Review – so Plato’s justified true belief has a flaw and the Sceptics want us to believe we are a brain in the vat, but we all “Know”/feel/believe/have faith in the idea that our lived experience is real.

So, what if we can’t come up with a clean and easy definition. It does not matter. Right? The sceptics leave us with a dizzying Epistemic Vertigo. Yet, we all know we know.

And, we had our own ideas about a knowledge model (Most of our ideas, btw, were references to what we call second-hand knowledge, knowledge that comes from other people. Culture, authority, school, family, the internet – the secondary nature of this sort of knowledge makes it difficult to JUSTIFY our beliefs.

One other group we have to consider, briefly – the relativists. Sometimes people react to the lack of certainty with a relativistic answer.

If I say, “See… it goes like this: what is true for you, is not true for me…but, it’s true for me, so it’s true!”

Discuss – Is this a satisfactory way to deal with our dizzying pursuit of knowledge?

Read: Science’s Finest Hour

What’s the point? How do you react?

Maybe if we can’t agree on a clear definite notion of what Knowledge is we can at least agree on what reasonable knowledge looks like. Reasonable knowledge has:

• Evidence – For a belief to be reasonably clear, there should be some positive evidence in support of it. If you have no positive evidence, you have a fallacy, an argument ad ignorantium (“you can’t prove that I am wrong”).