Exploring Knowledge through Plato and Williamson

This essay explores knowledge as 'awareness of truth'—a work-in-progress. I welcome critiques

In this essay, I will be exploring knowledge through Plato and Williamson and providing arguments for why knowledge as awareness of truth could be a potential model. I am currently reading Nagel’s work on Epistemic Anxiety and Zagzebski’s critique of knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB) to further my grasp on epistemology and potentially engage with these works here in the future.

Plato’s Meno and Williamson’s Knowledge and Belief present two different approaches to knowledge: one the belief-first approach and the other the knowledge-first approach. Plato’s opinion in Meno is that knowledge is a "true opinion" that is shackled, and this shackle is what makes knowledge worth more than true opinion. This is similar to the Justified True Belief (JTB) model of knowledge. Plato, through the words of Socrates, says that the shackle of figuring out what makes something true—understood as justification—is what ties belief to reality.

Williamson believes that knowledge is much more fundamental and cannot be analyzed. In Williamson’s view, knowledge is something that tracks reality or the truth and is a success-based term.

In my view, knowledge is awareness of truth: knowledge = awareness(truth). I use "awareness" here to refer to both understanding something and believing it. Thus, one needs both a true understanding and a true belief for something to be knowledge. For example, being aware that the sun is a ball of combusting gases involves understanding what gases are, how they differ from other states of matter, the process of combustion, and how combustion produces heat and light.

What does "true understanding" mean? True understanding refers to nothing but the shackle that Plato talks about—figuring out what makes something true. The apple falls because of gravity and not because it is red or the tree sneezed (if we agree that science has provided us with the truth). You only have knowledge if you have figured out that bodies exert forces on each other by virtue of their masses.

Suppose we raised the question: Is understanding knowing? Is it? Can we not understand something that isn’t true? For example, you can understand the concept of a flat Earth, but it isn’t knowing anything about the state of the Earth. Only if it is true will it become knowledge. Since truth is such an undeniable component of knowledge, we can show that knowledge is analyzable. It is not a belief or anything else but knowledge. However, it can be broken down into at least reflecting the truth or tracking the truth.

Let’s take the case of a child who has been told the Earth orbits the Sun. To know the Earth orbits the Sun, the child must know what the Earth is, what the Sun is, and what orbiting means. This constitutes an understanding of this sentence. Now, one could argue that the child needs to know F = Gm₁m₂/r². But is this really necessary to know the Earth orbits the Sun? The meaning and intentionality of this sentence emphasize knowing that the Earth is moving around the Sun in a circular manner. An understanding of "moving in a circular manner" is what is required here, not why it is moving in a circular manner.

While this degree of understanding could be interpreted as degrees of knowledge, upon further inspection, we can see that it is not so. When you learn that the Earth moves around the Sun because of gravitational forces, you are deepening your understanding but not your knowledge. You are adding new knowledge about a new truth—how something happens. This does not change that the Earth still orbits the Sun; it is an added feature. You may start understanding more, and that is because your knowledge has increased. Knowledge itself is binary—either one has awareness of a truth or not—but understanding admits degrees.