Knowledge Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Knowledge

Einleitung anhören

00:00

Zusammenfassung von Knowledge

Name: Knowledge
Rating: 4.2 (88 reviews)
Author: Jennifer Nagel

Jennifer Nagel

A Very Short Introduction

4.2 (88 Bewertungen)

25 Min.

Themen

Westliche Philosophie

Inhaltsübersicht

Knowledge
in 8 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 8

What’s in it for me? How much do you really know?

Knowledge, so the saying goes, is power. But in the current climate, knowledge can also be extremely confusing. Every day, we’re inundated with information. Some of it is authentic. Some of it is misleading. And much of it is downright false. We circulate select knowledge within social and political bubbles, but rarely tap into the knowledge that exists outside these bubbles.

Perhaps it’s time we got more critical about what we know – or what we think we know. And epistemology offers the perfect starting point for critiquing all things knowledge. This philosophical field studies the concept of knowledge – how it’s generated, circulated, and absorbed. These blinks outline key concepts in the field.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the intricate ways in which belief connects to knowledge;
the secrets of mind reading; and
why we may or may not know that Mount Everest is the world’s tallest mountain.

The verb “to know” is simple, but carries a complex meaning.

These days, knowledge is within easy reach. The internet is only ever a click away, and media operates on a 24-hour cycle. But that knowledge is intermingled with opinion and propaganda. And in an era of information overload, it’s natural to wonder which is which. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find deeper questions: How do we know what we know? And what is knowledge, anyway?

These questions are at the heart of epistemology, the philosophical field devoted to the study of knowledge.

The key message here is: The verb “to know” is simple, but carries a complex meaning.

There are a few things we need to get straight about knowledge.

For one thing, knowledge is not a naturally appearing resource like gold or coal. It’s generated by a knower. Imagine a coin that's shaken in a box. It lands heads side up. That’s a fact. But until someone looks in the box, this fact isn’t knowledge, simply because it isn’t known. Knowledge is what happens when a person accesses a fact.

For another thing, there’s a difference between knowing something to be true and believing it to be true. Sounds simple enough – but how can you tell whether you know something or merely believe it? Some cynics say that we can’t tell the difference, or even that there is no difference: knowledge is just a label we give to the beliefs of certain elite people like CEOs and scientists. A more generous approach might point out that even expert knowledge can be, and is, challenged. And besides, everyone can know. There’s a reason why “to know” is one of the ten most commonly used verbs in the English language.

Here’s where things get really meta: we can only know things that we are confident are true. But who’s to say what “true” is? Plenty of philosophers think truth is objective, meaning it can’t vary from knower to knower. But the fifth-century Greek philosopher Protagoras thought differently. He posited that truth is subjective. After all, if two people stand in a breeze, one of them can know the breeze is cold while the other, with equal certainty, can know it's warm.

But to take Protagoras’s argument to its logical conclusion, we’re forced to say that everyone is always right about what they feel to be true, and no one is ever wrong. So, then, for the purposes of interrogating knowledge further, let’s side with Plato and countless other philosophers who believe Protagoras is wrong and truth is objective; it’s something that exists as an entity outside any individual human self.

According to skeptics, we might not know what we think we know.

Let’s leave Protagoras’s theories behind and assume that we can only know things that are true. Furthermore, let’s accept that, according to the prevailing philosophy, truth is objective and exists outside of us. Think of truth as an electrical outlet: if we can plug into that outlet, we access knowledge.

But can we plug into that outlet? A skeptic might argue no, not really.

Descartes’ rationalism and Locke’s empiricism advanced two new understandings of knowledge.

Remember how the skeptics posited that we can never truly know anything? Well, not everyone agreed. On the opposing team, there are two heavyweight thinkers: Rene Descartes and John Locke.

Descartes and Locke were both key figures in the early modern philosophy of the seventeenth century. Both made influential contributions to epistemological thought, refuting the skeptics’ view that knowledge couldn’t be accessed. But that didn’t mean they agreed on everything.

Knowledge and belief have a crucial, yet slippery, relationship.

Why not follow Locke’s train of thought a little further? If we accept that, contrary to Descartes’s view, knowledge isn’t innate, then the conditions through which we come to know something suddenly get more complicated.

Centuries later, in the 1960s, a so-called classical analysis of knowledge was proposed to better explain these conditions. The elements of this analysis claim that a subject can only know a proposition when the proposition is factual, when the subject believes in the proposition, and when the subject is justified in her belief.

Epistemology calls even basic facts into question.

As we learned in the last blink, after Gettier problematized the classical analysis that knowledge rests on justified true belief, Alvin Goldman proposed the causal theory of knowledge. In fact, Goldman’s theory belongs to a broader category of epistemological theory called externalism.

To understand externalism, let’s look at Mount Everest – which you probably know as the world’s tallest mountain. But how do you know this? Unless you received this fact when you were also, say, having your first kiss, you won’t remember exactly how you learned it. You picked it up from a number of sources, and you feel it’s right. According to externalists, you know that Everest is the world’s tallest mountain.

Testimony is a form of knowledge that divides epistemologists.

Both internalist and externalist schools of thought see first-person thought – though different modes of it – as a reliable source of knowledge. But what happens when we bring another perspective into the equation?

There’s no denying that much of what we know about our world is secondhand knowledge, learned through the accounts of others. We know about life in ancient Rome because we can read about it; we know about events unfolding on the other side of the globe because we see them in the news.

Knowledge depends on context.

Some epistemologists consider the question of whether secondhand testimony counts as knowledge, or whether we can ever know something when our knowledge is based on a false belief. But there’s one school of thought, contextualism, that cuts through these questions. As the name suggests, their position is this: It all comes down to context.

This is the key message: Knowledge depends on context.

Humans can intuit others’ knowledge.

There’s another method for attaining knowledge that we haven’t discussed yet. And it’s one you use all the time, without even being aware that you’re using it. It’s intuition.

Think about it. If your friend Sam tells you, “I’m in line for a new position at work,” you might report that news by saying, “Sam knows he got the job.” Then again, you might say, “Sam thinks he got the job.” You don’t have to ponder which verb to choose. We don’t need to do that because, subconsciously, we can often intuit what other people know, what they’re unsure about, and what they don’t know.

Du möchtest die gesamte Zusammenfassung von Knowledge sehen?

Kernaussagen in Knowledge

Mehr Wissen in weniger Zeit

Sachbücher auf den Punkt gebracht

Kernaussagen aus Sachbüchern in ca. 15 Minuten pro Titel lesen & anhören mit den „Blinks”

Zeitsparende Empfehlungen

Titel, die dein Leben bereichern, passend zu deinen Interessen und Zielen

Podcasts in Kurzform ^Neu

Kernaussagen wichtiger Podcasts im Kurzformat mit den neuen „Shortcasts”

Worum geht es in Knowledge?

Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (2014) is an accessible introduction to the complex field of epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge itself. What can we know? And how do we know that we know it? Knowledge surveys epistemological thinking from the ancient Greeks to contemporary philosophy, shining a bright light on this fascinating field of thought.

Wer Knowledge lesen sollte

Philosophy buffs and newbies alike
Skeptics who take everything with a grain of salt
Knowledge workers interested in delving deeper into knowledge itself.

Über den Autor

Jennifer Nagel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. A highly respected epistemologist, her work focuses on the nexus of knowledge and belief. In addition to Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction, she’s written numerous academic articles on the topic of knowledge

Kategorien mit Knowledge

Bildung & Wissen Philosophie

Ähnlich wie Knowledge

Lying

Sam Harris

Why we need to stop lying and start telling the truth

Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

How to Find Respite in the Modern Age

A Very Short Introduction

Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling

17 min

4.4

Modern Romance

Aziz Ansari and Erik Klinenberg

Texting, sexting and more: How Aziz Ansari sees love in the 21st century

Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.

What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

21 min

4.1

Savor

Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung

Mindful Eating, Mindful Life

Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary

A Simple Plan to Stop People-Pleasing, Reclaim Your Boundaries, and Say Yes to the Life You Want

16 min

4.3

How to Measure Anything

Douglas W. Hubbard

Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

The stoic thinking of a Philosopher-King

Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever

24 min

4.2

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Mind, Brain and the Body in the Transformation of Trauma

Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business, and Live Happily Ever After

19 min

3.0

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

23 min

4.7

My Morning Routine

Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander

How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired

27 min

4.1

Waking the Tiger

Peter A. Levine with Ann Frederick

How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive

Timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy

Learn about the good life from a true Roman statesman

22 min

4.5

The Fifth Agreement

Don Miguel Ruiz and Don Jose Ruiz

A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery

The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want

Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

Unlock the Secrets of Existence and Transform Your Perspective

How Religion Poisons Everything

16 min

3.9

Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant

A groundbreaking and influential philosophy classic about the limits of human reason

Schopenhauer's take on will and deliberation

How Britain Made the Modern World

How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure

How to Run a Drug Cartel

How to free yourself from philosophical dogmas and assert your own values

25 min

4.7

The Four Pillars of Investing

William J. Bernstein

Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio

The Empowered Woman's Guide to Pleasuring a Man

10 min

4.0

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic on Racial Prejudice & Injustice

26 min

4.8

Easy Money

Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman

Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation, and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be

The True Teachings of Bruce Lee

The Greek Epic on the End of the Trojan War and Achilles’ Wrath

The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

24 min

4.4

Discipline Equals Freedom

Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

The New Psychology of Success

15 min

4.5

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life

How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

22 min

4.3

❤️ für Blinkist️️️

Ines S.

Ich bin begeistert. Ich liebe Bücher aber durch zwei kleine Kinder komme ich einfach nicht zum Lesen. Und ja, viele Bücher haben viel bla bla und die Quintessenz ist eigentlich ein Bruchteil.

Genau dafür ist Blinkist total genial! Es wird auf das Wesentliche reduziert, die Blinks sind gut verständlich, gut zusammengefasst und auch hörbar! Das ist super. 80 Euro für ein ganzes Jahr klingt viel, aber dafür unbegrenzt Zugriff auf 3000 Bücher. Und dieses Wissen und die Zeitersparnis ist unbezahlbar.

Ekaterina S.

Extrem empfehlenswert. Statt sinnlos im Facebook zu scrollen höre ich jetzt täglich zwischen 3-4 "Bücher". Bei manchen wird schnelle klar, dass der Kauf unnötig ist, da schon das wichtigste zusammen gefasst wurde..bei anderen macht es Lust doch das Buch selbständig zu lesen. Wirklich toll

Nils S.

Einer der besten, bequemsten und sinnvollsten Apps die auf ein Handy gehören. Jeden morgen 15-20 Minuten für die eigene Weiterbildung/Entwicklung oder Wissen.

Julia P.

Viele tolle Bücher, auf deren Kernaussagen reduziert- präzise und ansprechend zusammengefasst. Endlich habe ich das Gefühl, Zeit für Bücher zu finden, für die ich sonst keine Zeit habe.