Two Kinds of Knowledge?

A recurrent theme of my posts is that on Gangadean's theory of knowledge we know next to nothing. I take that as a reductio against his theory of knowledge because I take it that we know lots of things. Among the things which Gangdean's theory of knowledge invariable should make one skeptical about are propositions like, "the bible is the word of God" or "the bible is divinely inspired." The reason that this is the case is that Gangadean's standards for knowledge are impossibly high--we just can't seem to prove that the bible is the word of God. We might have various reasons to believe that it is so, but they fall short of proof. I would think that such a result is particularly troubling for the Christian that is moved by Gangadeanian epistemology. That is to say, a Christian wanting to maintain Gangadean's theory of knowledge (where knowledge requires certainty) ought to find it especially worrisome that such a theory entails that knowledge that the bible is really the word of God is impossible to attain. After all, Christians hold dearly to the scripture in guiding their lives--and the assumption that it contains divine truths is largely why this is so.

One way to resist this result is to simply say that we don't need to know things of the sort--maybe it's not important to know that the bible is special revelation. Perhaps it's enough to have a reasonable belief that it is so. But I doubt that any Gangadeanian would find that acceptable. 

Another option would be to deny that Gangadean's theory actually leads to skepticism of the sort I've argued for. This is usually how Gangadeanians respond, but it's proven difficult for them-- Gangadeanian's are in my experience ill-equipped for the task including Gangadean himself. The arguments are just not there. 

Finally, a third option is to fight for a new conceptual distinction and shall be the topic of this post. This was actually suggested to me once by Anderson although in a very tentative way. I was raising some of the very issues that I've explored in this blog about the worry of skepticism which seems to follow from Gangadean's demanding theory of knowledge. It was then suggested by Anderson that perhaps there were really two kinds of knowledge: one requires certainty and the other doesn't. We can have knowledge of the former kind of only "the most basic things" and yet we have knowledge of the latter sort (the one that doesn't require certainty) of a larger scope of propositions---you know, like everyday propositions (e.g., that I have hands). 

To make things easier let's label these two kinds of knowledge thusly: Gangadeanian knowledge which requires epistemic certainty = G-Knowledge (or in verb form, G-knows) and the latter sort we'll call E-Knowledge (or E-knows, in verb form) which is short for "everyday-knowledge." Here are some critical questions that we should consider in light of this proposal. 

1) Does it actually solve any of the problems it's supposed to?

2) Is it independently motivated so as not to be ad hoc?

3) How do we draw the boundary line between the things we can only E-Know and that which we can G-know? 

With respect to 1), if there were two kinds of knowledge constituted by different evidentiary standards, then it would seem that some of the bite of skeptical worries is assuaged. So that's a virtue of the proposal. As I've argued before, you can't know much of anything on Gangdean's theory of knowledge. A wife couldn't possibly know that she is waking up next to her husband each morning because it's at least possible that he was switched at night with a facsimile--or that her perceptual faculties are playing a trick or her (e.g., she's hallucinating that it's her husband). That for Gangadean means she could not know that the being next to her is her husband. That makes the theory silly of course. By suggesting that there are actually two kinds of knowledge we can make Gangadean's theory seem a little less silly in this way. The idea would be that while you can't G-know things like, "I am not hallucinating right now" you can at least E-Know it. Remember E-knowledge has lower standards than G-knowledge or so the argument would go. 

Unfortunately for the Gangadeanian wielding this distinction, it solves one set of problems only to introduce new ones. The problem is that by proliferating kinds of knowledge, we run into a value question. Why should we care about G-knowledge at all? If both E-knowledge and G-knowledge are species of knowledge, then why is one to be desired over the other particularly if one has far more applications than the other. Can't a person, even according to the two-kinds of knowledge-Gangdeanian, E-know that God exists on the basis of intuition or experience or by testimony or evidentialist approaches to apologetics? And if so, why do they need anything else? In other words, we need an argument explaining just why G-knows, given how hard it is to come by, is desirable, valuable, or necessary. Why must a person G-knows that God exists rather than merely E-knowing that it is so? Of course, there's a value question about knowledge even when we're only thinking about one kind of knowledge and a significant body of literature on the topic, but introducing another kind only makes the question more pressing particularly when the claim is that we can know some things in one sense, but not the other. 

As to 2), the quick answer is that it's more certainly ad hoc. Anderson tentatively proposed it in a conversation in order to save his theory from a serious problem. Suppose it solves the very problem it's purported to solve--- that doesn't make it true or give us reason to think it's true. We need independent grounds for that. I could come up with a very different theory of knowledge and in the face of counterexamples suggest more and more kinds of knowledge--but that doesn't make my theory or the patches true. This is why it's important to ask for independent motivations i.e., reasons to believe that there are two kinds of knowledge which have nothing to do with the problem that it purports to get around in order to preserve Gangadean's theory of knowledge (which is the very thing in question). 

3) The issue here is how we can determine which things are in principle E-knowable, but not G-knowable. If you could do this then you could figure out just which things are G-knowable. It's no good in the current context for the Gangadeanian to say that "the most basic things" are sort of by definition, G-knowable. Here's why. Gangadean's argument for his theory of knowledge is predicated on the idea that skepticism follows if the basic things are not clear (G-knowable). But the two-kinds of knowledge thesis is meant to undermine the skeptical worries in the first place. So skepticism at least of one sort is defanged but out goes with it the transcendental argument for the necessity of clarity of basic things (i.e., the G-knowability of basic things).

Even if the basic things aren't clear (in the G-knowable sense), admitting that there are two kinds of knowledge allows that the basic things could be clear in the E-knowable sense. That makes the transcendental argument that Gangadeanians favor no good, here. This brings us back to our discussion in 1). What makes G-knowledge worthwhile? Valuable? Desirable? Why should we care about it at all? Why not just stick with E-knowledge of both the less basic and the more basic? It's knowledge after all!