Knowing how to improve your quality of thinking and reasoning plays a key role in your education. Indeed, developing critical thinking skills, cogent arguments, and rational analysis, are all aspects of this course, namely 'the paths of knowledge'.

 

Epistemology (better known in academia as the formal subject  theory of knowledge) promotes your ability to think about thinking, to evaluate the role of thinking, and critique reason as a source of knowledge.

But how can we define knowledge?


 

Plato’s definition is as good as any: ‘justified, true belief.’

Propositional Knowledge

  • I know French (to know a language - saber hablar)
  • I know France (to know a physical place - conocer)
  • I know Mariano (to know a person - conocer)
  • I know how to drive (know-how - saber cómo)
  • I know that the Earth is round (know-that - saber que)

It is the last kind of knowledge, ‘know-that’ or propositional knowledge, the one we will be focusing on in this course.

There are several ways in which we can claim we know something. For instance, I can say:

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