What is knowledge? Do we have any?

This chapter introduces you to an area of philosophy called the ‘theory of knowledge’, also known as epistemology. In particular, we will be exploring two philosophical questions that are fundamental to epistemology. The first question is: what is the nature of knowledge? What is it that determines whether or not someone knows something? As we will see, this question is harder to answer than you might think. The second question is: do we have any knowledge? This second question concerns the philosophical problem of radical scepticism, which is the problem of demonstrating that we do have the knowledge we typically credit to ourselves. In its most extreme form, radical scepticism maintains that knowledge is simply impossible. As I hope to convince you, explaining just what is mistaken about radical scepticism is quite a challenge. We will take these two questions in turn, since we need to have a reasonable grip on what knowledge is before we can understand what it is the sceptic is claiming we don’t possess.