Sensitivity to Facts

In this chapter I am going to argue that the concept of knowledge simply falls out of the behaviourist model of the mind that I have outlined so far. I think that this is a big selling point. The traditional approach to the philosophy of knowledge has been to construct the concept of knowledge out of other, apparently better understood, elements like belief and justification. In this traditional approach, the philosophy of mind is relevant only in providing an account of belief. Then epistemology is supposed to be concerned with outlining the special relationship that belief must have with the objects of knowledge in order to count as knowledge.

One trouble with the traditional approach is that it gives us no understanding of why we should turn out to have a concept of knowledge that corresponds to one such construction rather than to any other. The philosophical accounts are constructed in response to counterexamples that appeal to our actual internalised conception of what counts as knowledge, but they do not explain the fundamental role of our concept of knowledge.

As a result, the accounts that emerge from the traditional approach have a degree of complexity that fails to reflect the apparent simplicity of our actual grasp of the concept of knowledge. The complexity by itself is perhaps not a problem; but there should at least be some indication in the traditional account of how it is that we can grasp the idea of knowledge so easily.