Download top and best high-quality free Knowledge PNG Transparent Images backgrounds available in various sizes. To view the full PNG size resolution click on any of the below image thumbnail.

License Info: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC

A familiarity, awareness, or comprehension of someone or something, such as facts (descriptive knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (objective knowledge), is known as knowledge (acquaintance knowledge). According to most accounts, knowledge may be gained in various ways and from a variety of sources, including but not limited to perception, reason, memory, witness, scientific investigation, education, and practice. Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge.

A theoretical or practical grasp of a subject is referred to as “knowledge.” It might be implicit (as in practical competence or knowledge) or explicit (as in theoretical subject comprehension); formal or informal; systematic or specific.

In the Theaetetus, the philosopher Plato famously emphasized the need to distinguish between knowledge and genuine belief, prompting many to credit to him a definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” For more than half a century, epistemologists have debated the issues with this concept highlighted by the Gettier dilemma.

The idea that philosophy’s core was “theory of knowledge,” a theory separate from the sciences since it was their basis, allowing for the ultimate separation of philosophy from science… It’s difficult to fathom what “philosophy” might have been in the age of contemporary science without the concept of a “theory of knowing.”

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Nature’s Mirror

The major focus of epistemology is the study of what we know, how we come to know it, and what it means to know something. It is crucial to define knowledge in epistemology because having a belief is not enough; one must also have strong grounds for that view. Otherwise, there would be no reason to favor one belief over another.

Epistemologists have been debating the concept of knowledge for a long time. According to the traditional definition, a statement must fulfill three requirements to be deemed knowledge, which Plato defined but did not ultimately endorse: it must be justified, true, and believed. As many Gettier examples are considered to illustrate, epistemologists today largely agree that these requirements are insufficient.

Alternative definitions have been offered, such as Robert Nozick’s suggestion that all instances of knowledge must ‘follow the truth,’ and Simon Blackburn’s proposal that people have a justified genuine belief “via a fault, flaw, or failure” do not know. According to Richard Kirkham, our concept of knowledge demands the reality of the belief’s evidence.

Following Moore’s paradox, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that one might say, “He believes that, but it isn’t so,” but not “He knows it, but it isn’t so,” in contrast to this method. He says that they are not different mental states but rather various methods of communicating about conviction. The difference here is not the speaker’s mental state but the activity in which they are involved.

For example, knowing that the kettle is boiling does not imply that you are in a specific frame of mind, but rather that you are doing a specific activity with the statement that the kettle is boiling. By looking at how “knowledge” is employed in natural languages, Wittgenstein hoped to avoid definition.

Knowledge, he thought, was akin to a family resemblance. Following this logic, “knowledge” has been rebuilt as a cluster notion that highlights key characteristics that no definition properly captures.

Download Knowledge PNG images transparent gallery.