Introduction

• Knowledge and its transmission is a central concern of education.

• Critical questions include what aspects of human knowledge to select for transmission and what criteria to use in curriculum planning.

• Understanding the philosophical basis of knowledge and the sources of knowledge and their validity is essential.

• Philosophy is conceived as critical inquiry and a second-order discipline focusing on the claims of intellectual activities involving knowledge.

• Philosophy involves analysis, clarification, and criticism of concepts.

• This view is inspired by the idea that enquiry results are acceptable only if they are publicly testable, reliable, and coherent with other public knowledge.

• Knowledge is not just vast bodies of tested symbolic expressions; these are merely the public manifestations of how human experience has been shaped.

• To acquire knowledge means to become aware of how experience is structured, organized, and made meaningful in specific ways.

• The varieties of human knowledge form the basis for curriculum planning and the choice of disciplines.

• It is necessary to understand how knowledge has evolved and to engage in epistemological considerations of different forms of knowledge that constitute various disciplines.

Concept of Knowledge

• The nature of knowledge has been a central concern in philosophy since earliest times.

• The Theory of Knowledge is a branch of philosophy known as Epistemology.

• The term Epistemology derives from Greek: ‘episteme’ meaning knowledge and ‘logos’ meaning discourse or science.

• Epistemology is the philosophical field concerned with the nature and justification of human knowledge.

• It investigates the origin, nature, methods, validity, and limits of knowledge.

• Epistemologists historically focus on key questions such as:

  • What is knowledge?

  • Is knowledge unified or diverse?

  • What is the structure of knowledge?

  • What are the logical categories of knowledge?

Definition of Knowledge

• According to the most widely accepted definition, knowledge is justified true belief.

• Knowledge is a kind of belief, supported by the fact that both knowledge and belief can have the same objects.

• What is true of someone who believes something is often true of someone who knows it.

• Example: “The sun rises in the east” is knowledge or true belief supported by daily observations over millions of years.

• We can be said to have knowledge only of what is true.

• If a proposition (p) is false, then the person does not know it, even if they believe or say so.

• Beliefs that merely happen to be true are not knowledge; knowledge requires justification.

• Knowledge is expressed in propositions.

• A proposition is what a meaningful sentence conveys in terms of truth or meaning.

• For a sentence to be meaningful, the concepts expressed must be true and correspond to the existing or past state of affairs.

• A proposition (p) is the meaning of the sentence; multiple sentences can express the same proposition.

• The proposition is either true or false, while the sentence carries meaning or may fail to have meaning.

• Not every sentence expresses a proposition; only sentences used to assert something express propositions.

• Examples of propositions:

  • “A square has four sides that are equal.”

  • “I know that ice melts on heating.”

• To understand any proposition, one must first understand the concepts involved in it.

• According to John Hospers, there are two requirements for knowing:

  • (a) Objective requirement: p must be true

  • (b) Subjective requirement: one must believe p