document Summary
We"re interested in under what circumstances one can know that p, where p is some proposition (the kind of thing that might be true or false). So knowing an object or an idea or an activity isn"t the relevant sense of knowledge. One of the groups was discussing whether there is innate knowledge knowledge that humans have from birth, that doesn"t need to be acquired. Breathing was suggested as a possible case of innate knowledge. It can"t be breathing neither infants nor anybody else can know that breathing . To be the kind of knowledge we"re talking about, we need it to be knowledge of a proposition for example, knowing that breathing is necessary for survival. When i say snow is white , it expresses a certain proposition the proposition that snow is white. (if some language has no exact translation for snow , then maybe you can"t express that proposition in that language. )
