The meaning of "knowledge" : comments [Peter]

Yes, I was trying to think of further breakings down of the concept in other languages but didn't come up with anything useful :) There are some technical ways in which Greek philosophers talk about knowledge and truth and so forth using various technical vocabulary, but that's not quite the same.

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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'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' :)

:)

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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Ah, yes, they're good e.g.s. Unfortunately, they also involve breaking linguistics :) When you talk about a language having different words for different concepts, you're looking at good old fashioned etymologies and traditional semantics and so on. But when you talk about people meaning something different by the way they emphasise a word, you're into the field of pragmatics (which is all about why things mean what they mean in context), which is a relatively new concept[1]. Obviously when talking about philosophical and to some extent psychological aspects, this is perfectly justified. It's just a by-product that my head responds by dividing the two concepts and keeping them separate :)

[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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Pragmatics: mid-20th century it seems.

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Yes exactly, thereabouts - this is very late by my internal timeline :)

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Have you ever come across evidential markers in Quechua? I once had a colleague who studied Quechua in Ecuador for a while, and gave a talk in Cambridge about the overt marking of one's degree of certainty in a proposition. We all thought it would be a good language to require politicians to use :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua_languages#Evidentiality

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Oh that's fascinating - thank you for that link. My experience of Quechua has been very fleeting (one MPhil seminar, and a snatch in Indy 4, etc!), and I didn't know about the evidentiality markers at all. What a wonderful system!

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I'd heard of evidential markers; I hadn't connected it with Quechua though. I had some memory of something along that lines being part of some Indonesian language, although maybe that's me just getting confused.

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