Knowledge first

And this is something that doesn't just apply to humans; it applies to all animals. Predators and prey, for example: predators need to know where the prey is, and the prey needs to know where the predator is. And that's a matter of life and death.

Where belief comes in is because sometimes, in attempting to get knowledge of their environment, things go wrong: animals are misled, things aren't the way they look. And then animals may get beliefs that are false, or maybe true, but only by accident. And so those are the kinds of cases where things go wrong.

But cognition malfunctioning has to be understood in relation to cognition functioning properly, in the same way that you can't understand how a heart is malfunctioning unless you know what it is for a heart to function well. And so the primary thing has to be the case of good functioning, which is knowledge. And I think that idea—that belief has to be understood in terms of knowledge—was the complete opposite of the standard view, which had been that knowledge has to be understood in terms of belief.

As an account of knowledge, I think it's widely recognized that it doesn't work as it stands. And there are lots of examples of cases of justified true belief that are not knowledge, like cases of someone who sees a clock and forms a justified belief about the time — let's say that it's three o'clock — by looking at the clock. But what they don't realize is that the clock has stopped. And although the time, as a matter of pure coincidence, is in fact three o'clock, that's just chance that they looked at it at the right moment. And so that's a case where they have a justified true belief that it's three o'clock, but they don't know that it's three o'clock.

But I think there's also something very strange about those kinds of attempts to analyze knowledge in terms of belief, because since then, although people have generally abandoned that particular analysis, they've been looking at more complicated analyses of knowledge in terms of belief along similar lines — that it's belief plus truth plus lots of extra bits and pieces.

One thing that's already haywire with approaches like that is that they have much too sophisticated a conception of who this potential knower is. It doesn't have to be an adult human; it can be a much simpler creature. It can be a nonhuman animal or a very small child — creatures for whom questions of justification are just silly.

It's a challenging cognitive task. And if you try to do it starting from nothing, from assuming that the other person or animal is just like a blank slate and then somehow building up a picture of their mind from nothing, that makes it a pretty much intractable task. Because each of us, in effect, has some kind of map of the world. And then if I'm trying to understand you, I would have to know what your map was. My map would have to include a map of your map, but then your map will have a map of my map. So I'll have a map of your map of my map, and things will just get out of hand in a way that makes the whole task intractable.

The way that we're able to understand each other is because we assume that we share a common world that is out there and that we are perceiving. We understand each other because we assume, as a default, that the other sees the same world that we do. And so it's treating knowledge of the world as the default that we start with.

In action, we might know that we need something to drink. We might also know where a source of water is, and we know how to get there. And so by putting those pieces of knowledge together and acting on them, we can navigate to this stream and have a drink of water. So that's a simple case of acting on one's knowledge of the world to get something that one knows one needs.

A very elementary case of this is hiding, which is something that lots of animals do, and lots of small children do. It might seem a very simple thing, but when you're hiding, you're hiding from someone or something. And the point of hiding is to prevent the other from knowing where you are. That's what hiding is.

Something as simple as hiding is a way in which creatures try to put, for example, a predator into a state of ignorance. If I'm hiding from a tiger, I want the tiger to be ignorant of my whereabouts. Any animal that engages in hiding is already drawing a distinction between knowledge and ignorance.

There are aspects of journalism which attempt to deal with this problem, but which I think fail because they are not taking a knowledge-first approach. One aspect of that is that journalists and editors sometimes make a big deal about the need for what they call balance, which means that they want to have people on each side of a question.

But often that means that they have somebody who's a genuine expert debating with somebody who's some kind of pseudo-expert who doesn't really have any qualifications in the area, whether it's global warming or whatever it happens to be. I think we can have a better approach than one which simply balances truth against falsity and knowledge against ignorance.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026