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The meaning of "knowledge"
Hypothetical:
In Town X, a burglary is reported to the police. They investigate, and their investigation leads to Bob, who has previous convictions for that sort of thing. They find the stolen goods at Bob's house, Bob is questioned, he confesses, it goes to trial, Bob pleads guilty, the jury is convinced by the evidence, and Bob is sentenced accordingly.
In fact, Bob had not committed the burglary. In fact, he had a provable alibi - he was out committing another burglary (of equivalent severity) elsewhere in town at the time. The original burglary was done by a friend of his, and he was just storing the goods at his house. Given that demonstrating his alibi wouldn't have saved him any prison time, and would have involved fingering his accomplices (which would have damaged his standing in the criminal underworld), he felt that the simplest thing to do was to take the rap for the original burglary.
This is all to illustrate a philosophical point about the word "know" (and "knowledge" etc). A poll:
(ETA Note that the previous convictions don't count when I'm asking whether the legal system knew Bob had committed burglary... I meant to ask "...committed burglary on that day" or something similar. This ETA is before anyone but me has answered this, so all the results reflect this ETA)
In Town X, a burglary is reported to the police. They investigate, and their investigation leads to Bob, who has previous convictions for that sort of thing. They find the stolen goods at Bob's house, Bob is questioned, he confesses, it goes to trial, Bob pleads guilty, the jury is convinced by the evidence, and Bob is sentenced accordingly.
In fact, Bob had not committed the burglary. In fact, he had a provable alibi - he was out committing another burglary (of equivalent severity) elsewhere in town at the time. The original burglary was done by a friend of his, and he was just storing the goods at his house. Given that demonstrating his alibi wouldn't have saved him any prison time, and would have involved fingering his accomplices (which would have damaged his standing in the criminal underworld), he felt that the simplest thing to do was to take the rap for the original burglary.
This is all to illustrate a philosophical point about the word "know" (and "knowledge" etc). A poll:
(ETA Note that the previous convictions don't count when I'm asking whether the legal system knew Bob had committed burglary... I meant to ask "...committed burglary on that day" or something similar. This ETA is before anyone but me has answered this, so all the results reflect this ETA)
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9
Did the legal system know that Bob had committed burglary?
Was the outcome just?
View Answers
Yes - Bob committed a burglary and served a sentence for burglary, your point?
4 (57.1%)
No - Bob was punished for a crime he did not commit.
2 (28.6%)
I don't believe in punishing people for burglary anyway, so No
1 (14.3%)
Furthermore
View Answers
This is a completely ridiculous hypothetical and the legal system wouldn't have acted that way
0 (0.0%)
This is reasonably realistic, at least in terms of how the legal system acted
2 (25.0%)
Ummmm...
6 (75.0%)
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However, to me, the mistake seems to be assuming that because we have a word "know", that it maps cleanly to a relevant philosophical concept (that fulfils all the expectations of "something you can reason with", "something you have good reason to think true", etc, etc). It seems more likely that there is (at best) a number of overlapping concepts that "know" describes well when they coincide, but people would disagree about when they don't.
So I realise this is one of the edge cases, but I'm not sure the answer is "yes" or "no"... :)
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(Obviously Spanish is not the only language in which this is the case, it's just the one that comes most easily to my mind because I've spent time studying it.)
P.S. This should probably spark a discussion of whether you can ever really know a person :)
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I'm definitely not sure that I know any language where 'knowing something that really has happened because you have been convinced by evidence that it has happened' is distinguished from 'thinking you know that something has happened because you have been convinced by evidence that it has happened when in fact it hasn't happened but something else equivalent has, with that result that you sort of know something that has happened for which you didn't have any direct evidence, and where you will never realise that this isn't knowledge type A' :)
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:)
Yeah, not really expect that :) The closest I can think of is when people use varying emphases and modifiers, like "I know it, I just KNOW it" means "I have a strong feeling but no evidence" or "You can't KNOW that" means "it's pretty certain that it is, but it's always possible you've misinterpreted it"
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[1] A case in point re pragmatics: 'relatively new concept' means something a bit different to a classicist like me from what it might mean to e.g. a modern linguist ;)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua_languages#Evidentiality
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