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Thomas De Quincey - The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power

Thomas De Quincey, "The Literature of Knowlege and the Literature of Power" (First Published in the North British Review, August, 1848, as part of a critical essay on Alexander Pope)

Thomas De Quincey, Letter with signature, 1807

Every great classic in our native language should from time to time be reviewed anew; and especially if he belongs in any considerable extent to that section of the literature which connects itself with manners, and if his reputation originally, or his style of composition, is likely to have been much influenced by the transient fashions of his own age. The withdrawal, for instance, from a dramatic poet, or a satirist, of any false luster which he has owed to his momentary connection with what we may call the personalities of a fleeting generation, or of any undue shelter to his errors which may have gathered round them from political bias, or from intellectual infirmities amongst his partisans, will sometimes seriously modify, after a century or so, the fairest original appreciation of a fine writer. A window composed of Claude Lorraine glasses spreads over the landscape outside a disturbing effect, which not the most practiced eye can evade. The eidola theatri ["idols of the theater," one of Francis Bacon's Idols of the Mind — ed.] affect us all. No man escapes the contagion from his contemporary bystanders.

As books multiply to an unmanageable excess, selection becomes more and more a necessity for readers, and the power of selection more and more a desperate problem for the busy part of readers. The possibility of selecting wisely is becoming continually more hopeless as the necessity for selection is becoming continually more pressing. Exactly as the growing weight of books overlays and stifles the power of comparison, pari passu is the call for comparison the more clamorous; and thus arises a duty correspondingly more urgent of searching and revising until everything spurious has been weeded out from amongst the Flora of our highest literature, and until the waste of time for those who have so little at their command is reduced to a minimum . For, where the good cannot be read in its twentieth part, the more requisite it is that no part of the bad should steal an hour of the available time; and it is not to be endured that people without a minute to spare should be obliged first of all to read a book before they can ascertain whether in fact it is worth reading. The public cannot read by proxy as regards the good which it is to appropriate, but it can as regards the poison which it is to escape. And thus, as literature expands, becoming continually more of a household necessity, the duty resting upon critics (who are the vicarious readers for the public) becomes continually more urgent — of reviewing all works that may be supposed to have benefited too much or too indiscriminately by the superstition of a name. The praegustatores ["pre-tasters," ie those whose obligation was to taste a Roman emperor's food to determine its fitness for eating — ed.] should have tasted of every cup, and reported its quality, before the public call for it; and, above all, they should have done this in all cases of the higher literature — that is, of literature properly so called.

What is it that we mean by literature? Popularly, and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include everything that is printed in a book. Little logic is required to disturb that definition. The most thoughtless person is easily made aware that in the idea of literature one essential element is some relation to a general and common interest of man — so that what applies only to a local, or professional, or merely personal interest, even though presenting itself in the shape of a book, will not belong to literature. So far the definition is easily narrowed; and it is as easily expanded. For not only is much that takes a station in books not literature; but inversely, much that really is literature never reaches a station in books. The weekly sermons of Christendom, that vast pulpit literature which acts so extensively upon the popular mind — to warn, to uphold, to renew, to comfort, to alarm — does not attain the sanctuary of libraries in the ten-thousandth part of its extent. The drama again — as, for instance, the finest of Shakespeare's plays in England, and all leading Athenian plays in the noontide of the Attic stage — operated as a literature on the public mind, and were (according to the strictest letter of that term) published through the audiences that witnessed 1 their representation some time before they were published as things to be read; and they were published in this scenical mode of publication with much more effect than they could have had as books during ages of costly copying or of costly printing.

Books, therefore, do not suggest an idea coextensive and interchangeable with the idea of literature; since much literature, scenic, forensic, or didactic (as from lecturers and public orators) , may never come into books, and much that does come into books may connect itself with no literary interest. 2 But a far more important correction, applicable to the common vague idea of literature is to be sought not so much in a better definition of literature as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfils. In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the Literature of Kowledge ; and, secondly, the Literature of Power . The function of the first is — to teach ; the function of the second is — to move : the first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely, it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but, proximately, it does and must operate — else it ceases to be a Literature of Power — on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth — namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven — the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly — are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz. the Literature of Power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power — that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth: whereas the very first step in power is a flight — is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten.

Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated and continually called out into exercise by the great phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, &c., it is certain that, like any animal power or muscular energy falling into disuse, all such sensibilities would gradually droop and dwindle. It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the Literature of Power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or cooperation with the mere discursive understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of "the understanding heart" — making the heart, i.e. the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite. Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration. What is meant, for instance, by poetic justice? — It does not mean a justice that differs by its object from the ordinary justice of human jurisprudence; for then it must be confessedly a very bad kind of justice; but it means a justice that differs from common forensic justice by the degree in which it attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent over its own ends, as dealing — not with the refractory elements of earthly life, but with the elements of its own creation, and with materials flexible to its own purest preconceptions. It is certain that, were it not for the Literature of Power, these ideals would often remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms; whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and germinate into vital activities. The commonest novel, by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of wrong and right, sustains and quickens those affections. Calling them into action, it rescues them from torpor. And hence the pre-eminency over all authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the Literature of Knowledge is but a provisional work: a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit [while it behaved well — ed.]. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded — nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order — and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the Literature of Power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence: first, as regards absolute truth; secondly, when that combat was over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a Laplace, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra, but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the Iliad, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the Othello or King Lear , the Hamlet or Macbeth , and the Paradise Lost, are not militant, but triumphant for ever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michelangelo. These things are separated not by imparity, but by disparity. They are not thought of as unequal under the same standard, but as different in kind, and, if otherwise equal, as equal under a different standard. Human works of immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing; they never absolutely repeat each other, never approach so near as not to differ; and they differ not as better and worse, or simply by more and less: they differ by undecipherable and incommunicable differences, that cannot be caught by mimicries, that cannot be reflected in the mirror of copies, that cannot become ponderable in the scales of vulgar comparison.

All works in this class, as opposed to those in the Literature of Knowledge, first, work by far deeper agencies, and, secondly, are more permanent; in the strictest sense they are χτηματα εσ αει: and what evil they do, or what good they do, is commensurate with the national language, sometimes long after the nation has departed. At this hour, five hundred years since their creation, the tales of Chaucer, never equaled on this earth for their tenderness, and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the modernizations of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth. At this hour, one thousand eight hundred years since their creation, the Pagan tales of Ovid, never equaled on this earth for the gaiety of their movement and the capricious graces of their narrative, are read by all Christendom. This man's people and their monuments are dust; but he is alive: he has survived them, as he told us that he had it in his commission to do, by a thousand years; "and shall a thousand more."

All the Literature of Knowledge builds only ground nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the plough; but the Literature of Power builds nests in aerial altitudes of temples sacred from violation, or of forests inaccessible to fraud. This is a great prerogative of the power literature; and it is a greater which lies in the mode of its influence. The knowledge literature, like the fashion of this world, passeth away. An encyclopedia is its abstract; and, in this respect, it may be taken for its speaking symbol — that before one generation has passed an encyclopedia is superannuated; for it speaks through the dead memory and unimpassioned understanding, which have not the repose of higher faculties, but are continually enlarging and varying their phylacteries. But all literature properly so called — literature χατ εξοχην [par excellence — ed.] — for the very same reason that it is so much more durable than the Literature of Knowledge, is (and by the very same proportion it is) more intense and electrically searching in its impressions. The directions in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and the combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. 3 And of this let every one be assured — that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood.

1. Charles I, for example, when Prince of Wales, and many others in his father's court, gained their known familiarity with Shakespeare not through the original quartos, so slenderly diffused, nor through the first folio of 1623, but through the court representations of his chief dramas at Whitehall.

2. What are called The Blue Books — by which title are understood the folio Reports issued every session of Parliament by committees of the two Houses, and stitched into blue covers — though often sneered at by the ignorant as so much waste paper, will be acknowledged gratefully by those who have used them diligently as the main well-beads of all accurate information as to the Great Britain of this day. As an immense depository of faithful (and not superannuated) statistics, they are indispensable to the honest student. But no man would therefore class The Blue Books as literature.

3. The reason why the broad distinctions between the two literatures of power and knowledge so little fix the attention lies in the fact that a vast proportion of books — history, biography, travels, miscellaneous essays, &c. — lying in a middle zone, confound these distinctions by interblending them. All that we call "amusement" or "entertainment" is a diluted form of the power belonging to passion, and also a mixed form; and, where threads of direct instruction intermingle in the texture with these threads of power, this absorption of the duality into one representative nuance neutralizes the separate perception of either. Fused into a tertium quid , or neutral state, they disappear to the popular eye as the repelling forces which, in fact, they are.

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The Analysis of Knowledge

For any person, there are some things they know, and some things they don’t. What exactly is the difference? What does it take to know something? It’s not enough just to believe it—we don’t know the things we’re wrong about. Knowledge seems to be more like a way of getting at the truth. The analysis of knowledge concerns the attempt to articulate in what exactly this kind of “getting at the truth” consists.

More particularly, the project of analysing knowledge is to state conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for propositional knowledge, thoroughly answering the question, what does it take to know something? By “propositional knowledge”, we mean knowledge of a proposition—for example, if Susan knows that Alyssa is a musician, she has knowledge of the proposition that Alyssa is a musician. Propositional knowledge should be distinguished from knowledge of “acquaintance”, as obtains when Susan knows Alyssa. The relation between propositional knowledge and the knowledge at issue in other “knowledge” locutions in English, such as knowledge-where (“Susan knows where she is”) and especially knowledge-how (“Susan knows how to ride a bicycle”) is subject to some debate (see Stanley 2011 and his opponents discussed therein).

The propositional knowledge that is the analysandum of the analysis of knowledge literature is paradigmatically expressed in English by sentences of the form “ S knows that p ”, where “ S ” refers to the knowing subject, and “ p ” to the proposition that is known. A proposed analysis consists of a statement of the following form: S knows that p if and only if j , where j indicates the analysans: paradigmatically, a list of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for S to have knowledge that p .

It is not enough merely to pick out the actual extension of knowledge. Even if, in actual fact, all cases of S knowing that p are cases of j , and all cases of the latter are cases of the former, j might fail as an analysis of knowledge. For example, it might be that there are possible cases of knowledge without j , or vice versa. A proper analysis of knowledge should at least be a necessary truth. Consequently, hypothetical thought experiments provide appropriate test cases for various analyses, as we shall see below.

Even a necessary biconditional linking knowledge to some state j would probably not be sufficient for an analysis of knowledge, although just what more is required is a matter of some controversy. According to some theorists, to analyze knowledge is literally to identify the components that make up knowledge—compare a chemist who analyzes a sample to learn its chemical composition. On this interpretation of the project of analyzing knowledge, the defender of a successful analysis of knowledge will be committed to something like the metaphysical claim that what it is for S to know p is for some list of conditions involving S and p to obtain. Other theorists think of the analysis of knowledge as distinctively conceptual —to analyse knowledge is to limn the structure of the concept of knowledge. On one version of this approach, the concept knowledge is literally composed of more basic concepts, linked together by something like Boolean operators. Consequently, an analysis is subject not only to extensional accuracy, but to facts about the cognitive representation of knowledge and other epistemic notions. In practice, many epistemologists engaging in the project of analyzing knowledge leave these metaphilosophical interpretive questions unresolved; attempted analyses, and counterexamples thereto, are often proposed without its being made explicit whether the claims are intended as metaphysical or conceptual ones. In many cases, this lack of specificity may be legitimate, since all parties tend to agree that an analysis of knowledge ought at least to be extensionally correct in all metaphysically possible worlds. As we shall see, many theories have been defended and, especially, refuted, on those terms.

The attempt to analyze knowledge has received a considerable amount of attention from epistemologists, particularly in the late 20 th Century, but no analysis has been widely accepted. Some contemporary epistemologists reject the assumption that knowledge is susceptible to analysis.

1.1 The Truth Condition

1.2 the belief condition, 1.3 the justification condition, 2. lightweight knowledge, 3. the gettier problem, 4. no false lemmas, 5.1 sensitivity, 5.3 relevant alternatives, 6.1 reliabilist theories of knowledge, 6.2 causal theories of knowledge, 7. is knowledge analyzable, 8. epistemic luck, 9. methodological options, 10.1 the “aaa” evaluations, 10.2 fake barn cases, 11. knowledge first, 12. pragmatic encroachment, 13. contextualism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. knowledge as justified true belief.

There are three components to the traditional (“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge.

• S believes that p ;
• S is justified in believing that p .

The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified true belief”.

Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its starting-point. It became something of a convenient fiction to suppose that this analysis was widely accepted throughout much of the history of philosophy. In fact, however, the JTB analysis was first articulated in the twentieth century by its attackers. [ 1 ] Before turning to influential twentieth-century arguments against the JTB theory, let us briefly consider the three traditional components of knowledge in turn.

Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that what is false cannot be known. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody knows that Hillary Clinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election. Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not a factive verb. [ 2 ] Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not literally true.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical , as opposed to epistemological , notion: truth is a matter of how things are , not how they can be shown to be. So when we say that only true things can be known, we’re not (yet) saying anything about how anyone can access the truth. As we’ll see, the other conditions have important roles to play here. Knowledge is a kind of relationship with the truth—to know something is to have a certain kind of access to a fact. [ 3 ]

The belief condition is only slightly more controversial than the truth condition. The general idea behind the belief condition is that you can only know what you believe. Failing to believe something precludes knowing it. “Belief” in the context of the JTB theory means full belief, or outright belief. In a weak sense, one might “believe” something by virtue of being pretty confident that it’s probably true—in this weak sense, someone who considered Clinton the favourite to win the election, even while recognizing a nontrivial possibility of her losing, might be said to have “believed” that Clinton would win. Outright belief is stronger (see, e.g., Fantl & McGrath 2009: 141; Nagel 2010: 413–4; Williamson 2005: 108; or Gibbons 2013: 201.). To believe outright that p , it isn’t enough to have a pretty high confidence in p ; it is something closer to a commitment or a being sure. [ 4 ]

Although initially it might seem obvious that knowing that p requires believing that p , a few philosophers have argued that knowledge without belief is indeed possible. Suppose Walter comes home after work to find out that his house has burned down. He says: “I don’t believe it”. Critics of the belief condition might argue that Walter knows that his house has burned down (he sees that it has), but, as his words indicate, he does not believe it. The standard response is that Walter’s avowal of disbelief is not literally true; what Walter wishes to convey by saying “I don’t believe it” is not that he really does not believe that his house has burned down, but rather that he finds it hard to come to terms with what he sees. If he genuinely didn’t believe it, some of his subsequent actions, such as phoning his insurance company, would be rather mysterious.

A more serious counterexample has been suggested by Colin Radford (1966). Suppose Albert is quizzed on English history. One of the questions is: “When did Queen Elizabeth die?” Albert doesn’t think he knows, but answers the question correctly. Moreover, he gives correct answers to many other questions to which he didn’t think he knew the answer. Let us focus on Albert’s answer to the question about Elizabeth:

• (E) Elizabeth died in 1603.

Radford makes the following two claims about this example:

• Albert does not believe (E).
• Albert knows (E).

Radford’s intuitions about cases like these do not seem to be idiosyncratic; Myers-Schutz & Schwitzgebel (2013) find evidence suggesting that many ordinary speakers tend to react in the way Radford suggests. In support of (a), Radford emphasizes that Albert thinks he doesn’t know the answer to the question. He doesn’t trust his answer because he takes it to be a mere guess. In support of (b), Radford argues that Albert’s answer is not at all just a lucky guess. The fact that he answers most of the questions correctly indicates that he has actually learned, and never forgotten, such historical facts.

Since he takes (a) and (b) to be true, Radford holds that belief is not necessary for knowledge. But either of (a) and (b) might be resisted. One might deny (a), arguing that Albert does have a tacit belief that (E), even though it’s not one that he thinks amounts to knowledge. David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer (2013) take this route. Alternatively, one might deny (b), arguing that Albert’s correct answer is not an expression of knowledge, perhaps because, given his subjective position, he does not have justification for believing (E). The justification condition is the topic of the next section.

Why is condition (iii) necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief might be true even though it is formed improperly. Suppose that William flips a coin, and confidently believes—on no particular basis—that it will land tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, then William’s belief was true; but a lucky guess such as this one is no knowledge. For William to know, his belief must in some epistemic sense be proper or appropriate: it must be justified . [ 5 ]

Socrates articulates the need for something like a justification condition in Plato’s Theaetetus , when he points out that “true opinion” is in general insufficient for knowledge. For example, if a lawyer employs sophistry to induce a jury into a belief that happens to be true, this belief is insufficiently well-grounded to constitute knowledge.

1.3.1 Approaches to Justification

There is considerable disagreement among epistemologists concerning what the relevant sort of justification here consists in. Internalists about justification think that whether a belief is justified depends wholly on states in some sense internal to the subject. According to one common such sense of “internal”, only those features of a subject’s experience which are directly or introspectively available count as “internal”—call this “access internalism”. According to another, only intrinsic states of the subject are “internal”—call this “state internalism”. See Feldman & Conee 2001 for the distinction.

Conee and Feldman present an example of an internalist view. They have it that S ’s belief that p is justified if and only if believing that p is the attitude towards p that best fits S ’s evidence, where the latter is understood to depend only on S ’s internal mental states. Conee and Feldman call their view “evidentialism”, and characterize this as the thesis that justification is wholly a matter of the subject’s evidence. Given their (not unsubstantial) assumption that what evidence a subject has is an internal matter, evidentialism implies internalism. [ 6 ] Externalists about justification think that factors external to the subject can be relevant for justification; for example, process reliabilists think that justified beliefs are those which are formed by a cognitive process which tends to produce a high proportion of true beliefs relative to false ones. [ 7 ] We shall return to the question of how reliabilist approaches bear on the analysis of knowledge in §6.1 .

1.3.2 Kinds of Justification

It is worth noting that one might distinguish between two importantly different notions of justification, standardly referred to as “propositional justification” and “doxastic justification”. (Sometimes “ ex ante ” justification and “ ex post ” justification, respectively.) [ 8 ] Unlike that between internalist and externalist approaches to justification, the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification does not represent a conflict to be resolved; it is a distinction between two distinct properties that are called “justification”. Propositional justification concerns whether a subject has sufficient reason to believe a given proposition; [ 9 ] doxastic justification concerns whether a given belief is held appropriately. [ 10 ] One common way of relating the two is to suggest that propositional justification is the more fundamental, and that doxastic justification is a matter of a subject’s having a belief that is appropriately responsive to or based on their propositional justification.

The precise relation between propositional and doxastic justification is subject to controversy, but it is uncontroversial that the two notions can come apart. Suppose that Ingrid ignores a great deal of excellent evidence indicating that a given neighborhood is dangerous, but superstitiously comes to believe that the neighborhood is dangerous when she sees a black cat crossing the street. Since forming beliefs on the basis of superstition is not an epistemically appropriate way of forming beliefs, Ingrid’s belief is not doxastically justified; nevertheless, she does have good reason to believe as she does, so she does have propositional justification for the proposition that the neighborhood is dangerous.

Since knowledge is a particularly successful kind of belief, doxastic justification is a stronger candidate for being closely related to knowledge; the JTB theory is typically thought to invoke doxastic justification (but see Lowy 1978).

Some epistemologists have suggested that there may be multiple senses of the term “knowledge”, and that not all of them require all three elements of the tripartite theory of knowledge. For example, some have argued that there is, in addition to the sense of “knowledge” gestured at above, another, weak sense of “knowledge”, that requires only true belief (see for example Hawthorne 2002 and Goldman & Olsson 2009; the latter contains additional relevant references). This view is sometimes motivated by the thought that, when we consider whether someone knows that p , or wonder which of a group of people know that p , often, we are not at all interested in whether the relevant subjects have beliefs that are justified; we just want to know whether they have the true belief. For example, as Hawthorne (2002: 253–54) points out, one might ask how many students know that Vienna is the capital of Austria; the correct answer, one might think, just is the number of students who offer “Vienna” as the answer to the corresponding question, irrespective of whether their beliefs are justified. Similarly, if you are planning a surprise party for Eugene and ask whether he knows about it, “yes” may be an appropriate answer merely on the grounds that Eugene believes that you are planning a party.

One could allow that there is a lightweight sense of knowledge that requires only true belief; another option is to decline to accept the intuitive sentences as true at face value. A theorist might, for instance, deny that sentences like “Eugene knows that you are planning a party”, or “eighteen students know that Vienna is the capital of Austria” are literally true in the envisaged situations, explaining away their apparent felicity as loose talk or hyperbole.

Even among those epistemologists who think that there is a lightweight sense of “knows” that does not require justification, most typically admit that there is also a stronger sense which does, and that it is this stronger state that is the main target of epistemological theorizing about knowledge. In what follows, we will set aside the lightweight sense, if indeed there be one, and focus on the stronger one.

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTB analysis. Although most agree that each element of the tripartite theory is necessary for knowledge, they do not seem collectively to be sufficient . There seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge. Here is one kind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right there under a rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus 1997: 292)

This example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE. The 14 th -century Italian philosopher Peter of Mantua presented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to be running, but you mistakenly believe that he is Socrates, so that you firmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be so that Socrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this. (from Peter of Mantua’s De scire et dubitare , given in Boh 1985: 95)

Cases like these, in which justified true belief seems in some important sense disconnected from the fact, were made famous in Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”. Gettier presented two cases in which a true belief is inferred from a justified false belief. He observed that, intuitively, such beliefs cannot be knowledge; it is merely lucky that they are true.

In honour of his contribution to the literature, cases like these have come to be known as “Gettier cases”. Since they appear to refute the JTB analysis, many epistemologists have undertaken to repair it: how must the analysis of knowledge be modified to accommodate Gettier cases? This is what is commonly referred to as the “Gettier problem”.

Above, we noted that one role of the justification is to rule out lucky guesses as cases of knowledge. A lesson of the Gettier problem is that it appears that even true beliefs that are justified can nevertheless be epistemically lucky in a way inconsistent with knowledge.

Epistemologists who think that the JTB approach is basically on the right track must choose between two different strategies for solving the Gettier problem. The first is to strengthen the justification condition to rule out Gettier cases as cases of justified belief. This was attempted by Roderick Chisholm; [ 11 ] we will refer to this strategy again in §7 below. The other is to amend the JTB analysis with a suitable fourth condition, a condition that succeeds in preventing justified true belief from being “gettiered”. Thus amended, the JTB analysis becomes a JTB+ X account of knowledge, where the “ X ” stands for the needed fourth condition.

Let us consider an instance of this attempt to articulate a “degettiering” condition.

According to one suggestion, the following fourth condition would do the trick:

• S ’s belief that p is not inferred from any falsehood. [ 12 ]

In Gettier’s cases, the justified true belief is inferred from a justified false belief. So condition (iv) explains why it isn’t knowledge. However, this “no false lemmas” proposal is not successful in general. There are examples of Gettier cases that need involve no inference; therefore, there are possible cases of justified true belief without knowledge, even though condition (iv) is met. Suppose, for example, that James, who is relaxing on a bench in a park, observes an apparent dog in a nearby field. So he believes

• There is a dog in the field.

Suppose further that the putative dog is actually a robot dog so perfect that it could not be distinguished from an actual dog by vision alone. James does not know that such robot dogs exist; a Japanese toy manufacturer has only recently developed them, and what James sees is a prototype that is used for testing the public’s response. Given these assumptions, (d) is of course false. But suppose further that just a few feet away from the robot dog, there is a real dog, concealed from James’s view. Given this further assumption, James’s belief in (d) is true. And since this belief is based on ordinary perceptual processes, most epistemologists will agree that it is justified. But as in Gettier’s cases, James’s belief appears to be true only as a matter of luck, in a way inconsistent with knowledge. So once again, what we have before us is a justified true belief that isn’t knowledge. [ 13 ] Arguably, this belief is directly justified by a visual experience; it is not inferred from any falsehood. If so, then the JTB account, even if supplemented with (iv) , gives us the wrong result that James knows (d).

Another case illustrating that clause (iv) won’t do the job is the well-known Barn County case (Goldman 1976). Suppose there is a county in the Midwest with the following peculiar feature. The landscape next to the road leading through that county is peppered with barn-facades: structures that from the road look exactly like barns. Observation from any other viewpoint would immediately reveal these structures to be fakes: devices erected for the purpose of fooling unsuspecting motorists into believing in the presence of barns. Suppose Henry is driving along the road that leads through Barn County. Naturally, he will on numerous occasions form false beliefs in the presence of barns. Since Henry has no reason to suspect that he is the victim of organized deception, these beliefs are justified. Now suppose further that, on one of those occasions when he believes there is a barn over there, he happens to be looking at the one and only real barn in the county. This time, his belief is justified and true. But since its truth is the result of luck, it is exceedingly plausible to judge that Henry’s belief is not an instance of knowledge. Yet condition (iv) is met in this case. His belief is not the result of any inference from a falsehood. Once again, we see that (iv) does not succeed as a general solution to the Gettier problem.

5. Modal Conditions

Another candidate fourth condition on knowledge is sensitivity . Sensitivity, to a first approximation, is this counterfactual relation:

S ’s belief that p is sensitive if and only if, if p were false, S would not believe that p . [ 14 ]

A sensitivity condition on knowledge was defended by Robert Nozick (1981). Given a Lewisian (Lewis 1973) semantics for counterfactual conditionals, the sensitivity condition is equivalent to the requirement that, in the nearest possible worlds in which not- p , the subject does not believe that p .

One motivation for including a sensitivity condition in an analysis of knowledge is that there seems to be an intuitive sense in which knowledge requires not merely being correct, but tracking the truth in other possible circumstances. This approach seems to be a plausible diagnosis of what goes wrong in at least some Gettier cases. For example, in Dharmottara’s desert water case, your belief that there is water in a certain location appears to be insensitive to the fact of the water. For if there were no water there, you would have held the same belief on the same grounds— viz. , the mirage.

However, it is doubtful that a sensitivity condition can account for the phenomenon of Gettier cases in general. It does so only in cases in which, had the proposition in question been false, it would have been believed anyway. But, as Saul Kripke (2011: 167–68) has pointed out, not all Gettier cases are like this. Consider for instance the Barn County case mentioned above. Henry looks at a particular location where there happens to be a barn and believes there to be a barn there. The sensitivity condition rules out this belief as knowledge only if, were there no barn there, Henry would still have believed there was. But this counterfactual may be false, depending on how the Barn County case is set up. For instance, it is false if the particular location Henry is examining is not one that would have been suitable for the erecting of a barn façade. Relatedly, as Kripke has also indicated (2011: 186), if we suppose that barn facades are always green, but genuine barns are always red, Henry’s belief that he sees a red barn will be sensitive, even though his belief that he sees a barn will not. (We assume Henry is unaware that colour signifies anything relevant.) Since intuitively, the former belief looks to fall short of knowledge in just the same way as the latter, a sensitivity condition will only handle some of the intuitive problems deriving from Gettier cases.

Most epistemologists today reject sensitivity requirements on knowledge. The chief motivation against a sensitivity condition is that, given plausible assumptions, it leads to unacceptable implications called “abominable conjunctions”. [ 15 ] To see this, suppose first that skepticism about ordinary knowledge is false—ordinary subjects know at least many of the things we ordinarily take them to know. For example, George, who can see and use his hands perfectly well, knows that he has hands. This is of course perfectly consistent with a sensitivity condition on knowledge, since if George did not have hands—if they’d been recently chopped off, for instance—he would not believe that he had hands.

Now imagine a skeptical scenario in which George does not have hands. Suppose that George is the victim of a Cartesian demon, deceiving him into believing that he has hands. If George were in such a scenario, of course, he would falsely believe himself not to be in such a scenario. So given the sensitivity condition, George cannot know that he is not in such a scenario.

Although these two verdicts—the knowledge-attributing one about ordinary knowledge, and the knowledge-denying one about the skeptical scenario—are arguably each intuitive, it is intuitively problematic to hold them together. Their conjunction is, in DeRose’s term, abominable: “George knows that he has hands, but he doesn’t know that he’s not the handless victim of a Cartesian demon”. A sensitivity condition on knowledge, combined with the nonskeptical claim that there is ordinary knowledge, seems to imply such abominable conjunctions. [ 16 ]

Most contemporary epistemologists have taken considerations like these to be sufficient reason to reject sensitivity conditions. [ 17 ] However, see Ichikawa (2011a) for an interpretation and endorsement of the sensitivity condition according to which it may avoid commitment to abominable conjunctions.

Although few epistemologists today endorse a sensitivity condition on knowledge, the idea that knowledge requires a subject to stand in a particular modal relation to the proposition known remains a popular one. In his 1999 paper, “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore”, Ernest Sosa proposed that a safety condition ought to take the role that sensitivity was intended to play. Sosa characterized safety as the counterfactual contrapositive of sensitivity.

Sensitivity: If p were false, S would not believe that p .

Safety: If S were to believe that p , p would not be false. [ 18 ]

Although contraposition is valid for the material conditional \((A \supset B\) iff \(\mathord{\sim} B \supset \mathord{\sim}A)\), Sosa suggests that it is invalid for counterfactuals, which is why sensitivity and safety are not equivalent. An example of a safe belief that is not sensitive, according to Sosa, is the belief that a distant skeptical scenario does not obtain. If we stipulate that George, discussed above, has never been at risk of being the victim of a Cartesian demon—because, say, Cartesian demons do not exist in George’s world—then George’s belief that he is not such a victim is a safe one, even though we saw in the previous section that it could not be sensitive. Notice that although we stipulated that George is not at risk of deceit by Cartesian demons, we did not stipulate that George himself had any particular access to this fact. Unless he does, safety, like sensitivity, will be an externalist condition on knowledge in the “access” sense. It is also externalist in the “state” sense, since the truth of the relevant counterfactuals will depend on features outside the subject.

Characterizing safety in these counterfactual terms depends on substantive assumptions about the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. [ 19 ] If we were to accept, for instance, David Lewis’s or Robert Stalnaker’s treatment of counterfactuals, including a strong centering condition according to which the actual world is always uniquely closest, all true beliefs would count as safe according to the counterfactual analysis of safety. [ 20 ] Sosa intends the relevant counterfactuals to be making a stronger claim, requiring roughly that in all nearby worlds in which S believes that p , p is not false.

Rather than resting on a contentious treatment of counterfactuals, then, it may be most perspicuous to understand the safety condition more directly in these modal terms, as Sosa himself often does:

In all nearby worlds where S believes that p , p is not false.

Whether a JTB+safety analysis of knowledge could be successful is somewhat difficult to evaluate, given the vagueness of the stated “nearby” condition. The status of potential counterexamples will not always be straightforward to apply. For example, Juan Comesaña (2005) presents a case he takes to refute the requirement that knowledge be safe. In Comesaña’s example, the host of a Halloween party enlists Judy to direct guests to the party. Judy’s instructions are to give everyone the same directions, which are in fact accurate, but that if she sees Michael, the party will be moved to another location. (The host does not want Michael to find the party.) Suppose Michael never shows up. If a given guest does not, but very nearly does, decide to wear a very realistic Michael costume to the party, then his belief, based in Judy’s testimony, about the whereabouts of the party will be true, but could, Comesaña says, easily have been false. (Had he merely made a slightly different choice about his costume, he would have been deceived.) Comesaña describes the case as a counterexample to a safety condition on knowledge. However, it is open to a safety theorist to argue that the relevant skeptical scenario, though possible and in some sense nearby, is not near enough in the relevant respect to falsify the safety condition. Such a theorist would, if she wanted the safety condition to deliver clear verdicts, face the task of articulating just what the relevant notion of similarity amounts to (see also Bogardus 2014).

Not all further clarifications of a safety condition will be suitable for the use of the latter in an analysis of knowledge. In particular, if the respect of similarity that is relevant for safety is itself explicated in terms of knowledge, then an analysis of knowledge which made reference to safety would be in this respect circular. This, for instance, is how Timothy Williamson characterizes safety. He writes, in response to a challenge by Alvin Goldman:

In many cases, someone with no idea of what knowledge is would be unable to determine whether safety obtained. Although they could use the principle that safety entails truth to exclude some cases, those are not the interesting ones. Thus Goldman will be disappointed when he asks what the safety account predicts about various examples in which conflicting considerations pull in different directions. One may have to decide whether safety obtains by first deciding whether knowledge obtains, rather than vice versa. (Williamson 2009: 305)

Because safety is understood only in terms of knowledge, safety so understood cannot serve in an analysis of knowledge. Nor is it Williamson’s intent that it should do so; as we will see below, Williamson rejects the project of analyzing knowledge. This is of course consistent with claiming that safety is a necessary condition on knowledge in the straightforward sense that the latter entails the former.

A third approach to modal conditions on knowledge worthy of mention is the requirement that for a subject to know that p , she must rule out all “relevant alternatives” to p . Significant early proponents of this view include Stine 1976, Goldman 1976, and Dretske 1981. The idea behind this approach to knowledge is that for a subject to know that p , she must be able to “rule out” competing hypotheses to p —but that only some subset of all not- p possibilities are “relevant” for knowledge attributions. Consider for example, the differences between the several models that have been produced of Apple’s iPhone. To be able to know by sight that a particular phone is the 6S model, it is natural to suppose that one must be able to tell the difference between the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 7; the possibility that the phone in question is a newer model is a relevant alternative. But perhaps there are other possibilities in which the belief that there is an iPhone 6S is false that do not need to be ruled out—perhaps, for instance, the possibility that the phone is not an iPhone, but a Chinese knock-off, needn’t be considered. Likewise for the possibility that there is no phone at all, the phone-like appearances being the product of a Cartesian demon’s machinations. Notice that in these cases and many of the others that motivate the relevant-alternatives approach to knowledge, there is an intuitive sense in which the relevant alternatives tend to be more similar to actuality than irrelevant ones. As such, the relevant alternatives theory and safety-theoretic approaches are very similar, both in verdict and in spirit. As in the case of a safety theorist, the relevant alternatives theorist faces a challenge in attempting to articulate what determines which possibilities are relevant in a given situation. [ 21 ]

6. Doing Without Justification?

As we have seen, one motivation for including a justification condition in an analysis of knowledge was to prevent lucky guesses from counting as knowledge. However, the Gettier problem shows that including a justification condition does not rule out all epistemically problematic instances of luck. Consequently, some epistemologists have suggested that positing a justification condition on knowledge was a false move; perhaps it is some other condition that ought to be included along with truth and belief as components of knowledge. This kind of strategy was advanced by a number of authors from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, although there has been relatively little discussion of it since. [ 22 ] Kornblith 2008 provides a notable exception.

One candidate property for such a state is reliability . Part of what is problematic about lucky guesses is precisely that they are so lucky: such guesses are formed in a way such that it is unlikely that they should turn out true. According to a certain form of knowledge reliabilism, it is unreliability, not lack of justification, which prevents such beliefs from amounting to knowledge. Reliabilist theories of knowledge incorporate this idea into a reliability condition on knowledge. [ 23 ] Here is an example of such a view:

Simple K-Reliabilism:

S knows that p iff

• S ’s belief that p was produced by a reliable cognitive process.

Simple K-Reliabilism replaces the justification clause in the traditional tripartite theory with a reliability clause. As we have seen, reliabilists about justification think that justification for a belief consists in a genesis in a reliable cognitive process. Given this view, Simple K-Reliabilism and the JTB theory are equivalent. However, the present proposal is silent on justification. Goldman 1979 is the seminal defense of reliabilism about justification; reliabilism is extended to knowledge in Goldman 1986. See Goldman 2011 for a survey of reliabilism in general.

In the following passage, Fred Dretske articulates how an approach like K-reliabilism might be motivated:

Those who think knowledge requires something other than , or at least more than , reliably produced true belief, something (usually) in the way of justification for the belief that one’s reliably produced beliefs are being reliably produced, have, it seems to me, an obligation to say what benefits this justification is supposed to confer…. Who needs it, and why? If an animal inherits a perfectly reliable belief-generating mechanism, and it also inherits a disposition, everything being equal, to act on the basis of the beliefs so generated, what additional benefits are conferred by a justification that the beliefs are being produced in some reliable way? If there are no additional benefits, what good is this justification? Why should we insist that no one can have knowledge without it? (Dretske 1989: 95)

According to Dretske, reliable cognitive processes convey information, and thus endow not only humans, but (nonhuman) animals as well, with knowledge. He writes:

I wanted a characterization that would at least allow for the possibility that animals (a frog, rat, ape, or my dog) could know things without my having to suppose them capable of the more sophisticated intellectual operations involved in traditional analyses of knowledge. (Dretske 1985: 177)

It does seem odd to think of frogs, rats, or dogs as having justified or unjustified beliefs. Yet attributing knowledge to animals is certainly in accord with our ordinary practice of using the word “knowledge”. So if, with Dretske, we want an account of knowledge that includes animals among the knowing subjects, we might want to abandon the traditional JTB account in favor of something like K-reliabilism.

Another move in a similar spirit to K-Reliabilism replaces the justification clause in the JTB theory with a condition requiring a causal connection between the belief and the fact believed; [ 24 ] this is the approach of Goldman (1967, 1976). [ 25 ] Goldman’s own causal theory is a sophisticated one; we will not engage with its details here. See Goldman’s papers. Instead, consider a simplified causal theory of knowledge, which illustrates the main motivation behind causal theories.

Simple Causal Theory of Knowledge:

• S ’s belief that p is caused by the fact that p .

Do approaches like Simple K-Reliabilism or the Simple Causal Theory fare any better than the JTB theory with respect to Gettier cases? Although some proponents have suggested they do—see e.g., Dretske 1985: 179; Plantinga 1993: 48—many of the standard counterexamples to the JTB theory appear to refute these views as well. Consider again the case of the barn facades. Henry sees a real barn, and that’s why he believes there is a barn nearby. This belief is formed by perceptual processes, which are by-and-large reliable: only rarely do they lead him into false beliefs. So it looks like the case meets the conditions of Simple K-Reliabilism just as much as it does those of the JTB theory. It is also a counterexample to the causal theory, since the real barn Henry perceives is causally responsible for his belief. There is reason to doubt, therefore, that shifting from justification to a condition like reliability will escape the Gettier problem. [ 26 ] Gettier cases seem to pose as much of a problem for K-reliabilism and causal theories as for the JTB account. Neither theory, unless amended with a clever “degettiering” clause, succeeds in stating sufficient conditions for knowledge. [ 27 ]

Gettier’s paper launched a flurry of philosophical activity by epistemologists attempting to revise the JTB theory, usually by adding one or more conditions, to close the gap between knowledge and justified true belief. We have seen already how several of these attempts failed. When intuitive counterexamples were proposed to each theory, epistemologists often responded by amending their theories, complicating the existing conditions or adding new ones. Much of this dialectic is chronicled thoroughly by Shope 1983, to which the interested reader is directed.

After some decades of such iterations, some epistemologists began to doubt that progress was being made. In her 1994 paper, “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems”, Linda Zagzebski suggested that no analysis sufficiently similar to the JTB analysis could ever avoid the problems highlighted by Gettier’s cases. More precisely, Zagzebski argued, any analysans of the form JTB+ X , where X is a condition or list of conditions logically independent from justification, truth, and belief, would be susceptible to Gettier-style counterexamples. She offered what was in effect a recipe for constructing Gettier cases:

• (1) Start with an example of a case where a subject has a justified false belief that also meets condition X .
• (2) Modify the case so that the belief is true merely by luck.

Zagzebski suggests that the resultant case will always represent an intuitive lack of knowledge. So any non-redundant addition to the JTB theory will leave the Gettier problem unsolved. [ 28 ] We may illustrate the application of the recipe using one of Zagzebski’s own examples, refuting Alvin Plantinga’s (1996) attempt to solve the Gettier problem by appending to the JTB analysis a condition requiring that the subject’s faculties be working properly in an appropriate environment.

In step one of Zagzebski’s procedure, we imagine a case in which a subject’s faculties are working properly in an appropriate environment, but the ensuing belief, though justified, is false. Zagzebski invites us to imagine that Mary has very good eyesight—good enough for her cognitive faculties typically to yield knowledge that her husband is sitting in the living room. Such faculties, even when working properly in suitable environments, however, are not infallible—if they were, the condition would not be independent from truth—so we can imagine a case in which they go wrong. Perhaps this is an unusual instance in which Mary’s husband’s brother, who looks a lot like the husband, is in the living room, and Mary concludes, on the basis of the proper function of her visual capacity, that her husband is in the living room. This belief, since false, is certainly not knowledge.

In step two, we imagine Mary’s misidentification of the occupant of the living room as before, but add to the case that the husband is, by luck, also in the living room. Now Mary’s belief is true, but intuitively, it is no more an instance of knowledge than the false belief in the first step was.

Since the recipe is a general one, it appears to be applicable to any condition one might add to the JTB theory, so long as it does not itself entail truth. The argument generalizes against all “non-redundant” JTB+ X analyses.

One potential response to Zagzebski’s argument, and the failure of the Gettier project more generally, would be to conclude that knowledge is unanalyzable. Although it would represent a significant departure from much analytic epistemology of the late twentieth century, it is not clear that this is ultimately a particularly radical suggestion. Few concepts of interest have proved susceptible to traditional analysis (Fodor 1998). One prominent approach to knowledge in this vein is discussed in §11 below.

Another possible line is the one mentioned in §2 —to strengthen the justification condition to rule out Gettier cases as justified. In order for this strategy to prevent Zagzebski’s recipe from working, one would need to posit a justification condition that precludes the possibility of step one above—the only obvious way to do this is for justification to entail truth. If it does, then it will of course be impossible to start with a case that has justified false belief. This kind of approach is not at all mainstream, but it does have its defenders—see e.g., Sturgeon 1993 and Merricks 1995. Sutton 2007 and Littlejohn 2012 defend factive approaches to justification on other grounds.

A third avenue of response would be to consider potential analyses of knowledge that are not of the nonredundant form JTB+ X . Indeed, we have already seen some such attempts, albeit unsuccessful ones. For instance, the causal theory of knowledge includes a clause requiring that the belief that p be caused by the fact that p . This condition entails both belief and truth, and so is not susceptible to Zagzebski’s recipe. (As we’ve seen, it falls to Gettier-style cases on other grounds.) One family of strategies along these lines would build into an analysis of knowledge a prohibition on epistemic luck directly; let us consider this sort of move in more detail.

If the problem illustrated by Gettier cases is that JTB and JTB+ analyses are compatible with a degree of epistemic luck that is inconsistent with knowledge, a natural idea is to amend one’s analysis of knowledge by including an explicit “anti-luck” condition. Zagzebski herself outlines this option in her 1994 (p. 72). Unger 1968 gives an early analysis of this kind. For example:

• S ’s belief is not true merely by luck.

The first thing to note about this analysis is that it is “redundant” in the sense described in the previous section; the fourth condition entails the first two. [ 29 ] So its surface form notwithstanding, it actually represents a significant departure from the JTB+ analyses. Rather than composing knowledge from various independent components, this analysis demands instead that the epistemic states are related to one another in substantive ways.

The anti-luck condition, like the safety condition of the previous section, is vague as stated. For one thing, whether a belief is true by luck comes in degrees—just how much luck does it take to be inconsistent with knowledge? Furthermore, it seems, independently of questions about degrees of luck, we must distinguish between different kinds of luck. Not all epistemic luck is incompatible with having knowledge. Suppose someone enters a raffle and wins an encyclopedia, then reads various of its entries, correcting many of their previous misapprehensions. There is a straightforward sense in which the resultant beliefs are true only by luck—for our subject was very lucky to have won that raffle—but this is not the sort of luck, intuitively, that interferes with the possession of knowledge. [ 30 ] Furthermore, there is a sense in which our ordinary perceptual beliefs are true by luck, since it is possible for us to have been the victim of a Cartesian demon and so we are, in some sense, lucky not to be. But unless we are to capitulate to radical skepticism, it seems that this sort of luck, too, ought to be considered compatible with knowledge. [ 31 ]

Like the safety condition, then, a luck condition ends up being difficult to apply in some cases. We might try to clarify the luck condition as involving a distinctive notion of epistemic luck—but unless we were able to explicate that notion—in effect, to distinguish between the two kinds of luck mentioned above—without recourse to knowledge, it is not clear that the ensuing analysis of knowledge could be both informative and noncircular.

As our discussion so far makes clear, one standard way of evaluating attempted analyses of knowledge has given a central role to testing it against intuitions against cases. In the late twentieth century, the perceived lack of progress towards an acceptable analysis—including the considerations attributed to Zagzebski in §7 above—led some epistemologists to pursue other methodological strategies. (No doubt, a wider philosophical trend away from “conceptual analysis” more broadly also contributed to this change.) Some of the more recent attempts to analyse knowledge have been motivated in part by broader considerations about the role of knowledge, or of discourse about knowledge.

One important view of this sort is that defended by Edward Craig (1990). Craig’s entry-point into the analysis of knowledge was not intuitions about cases, but rather a focus on the role that the concept of knowledge plays for humans. In particular, Craig suggested that the point of using the category of knowledge was for people to flag reliable informants—to help people know whom to trust in matters epistemic. Craig defends an account of knowledge that is designed to fill this role, even though it is susceptible to intuitive counterexamples. The plausibility of such accounts, with a less intuitive extension but with a different kind of theoretical justification, is a matter of controversy.

Another view worth mentioning in this context is that of Hilary Kornblith (2002), which has it that knowledge is a natural kind, to be analysed the same way other scientific kinds are. Intuition has a role to play in identifying paradigms, but generalizing from there is an empirical, scientific matter, and intuitive counterexamples are to be expected.

The “knowledge first” stance is also connected to these methodological issues. See §11 below.

10. Virtue-Theoretic Approaches

The virtue-theoretic approach to knowledge is in some respects similar to the safety and anti-luck approaches. Indeed, Ernest Sosa, one of the most prominent authors of the virtue-theoretic approach, developed it from his previous work on safety. The virtue approach treats knowledge as a particularly successful or valuable form of belief, and explicates what it is to be knowledge in such terms. Like the anti-luck theory, a virtue-theoretic theory leaves behind the JTB+ project of identifying knowledge with a truth-functional combination of independent epistemic properties; knowledge, according to this approach, requires a certain non-logical relationship between belief and truth.

Sosa has often (e.g., Sosa 2007: ch. 2) made use of an analogy of a skilled archer shooting at a target; we may find it instructive as well. Here are two ways in which an archer’s shot might be evaluated:

• Was the shot successful? Did it hit its target?
• Did the shot’s execution manifest the archer’s skill? Was it produced in a way that makes it likely to succeed?

The kind of success at issue in (1), Sosa calls accuracy . The kind of skill discussed in (2), Sosa calls adroitness . A shot is adroit if it is produced skillfully. Adroit shots needn’t be accurate, as not all skilled shots succeed. And accurate shots needn’t be adroit, as some unskilled shots are lucky.

In addition to accuracy and adroitness, Sosa suggests that there is another respect in which a shot may be evaluated, relating the two. This, Sosa calls aptness .

• Did the shot’s success manifest the archer’s skill?

A shot is apt if it is accurate because adroit. Aptness entails, but requires more than, the conjunction of accuracy and adroitness, for a shot might be both successful and skillful without being apt. For example, if a skillful shot is diverted by an unexpected gust of wind, then redirected towards the target by a second lucky gust, its ultimate accuracy does not manifest the skill, but rather reflects the lucky coincidence of the wind.

Sosa suggests that this “AAA” model of evaluation is applicable quite generally for the evaluation of any action or object with a characteristic aim. In particular, it is applicable to belief with respect to its aim at truth:

• A belief is accurate if and only if it is true.
• A belief is adroit if and only if it is produced skillfully. [ 32 ]
• A belief is apt if and only if it is true in a way manifesting, or attributable to, the believer’s skill.

Sosa identifies knowledge with apt belief, so understood. [ 33 ] Knowledge entails both truth (accuracy) and justification (adroitness), on this view, but they are not merely independent components out of which knowledge is truth-functionally composed. It requires that the skill explain the success. This is in some respects similar to the anti-luck condition we have examined above, in that it legislates that the relation between justification and truth be no mere coincidence. However, insofar as Sosa’s “AAA” model is generally applicable in a way going beyond epistemology, there are perhaps better prospects for understanding the relevant notion of aptness in a way independent of understanding knowledge itself than we found for the notion of epistemic luck.

Understanding knowledge as apt belief accommodates Gettier’s traditional counterexamples to the JTB theory rather straightforwardly. When Smith believes that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, the accuracy of his belief is not attributable to his inferential skills (which the case does not call into question). Rather, unlucky circumstances (the misleading evidence about Jones’s car) have interfered with his skillful cognitive performance, just as the first diverting gust of wind interfered with the archer’s shot. Compensating for the unlucky interference, a lucky circumstance (Brown’s coincidental presence in Barcelona) renders the belief true after all, similar to the way in which the second gust of wind returns the archer’s arrow back onto the proper path towards the target.

Fake barn cases, by contrast, may be less easily accommodated by Sosa’s AAA approach. When Henry looks at the only real barn in a countryside full of barn facades, he uses a generally reliable perceptual faculty for recognizing barns, and he goes right in this instance. Suppose we say the accuracy of Henry’s belief manifests his competence as a perceiver. If so, we would have to judge that his belief is apt and therefore qualifies as an instance of knowledge. That would be a problematic outcome because the intuition the case is meant to elicit is that Henry does not have knowledge. There are three ways in which an advocate of the AAA approach might respond to this difficulty.

First, AAA advocates might argue that, although Henry has a general competence to recognize barns, he is deprived of this ability in his current environment, precisely because he is in fake barn county. According to a second, subtly different strategy, Henry retains barn-recognition competence, his current location notwithstanding, but, due to the ubiquity of fake barns, his competence does not manifest itself in his belief, since its truth is attributable more to luck than to his skill in recognizing barns. [ 34 ] Third, Sosa’s own response to the problem is to bite the bullet. Judging Henry’s belief to be apt, Sosa accepts the outcome that Henry knows there is a barn before him. He attempts to explain away the counterintuitiveness of this result by emphasizing the lack of a further epistemically valuable state, which he calls “reflective knowledge” (see Sosa 2007: 31–32).

Not every concept is analyzable into more fundamental terms. This is clear both upon reflection on examples—what analysis could be offered of hydrogen , animal , or John F. Kennedy ?—and on grounds of infinite regress. Why should we think that knowledge has an analysis? In recent work, especially his 2000 book Knowledge and Its Limits , Timothy Williamson has argued that the project of analyzing knowledge was a mistake. His reason is not that he thinks that knowledge is an uninteresting state, or that the notion of knowledge is somehow fundamentally confused. On the contrary, Williamson thinks that knowledge is among the most fundamental psychological and epistemological states there are. As such, it is a mistake to analyze knowledge in terms of other, more fundamental epistemic notions, because knowledge itself is, in at least many cases, more fundamental. As Williamson puts it, we should put “knowledge first”. Knowledge might figure into some analyses, but it will do so in the analysans, not in the analysandum. [ 35 ]

There is no very straightforward argument for this conclusion; its case consists largely in the attempted demonstration of the theoretical success of the knowledge first stance. Weighing these benefits against those of more traditional approaches to knowledge is beyond the scope of this article. [ 36 ]

Although Williamson denies that knowledge is susceptible to analysis in the sense at issue in this article, he does think that there are interesting and informative ways to characterize knowledge. For example, Williamson accepts these claims:

• Knowledge is the most general factive mental state.
• S knows that p if and only if S ’s total evidence includes the proposition that p .

Williamson is also careful to emphasize that the rejection of the project of analyzing knowledge in no way suggests that there are not interesting and informative necessary or sufficient conditions on knowledge. The traditional ideas that knowledge entails truth, belief, and justification are all consistent with the knowledge first project. And Williamson (2000: 126) is explicit in endorsement of a safety requirement on knowledge—just not one that serves as part of an analysis.

One point worth recognizing, then, is that one need not engage in the ambitious project of attempting to analyze knowledge in order to have contact with a number of interesting questions about which factors are and are not relevant for whether a subject has knowledge. In the next section, we consider an important contemporary debate about whether pragmatic factors are relevant for knowledge.

Traditional approaches to knowledge have it that knowledge has to do with factors like truth and justification. Whether knowledge requires safety, sensitivity, reliability, or independence from certain kinds of luck has proven controversial. But something that all of these potential conditions on knowledge seem to have in common is that they have some sort of intimate connection with the truth of the relevant belief. Although it is admittedly difficult to make the relevant connection precise, there is an intuitive sense in which every factor we’ve examined as a candidate for being relevant to knowledge has something to do with truth of the would-be knowledgeable beliefs.

In recent years, some epistemologists have argued that focus on such truth-relevant factors leaves something important out of our picture of knowledge. In particular, they have argued that distinctively pragmatic factors are relevant to whether a subject has knowledge. Call this thesis “pragmatic encroachment”: [ 37 ]

Pragmatic Encroachment:

A difference in pragmatic circumstances can constitute a difference in knowledge.

The constitution claim here is important; it is trivial that differences in pragmatic circumstances can cause differences in knowledge. For example, if the question of whether marijuana use is legal in Connecticut is more important to Sandra than it is to Daniel, Sandra is more likely to seek out evidence, and come to knowledge, than Daniel is. This uninteresting claim is not what is at issue. Pragmatic encroachment theorists think that the practical importance itself can make for a change in knowledge, without reliance on such downstream effects as a difference in evidence-gathering activity. Sandra and Daniel might in some sense be in the same epistemic position , where the only difference is that the question is more important to Sandra. This difference, according to pragmatic encroachment, might make it the case that Daniel knows, but Sandra does not. [ 38 ]

Pragmatic encroachment can be motivated by intuitions about cases. Jason Stanley’s 2005 book Knowledge and Practical Interests argues that it is the best explanation for pairs of cases like the following, where the contrasted cases are evidentially alike, but differ pragmatically:

Low Stakes . Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit their paychecks. It is not important that they do so, as they have no impending bills. But as they drive past the bank, they notice that the lines inside are very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Realizing that it wasn’t very important that their paychecks are deposited right away, Hannah says, “I know the bank will be open tomorrow, since I was there just two weeks ago on Saturday morning. So we can deposit our paychecks tomorrow morning”.

High Stakes . Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit their paychecks. Since they have an impending bill coming due, and very little in their account, it is very important that they deposit their paychecks by Saturday. Hannah notes that she was at the bank two weeks before on a Saturday morning, and it was open. But, as Sarah points out, banks do change their hours. Hannah says, “I guess you’re right. I don’t know that the bank will be open tomorrow”. (Stanley 2005: 3–4)

Stanley argues that the moral of cases like these is that in general, the more important the question of whether p , the harder it is to know that p . Other, more broadly theoretical, arguments for pragmatic encroachment have been offered as well. Fantl & McGrath (2009) argue that encroachment follows from fallibilism and plausible principles linking knowledge and action, while Weatherson 2012 argues that the best interpretation of decision theory requires encroachment.

Pragmatic encroachment is not an analysis of knowledge; it is merely the claim that pragmatic factors are relevant for determining whether a subject’s belief constitutes knowledge. Some, but not all, pragmatic encroachment theorists will endorse a necessary biconditional that might be interpreted as an analysis of knowledge. For example, a pragmatic encroachment theorist might claim that:

S knows that p if and only if no epistemic weakness vis-á-vis p prevents S from properly using p as a reason for action.

This connection between knowledge and action is similar to ones endorsed by Fantl & McGrath (2009), but it is stronger than anything they argue for.

Pragmatic encroachment on knowledge is deeply controversial. Patrick Rysiew (2001), Jessica Brown (2006), and Mikkel Gerken (forthcoming) have argued that traditional views about the nature of knowledge are sufficient to account for the data mentioned above. Michael Blome-Tillmann (2009a) argues that it has unacceptably counterintuitive results, like the truth of such claims as S knows that p , but if it were more important, she wouldn’t know , or S knew that p until the question became important . Stanley (2005) offers strategies for accepting such consequences. Other, more theoretical arguments against encroachment have also been advanced; see for example Ichikawa, Jarvis, and Rubin (2012), who argue that pragmatic encroachment is at odds with important tenets of belief-desire psychology.

One final topic standing in need of treatment is contextualism about knowledge attributions, according to which the word “knows” and its cognates are context-sensitive. The relationship between contextualism and the analysis of knowledge is not at all straightforward. Arguably, they have different subject matters (the former a word, and the latter a mental state). Nevertheless, the methodology of theorizing about knowledge may be helpfully informed by semantic considerations about the language in which such theorizing takes place. And if contextualism is correct, then a theorist of knowledge must attend carefully to the potential for ambiguity.

It is uncontroversial that many English words are context-sensitive. The most obvious cases are indexicals, such as “I”, “you”, “here”, and “now” (David Kaplan 1977 gives the standard view of indexicals).

The word “you” refers to a different person, depending on the conversational context in which it is uttered; in particular, it depends on the person one is addressing. Other context-sensitive terms are gradable adjectives like “tall”—how tall something must be to count as “tall” depends on the conversational context—and quantifiers like “everyone”—which people count as part of “everyone” depends on the conversational context. Contextualists about “knows” think that this verb belongs on the list of context-sensitive terms. A consequence of contextualism is that sentences containing “knows” may express distinct propositions, depending on the conversational contexts in which they’re uttered. This feature allows contextualists to offer an effective, though not uncontroversial, response to skepticism. For a more thorough overview of contextualism and its bearing on skepticism, see Rysiew 2011 or Ichikawa forthcoming-b.

Contextualists have modeled this context-sensitivity in various ways. Keith DeRose 2009 has suggested that there is a context-invariant notion of “strength of epistemic position”, and that how strong a position one must be in in order to satisfy “knows” varies from context to context; this is in effect to understand the semantics of knowledge attributions much as we understand that of gradable adjectives. (How much height one must have to satisfy “tall” also varies from context to context.) Cohen 1988 adopts a contextualist treatment of “relevant alternatives” theory, according to which, in skeptical contexts, but not ordinary ones, skeptical possibilities are relevant. This aspect is retained in the view of Lewis 1996, which characterizes a contextualist approach that is more similar to quantifiers and modals. Blome-Tillmann 2009b and Ichikawa forthcoming-a defend and develop the Lewisian view in different ways.

Contextualism and pragmatic encroachment represent different strategies for addressing some of the same “shifty” patterns of intuitive data. (In fact, contextualism was generally developed first; pragmatic encroachment theorists were motivated in part by the attempt to explain some of the patterns contextualists were interested in without contextualism’s semantic commitments.) Although this represents a sense in which they tend to be rival approaches, contextualism and pragmatic encroachment are by no means inconsistent. One could think that “knows” requires the satisfaction of different standards in different contexts, and also think that the subject’s practical situation is relevant for whether a given standard is satisfied.

Like pragmatic encroachment, contextualism is deeply controversial. Critics have argued that it posits an implausible kind of semantic error in ordinary speakers who do not recognize the putative context-sensitivity—see Schiffer 1996 and Greenough & Kindermann forthcoming—and that it is at odds with plausible theoretical principles involving knowledge—see Hawthorne 2003, Williamson 2005, and Worsnip forthcoming. In addition, some of the arguments that are used to undercut the data motivating pragmatic encroachment are also taken to undermine the case for contextualism; see again Rysiew 2001 and Brown 2006.

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contextualism, epistemic | epistemic closure | epistemology: naturalism in | epistemology: social | epistemology: virtue | justification, epistemic: coherentist theories of | justification, epistemic: foundationalist theories of | justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

For the 2012 revision, we are grateful to Kurt Sylvan for extremely detailed and constructive comments on multiple drafts of this entry. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for additional helpful suggestions. For the 2017 revision, thanks to Clayton Littlejohn, Jennifer Nagel, and Scott Sturgeon for helpful and constructive feedback and suggestions. Thanks to Ben Bayer, Kenneth Ehrenberg, and Mark Young for drawing our attention to errors in the previous version.

Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa < ichikawa @ gmail . com > Matthias Steup

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The Language of Knowledge and the Language of Power

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Thomas De Quincey published in 1848 an essay on the poetry of Pope with a long digression on “the literature of knowledge” and “the literature of power.” I want to treat these categories speculatively, in order pursue the question of what we may mean by “knowledge”: a word that in the eighteenth century was synonymous with science, and that in De Quincey’s day hadn’t yet drifted far from that sense. The function of the literature of knowledge, De Quincey wrote,

is to teach; the function of [the literature of power] is to move . . . .The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding, or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but proximately it does and must operate—else it ceases to be literature of power —on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally, by way of germ or latent principle, in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth ranged on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power , or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven . . . are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz ., the literature of power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost ? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending movement into another element.

De Quincey is a little more favorable generally to the literature of knowledge than this quotation may have suggested. As an example of that literature, he cites Newton’s Principia ; and if we set Newton’s achievement alongside Milton’s we can see that the division between knowledge and power anticipates the distinction between what we now call the humanities and the natural sciences. There is an obvious difference between the two sorts of writing that matters greatly: the published words that make up the literature of knowledge do not represent the main intellectual work that science is relied on to perform. That work happens in the laboratory; in science, publication is a secondary business, which comes after the fact; it isn’t identical with discovery. Yet by his choice of terms, De Quincey is contrasting two sorts of literature. A work like Newton’s, belonging to the literature of knowledge, gives access to hidden truths of nature that are solved or soluble. But the literature of power strengthens our consciousness of a mysterious residuum of human nature—a fact we can only know by intuition, whose meaning in our lives is great and at the same time unsolved and insoluble. De Quincey conveys in a necessarily inadequate phrase—“sympathy with the infinite”—the human faculty that is developed by the literature of power.

Sympathy of this sort may be a more active process than De Quincey’s description makes it sound. He might have added, too, that the discovery once made belongs to the reader as surely as it belongs to the writer; there is a distinction of agency, but not of content, between the author’s finding of a truth about the world and the recognition of that truth by the reader. In both cases, the words do the relevant work. The writer is the first to know the pleasure of discovering the rightness of the words, but he does so only as their first reader. There is thus a qualitative resemblance between writer and reader, very different from what obtains in the case of an author like Newton and those who read of his discoveries. For the natural scientist, to repeat, the discovery and the work of explanation are separable and separate experiences.

We shouldn’t confuse De Quincey’s sympathy, which unites writer and reader, with the doctrine of imaginative self-trust that made Emerson propose that “creative reading” was akin to “creative writing.” Emerson believed in the truth of an aboriginal perception, belonging alike to writer and reader; but the writer alone, on his view, has overcome the slavishness of habit that prevents this perception from entering consciousness: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” It is an idealist doctrine and plainly true in one sense: in order for us to understand a thing imaginatively, it must be in our power to understand it. Potentially, the understanding was always ours; the author in this light may seem only an incidental medium. But Emerson really has in mind the recognition of a truth available from the start of the world. De Quincey on the other hand, if I am reading him rightly, is referring to a discovery from common experience. The author reveals a thought or a feeling which the reader grasps as an addition to his imagination of the world. Why not then call the writing that achieves this another branch of the literature of knowledge?

Let me try putting it a different way. Literature sharpens your ability to know when something surprising has happened to you—something that wants to be thought and felt about more and further. It signals an opportunity for knowledge and self-knowledge which mustn’t be ignored. I say “thought and felt about”—both of these things together—because I don’t see that thoughts can reliably be discriminated from feelings. Wordsworth says in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that thoughts are “the representatives of all our past feelings” and that seems right; thoughts are the carved-into-shape and unforgettable shadows of feelings, the allegorical or abstract heightenings or reductions by which feelings are made available with a precision that seems native to the discovering mind.

One of Thomas Hardy’s great elegies of 1912-13, “ I found her out there ,” presents such a discovery and surprise:

I found her out there On a slope few see, That falls westwardly To the sharp-edged air, Where the ocean breaks On the purple strand, And the hurricane shakes The solid land.

I brought her here, And have laid her to rest In a noiseless nest No sea beats near. She will never be stirred In her loamy cell By the waves long heard And loved so well.

So she does not sleep By those haunted heights The Atlantic smites And the blind gales sweep, Whence she often would gaze At Dundagel’s famed head, While the dipping blaze Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonnesse, While a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail; Or listen at whiles With a thought-bound brow To the murmuring miles She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe, Will glide underground Till it catch the sound Of that western sea As it swells and sobs Where she once domiciled, And joy in its throbs With the heart of a child.

Hardy’s poem does not deal with everlasting things, as Paradise Lost does. Still it seems to bear the marks of original imagination by which De Quincey would have recognized the literature of power. But the poem also discloses a vivid truth, something new in fact , a feeling never before apparent to the author or his readers. It is not an illustration of “sympathy with the infinite,” whatever we may take that to mean. It is a finding, a capture of something definite and never to be forgotten. Hardy’s marriage to Emma Gifford began in love and, on his side, enchantment; it led through deep divisions to mutual alienation; but when he learned of her death, his earliest feelings about her seemed to return, in a blended emotion of gratitude, wonder, and self-reproach.

“ I found her out there ” is one of several poems in the sequence of elegies that analyze this return of feeling—both its identity with and difference from the feeling of love as it first occurred. To borrow a comment by Ruth Yeazell on Henry James’s reasons for preferring Sargent to other portrait painters, one might say that Hardy is great because he paints a portrait of a feeling. He loved this woman as he could love a landscape. He associated her naturally with the Cornish coast, where he first saw her riding along the Western cliffs. And the poem forgives his earlier capture of her wildness by imagining her to have been eager and willing and childlike: the proof that he was not wrong comes out in the picture of her fascination with the tale of sunk Lyonnesse. What is it then that needs forgiving?

He stole her from her home by the sea to share his life far inland. It was a life quite alien to her and now she is in her grave, sealed-in forever. It is as if, in removing her from a native place, he took a step toward killing her. And yet, by a naturalizing myth of the free passage between the sea and her spirit underground, Hardy says—to himself and to us who overhear him—that his theft has been restored. So the poet re-enchants himself, accuses and forgives himself, and shows us how this work of myth-making and rationalization is native to him—as much perhaps as the stories he told which first drew her toward him. Theirs was a love made from stories and visions, and he remedies the loss (if he can) by another story and another vision. In the process, we gain a fresh view of something that wasn’t there before, something that exists only on the page: the enchantment of a love which can never altogether know itself.

That was a poem of memory with two characters. Pass now to a poem about the domineering imagination that can belong to a single mind in solitude. We sometimes know in dreaming a fantasy that disguises itself as an event; and we may think, about a landscape that is memorable and not altogether pleasant, “Did I see that or did I dream it?” Trumbull Stickney, with this perplexity in mind, chose to call his poem “In the Past”:

There lies a somnolent lake Under a noiseless sky, Where never the mornings break Nor the evenings die.

Mad flakes of colour Whirl on its even face Iridescent and streaked with pallour; And, warding the silent place,

The rocks rise sheer and gray From the sedgeless brink to the sky Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day Thro’ a void space and dry.

And the hours lag dead in the air With a sense of coming eternity To the heart of the lonely boatman there: That boatman am I,

I, in my lonely boat, A waif on the somnolent lake, Watching the colours creep and float With the sinuous track of a snake.

Now I lean o’er the side And lazy shades in the water see, Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide Crawled in from the living sea;

And next I fix mine eyes, So long that the heart declines, On the changeless face of the open skies Where no star shines;

And now to the rocks I turn, To the rocks, around That lie like walls of a circling sun Wherein lie bound

The waters that feel my powerless strength And meet my homeless oar Labouring over their ashen length Never to find a shore.

But the gleam still skims At times on the somnolent lake, And a light there is that swims With the whirl of a snake;

And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air, And dayless the sky, The heart is alive of the boatman there: That boatman am I.

This is a dream but also a discovery. I keep coming back to that word: discovery. Because here the dream is utterly real, for us, as we sense that it was for the poet. He is enclosed by a world that bears an uncanny affinity with his temper and desires; marooned, desolate, yet alive to himself; it is night, but delicate and strange colors are observable. He is a person apparently without will, in a world that exists by subtraction, but they are made for each other. The landscape is noiseless and dayless and the boatman powerless, but the sea itself is living, and though he says his heart declines, his heart is also alive. From these contradictions, there emerges a state of mind remote from any recorded or literal experience; and strangely, we find we can share in that state.

Poems often respond directly to other poems, and knowledge, of a peculiar kind, sometimes emerges from the resulting clash of temperaments. “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” is a verse epigram by A.E. Housman, about the British troops that fought in the battles of Ypres in Belgium, during 1914 and 1915. It is a patriotic poem, at an ironic distance from patriotism; for it elects to praise soldiers whose choice to sell their murderous skill might easily render them objects of contempt. Housman instead thanks them as drily as possible:

These, in the day when heaven was falling, ….. The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling ….. And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; ….. They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, ….. And saved the sum of things for pay.

The poem pays a well-earned respect to a class of persons the world agrees to use and then disclaim: mercenary soldiers. It is a powerful poem in some measure because no false feeling is evoked on their behalf. Housman tells a disagreeable truth and asks us to agree it is a truth anyway. Like all persuasive words, the “Epitaph” makes us forget the things it leaves out. What was the nature of the foundations these men are said to have held in place? Was the world better because of their sacrifice or was it worse? A larger and less extrinsic question springs from Housman’s use of “God”—even though he brings God into the poem only to deny his influence.

That profane usage may have given the impetus to a poem written by Hugh MacDiarmid in reply to Housman’s epitaph. “Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” as any reader will notice, is hardly fitted to rhyme and meter with the refinement Housman shows, but the bluntness of the attack perfectly suits the author’s intent:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride. They were professional murderers and they took Their blood money and their impious risks and died. In spite of all their kind some elements of worth With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

The rightness of MacDiarmid’s reply, I think, comes from its being so frank and unadorned a profession of loyalties. And these are loyalties opposite to those of reflex patriotism. MacDiarmid appeals to a common understanding that the killing that soldiers perform in war is legal murder. We shouldn’t corrupt ourselves by giving it a high-sounding name. The act of killing is regrettable in itself—to make a profession of it, how much more so! The men who join that profession are guilty of an impiety that may relate to something as deep as, and for this poet truer than, any faith in a God or gods. His own principle of action comes from a feeling of solidarity with human beings of all nations and their welfare everywhere: that is the burden of his deliberately cumbersome and simple praise of the “elements of worth” that “with difficulty persist here and there on earth.”

Now for a specimen of the literature of power, just as De Quincey has defined it. But you will notice again that it yields also an undeniable form of knowledge:

MACBETH There’s one did laugh in’s sleep, and one cried, “Murder!” That they did wake each other: I stood and heard them: But they did say their prayers, and address’d them Again to sleep.

LADY MACBETH ………… There are two lodged together.

MACBETH One cried, “God bless us!” and “Amen” the other; As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands. List’ning their fear, I could not say, “Amen,” When they did say, “God bless us!”

LADY MACBETH ………… Consider it not so deeply.

MACBETH But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”? I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” Stuck in my throat.

LADY MACBETH ……………….. These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

MACBETH Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravel’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—

LADY MACBETH ………………………………………. What do you mean?

MACBETH Still it cried, “Sleep no more!” to all the house: “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”

LADY MACBETH Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things. Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.

What strikes every reader on a first reading is the nightmare curse of “Sleep no more!” Macbeth’s eloquence proceeds to fashion a gorgeous image about sleep and its soothing work on the spirit; yet the gorgeousness is also a distraction, indeed a trick of avoidance, and in that respect altogether characteristic of Macbeth. Without quite seeing this, but somehow irritated at his poetic flight, Lady Macbeth turns suddenly literal-minded, as is her way. ”What do you mean?” There is no answer he could possibly give. And she keeps up that same practical demand throughout the dialogue. “There are two lodged together.” “Consider it not so deeply.” “These things must not be thought after these ways.” “What do you mean?” “Go get some water.” The failure of contact between this husband and this wife in the after-vacancy of their murder is one of those touches of mastery that permeate the play. It seems almost an accident—a snatch of conversation overheard, which makes us wonder at something unspeakable underneath.

“We do not produce new knowledge,” John Briggs observed in his remarks in 2016 as the departing president of the ALSCW. I agree, so far as the knowledge in question denotes new ways of acting on nature to make diseases curable, for example, or social interactions better regulated, or the methods of war faster and deadlier: in none of these beneficial or neutral or baneful ways do scholars of literature produce new knowledge. To the extent that cutting-edge research programs in our field pretend to explain the greatness or originality of works of art, we can say with reasonable certainty, about this year’s new knowledge, that a few years on it won’t be new and it won’t be knowledge. Discoveries in the natural sciences don’t fade as fast as that, and we are wrong to try to compete on that level. But let me here offer a partial retraction of De Quincey’s evident depreciation of knowledge in relation to literature. I will be drawing assistance from an essay by Rebecca West, “The Strange Necessity,” which defends literature as a resource of knowledge of a peculiar sort.

Writing in 1928, West devoted much of her argument to a powerful appreciation of the fiction of Joyce and Proust. She asked whether we could not recognize after all “a very close resemblance between art and science, a resemblance so close that we might say that art is science, only more scientific.” But she doesn’t go on to identify science with the domain of falsifiable propositions or refutable hypotheses. Rather, by science West means simply knowledge. She makes this plain through her admiration of Benjamin Constant’s great short novel Adolphe and her account of the unmistakable knowledge it conveys of the hero’s self-deception: the mental trick whereby he rationalizes the failure of his ambitions as the inevitable result of the hopeless love affair in which he has trapped himself in order to thwart himself. By the end of the book, says West, we can say about the hero: “This much we now know.” Similarly “This much we now know,” I suggest, is what we must say if we pause long enough at the household banalities of Lady Macbeth and the speechless revulsion of Macbeth at the atrocity the two together have coaxed his will to commit.

Notice that literature, on this view, gives us knowledge of something as good as real. Better in fact: because, by induction and implication, we can apply the knowledge, or aspects of it, to encounters in actual life which we are able to study with nothing approaching the same thoroughness. West illustrates with a final specimen the quality of the knowledge we pursue by a strange necessity in works of literature. She describes a portrait not of a single character but of a small society, in The Last Chronicle of Barset :

Anthony Trollope wrote a novel about a clergyman and a theft which has a theme. The mean anxiety of the countryside to believe that poor unattractive Mr. Crawley should have stolen the money sent to him as a gift, and their oddly enough equally sincere relief when it was proved that he did not, illustrate the curious tendency among human beings for the happy to hate the unhappy, as if they spread their unhappiness as an infection. . . . Anthony Trollope passed the whole of this material through his imagination (probably not knowing exactly what he was doing, or how he was doing it, or how important it was that it should be done, since the presentation of this knowledge to himself would have absorbed energy and he could do the job just as well without it), and having thus gained an accurate non-sentimental view of it he told the truth about it so helped him God. And at the end of it he has established just how certain kinds of people act in certain circumstances that uncover their attitudes to recurring and fundamental factors of life, just as Professor Pavlov has established how a certain kind of dog behaved when it was given meat powder under certain conditions. An experiment has been conducted, an observation has been made, bearing on a certain principle.

So Trollope in his unconscious way, as Rebecca West interprets him, gave a name to a local drama and thereby allowed his readers to glimpse a permanent truth about collective self-deception. In a writer of greater conscious intelligence, we may discover a knowledge of character and of group psychology that is just as rare. George Orwell in his essay “Reflections on Gandhi” criticized at length the severe asceticism of Gandhi. It took a toll it took on his relationships, as all asceticism must do:

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi—with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction—always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. . . . This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which—I think—most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

I spoke earlier of knowledge and self-knowledge; and though the passage I have just quoted is well known and rightly admired, I would care for it less if the essay in which it appears did not turn around finally and show how the work of reflecting on Gandhi’s life had surprised the author, and how it led to an unexpected discovery of self-knowledge. In the war years, Orwell had written unsympathetically of the political privilege and (as he saw it) the emotional luxury of pacifism. The pacifist, he thought, in the war against Hitler exercised with impunity a moralistic high-mindedness which was only possible because others were willing to fight to save a country that tolerated pacifism. The survival of pacifists depended on the exertion of soldiers, just as the defense of Belgium required the action of mercenaries who saved the sum of things for pay. Yet at the end of “Reflections on Gandhi,” Orwell honors the “inhuman” ascetic and pacifist for a virtue he rates as high as the physical courage required in battle.

It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles. One feels of him that there was much that he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure. . . . His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained.

When Orwell says he no longer feels sure that Gandhi was “wrong in the main,” he must mean that he is no longer sure that Gandhi’s pacifism was wrong. This essay was written after Nineteen Eighty-Four , with its portrayal of a North Atlantic world governed by a one-party state and driven by a foreign policy of perpetual war. Between 1945 and 1949, Orwell’s own politics had changed, to a degree that allowed him to discover a fresh truth, a kind of knowledge he could not have recognized before; and he found a name for the truth when he read Gandhi’s words about Gandhi’s life. If there is a common feature of the literature of knowledge I have been exploring, it may be that the discovery looks as if it had always been lying wait. It offers itself as a possible way of widening our intelligible relation to human life and human nature. Unless we choose to become like gods and to re-create ourselves in images devised by ourselves, this knowledge counts as proof that human nature has the sort of permanence that nature has. The history of such discoveries may therefore also be a history of the future—a prophecy and, to the extent that we think such discoveries are in danger of being lost, a warning.

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1.1: What is Literature?

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

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Defining Literature

In order for us to study literature with any kind of depth, first we must decide what constitutes literature. While works like William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are almost universally accepted as literature, other works are hotly debated, or included or excluded based on the context. For example, while most consider Toni Morrison’s Beloved literature, others debate whether more recent publications such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Rupi Kaur’s Instagram poetry constitute literature. And what about the stories told through tweets, like Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” ? What about video games, like Skyrim , or memes, like Grumpy Cat?

Students often throw their hands up in the air over such distinctions, arguing literature is subjective. Isn't it up to individual opinion? Anything can be literature, such students argue. At first glance, it could seem such distinctions are, at best, arbitrary. At worst, such definitions function as a means of enforcing cultural erasure.

However, consider a story about Kim Kardashian’s plastic surgery in People Magazine . Can this be considered on the same level of literary achievement as Hamlet ? Most would concede there is a difference in quality between these two texts. A blurb about Kim Kardashian’s latest plastic surgery, most would agree, does not constitute literature. So how can we differentiate between such works?

Literature vs. literature

As illustrated in the somewhat silly example above, one way we can define what constitutes literature is by identifying what is definitely not literature. For our intents and purposes of defining most terms in this textbook, we will use the Oxford English Dictionary ’s definitions. Many professors who teach Literature use the concept of Big L Literature vs. little l literature (Rollison).

While the definition of little l literature is fairly easy to understand and apply, the definition of Big L Literature remains amorphous. What makes a work “artistic”? How do we define “superior” or “lasting”?

Let’s break down some of the defining qualities of literature in a bit more detail, starting with the word “artistic.”

Exercise 1.1.1

Consider the following works of art. Which of these images do you feel is higher quality or more “artistic”? Which is lower-quality or less artistic? Why? Justify your position by analyzing the elements of each artwork.

While there may be some debate, most students usually respond that Friedrich's painting is more artistic. This is due to several composition differences between the two works:

• Artist’s skill: it certainly appears as if the first image was produced by an artist with superior skill
• Fame: for anyone who knows art history, the first image is famous while the other is not
• Lasting quality: the first image has survived the test of time, remaining popular over two hundred years!
• Meaning: the first image likely conjures deeper feelings, themes, or ideas, such as isolation and the primacy of nature. This is why this image has become the face of Romanticism.

But what about the images demonstrate the artists’ superior skills? While the second image appears to be produced with a simple doodle, and quickly composed, the first indicates more complexity, attention-to-detail, and craft. Freidrich leverages different colors, textures, shapes, and symbols to evoke a feeling in the viewer. Skilled artists will use different techniques, like the way they move the paintbrush, the pressure they exert or the direction of the brush. They will use textured paintbrushes for a specific effect, such as the difference between the light fluffy clouds and dark mountain rocks. They will use different color pallets to project, as accurately as possible, the feelings they are trying to evoke. In short, while anyone can paint, true artists leverage many different skills, techniques, and materials to render what is in their imagination into a real-life product.

So how does this relate to our attempts to define literature?

Literature is art, but with words.

While the artist uses different colors, paintbrushes, mediums, canvases, and techniques, the writer uses different genres and literary techniques called literary devices . Just like different types of paint, paintbrushes, and artistic tools, there are literally hundreds of literary devices, but some of the most common are metaphor, simile, personification, and imagery. Genre is the type or style of literature. Each genre has its own conventions. Literary genres include creative nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry . Works that are literary tend to masterfully use genre conventions and literary devices to create a world in the mind of the reader. Works that are less literary tend to be for practical and/or entertainment purposes, and the writer dedicates less focused energy towards artfully employing literary devices.

However, just because a work is not as literary as another does not mean it cannot be enjoyed. Just like a stick figure or cartoon character might be perfectly fine if intended for a particular audience or purpose, readers can still enjoy People Magazine even though it is not of the same literary quality as Hamlet .

So, to use an example from earlier:

While some literature falls into clear designations of literature or not literature, most works are open to debate. Given the sometimes difficult task of determining whether a work falls into one camp or the other, it may be more helpful to think of Literature less as a dichotomy than a spectrum, with popular magazines on one end and works like Hamlet and Beloved on the other, and most written works falling somewhere between the two extremes.

The Literary Spectrum

This spectrum can be a helpful way to think about literature because it provides a more open-ended way to discuss writing as art than simply labeling works as literary or not. After viewing the above chart, why do you think popular magazines and a Calculus textbook are considered "less literary"? In terms of popular magazines, they do not fit the definition of literature as "lasting" in the sense that they usually fade from relevancy quickly after publication. Additionally, the authors of such magazines are striving for quick entertainment rather than leaving a meaningful impression on the reader. They tend not to use literary devices, such as metaphor, in a masterful way. On the other end, Shakespeare's Hamlet definitely fits the definition of "lasting," in that it has survived hundreds of years. It is full of literary devices used for rhetorical effect and, one would argue, it touches upon deep themes such as death, the afterlife, murder, vengeance, and love, rather than trifling issues such as a starlet's most recent plastic surgery.

Certainly, works of literature are up for debate: that is the quintessential question literary scholars might ask. What makes certain literary works survive the test of time? What makes a story, poem, or drama "good"? While literary scholars are less interested in proving a certain work is "good" or not -- and more focused on analyzing the ways to illuminate a given work -- it can be helpful for you to consider what kinds of literature you like and why you like it. What about the way it was written causes you to feel the way you do about it?

Who Decides What is Literature?

Now that we have at least somewhat clarified the definition of literature, who decides what works are or are not literature? Historically speaking, kings, queens, publishers, literary critics, professors, colleges, and readers (like you!) have decided which works survive and which works do not.

Aristotle was one of the first writers to attempt to decide what works fall into the category of literature, and what works do not. While Aristotle was most famous for his contributions to science and philosophy, he is also considered one of the first literary critics. A literary critic is a person who studies and analyzes literature. A literary critic produces scholarship called literary criticism . An example of this would be Aristotle’s Poetics , in which he identifies the defining qualities of a “good” Tragedy. Aristotle’s analysis of Tragedy was so influential that it is still used today, over two thousand years later!

When a work is officially decided to constitute literature, it enters something called the Canon. Not to be confused with the large metal tube that shoots bombs popular in the 16th through the 19th centuries (cannon), the Literary Canon is a collection of works that are considered by the powers that be to constitute literature. A work that falls into this designation is called canonical. So, to use an example from Aristotle’s Poetics , Aristotle defined Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy as the pinnacle of the Tragic Genre. From there, in part due to Aristotle's influence, Greek society valued Oedipus so much that they kept discussing, reading, referencing, and teaching it. Thus, it became a kind of shining example of the Tragic Canon, one which has lasted thousands of years and continues to be read and lauded to this day. Other tragedies, fairly or not, are often judged on their quality in comparison to Sophocles' works. Wild to think that someone who died thousands of years ago still influences what we consider literature today!

Memes and Video Games: Today's Literature?

All this talk of thousands-of-years-old texts might seem out of touch. A lot of people think "old and boring" and literature are synonymous. Students are often surprised to hear that comic books and video games can arguably be considered literature, too. There are plenty of arguments to be made that comic books, such as Maus by Art Spiegalman (1991) or Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006) are literature. Cutting edge literary scholars argue video games like Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer (2015) can be considered literary. There is also literature that is published in tweets, like Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" (2012). Some might even consider memes literature!

Generative question: do you think memes can be literary?

A meme is an image or video containing cultural values or ideas, often represented through allusion (implied reference to another work, without naming that work or its author). Memes can spread rapidly spreads through social media. Why? Because the best ones are #relatable; that is, they speak to a common human experience.

Usually memes take the form of text superimposed on an image. For example, the meme above conveys the dramatic reaction students sometimes give when I assign an essay. This is done primarily through a literary device called hyperbole , or exaggeration for rhetorical effect. It conveys its message comically through certain conventions that come along with the meme genre, such as the syntactic structure "me, a [insert noun]" and asterisks, which convey action. Just like in the Shakespearean drama, the colon indicates what each character (me and the students, in this case) is saying or doing. My chihuahua's face looks silly and very dramatic. Through this use of image, text, format, and convention, the meaning I intended to convey was that I was making fun of my students for being over-dramatic about what to me seems like a fairly simple assignment. While some might dismiss memes as shallow, when you start to unravel the layers of meaning, they can actually be very complex and even, dare I say, literary!

Think about a recent meme you have seen, or your favorite meme of all time. Imagine explaining this meme to someone who has no idea what it means. What is the message or idea behind the meme? What cultural reference points does it use to convey its message? In what ways might this meme be considered literature? How might this compare to a short poem, like a haiku?

Not Literature

Let's say you come to the conclusion that a meme, a gossip magazine, or the Twilight Series is not literary. Does that mean you have to feel guilty and give up reading it forever? Or that it is not "good"?

Just because a work is not literary does not mean it is "bad," that it does not have value, or that one cannot enjoy it. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of written works that are on the less literary side of the spectrum but are still fun and enriching to read. Joe Dirt i s not on the same artistic level of cinema as Schindler's List , but my husband still loves watching it. Nothing Taylor Swift has produced is as deep as Tupac Shakur's "Changes" (1992) or Mitski's "Last Words of a Shooting Star" (2014), but listening to Taylor Swift is my guilty pleasure. This is all to say that whether a text is literary or not is not as important as the methods of analyzing texts. In fact, texts which were excluded from literature are often argued into the literary canon through such analysis. Part of what makes analyzing literature so fun is that it means the definition of literature is always up for debate! This is especially important given the history of the canon.

The Problem with the Canon

In an ideal world, literature would be celebrated purely based on its artistic merit. Well-written works would last, poorly-written works would wither from public memory. However, that is not always the case. Works often achieve public prominence or survive based on qualities unrelated to skill or aesthetics, such as an author's fame, wealth, connections, or acceptance by the dominant culture. William Wordsworth, for example, was named Poet Laureate of England and has been taught as one of the "Big Six" major Romantic-era authors ever since. Indeed, he is accepted as part of the Romanticism literary canon. One would be hard-pressed to find a Literature anthology that does not feature William Wordsworth . However, how many people have read or heard of Dorothy Wordsworth , William Wordsworth's sister, who arguably depicted Romantic themes with equal skill and beauty? Or James Hogg, a Scottish contemporary of Wordsworth who was a lower-class shepherd? Similarly, while most readers have encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edgar Allen Poe in their high school literature classes, how many have read Frederick Douglass in these same classes? In short, all artistic skill (arguably) considered equal, why do some authors predominantly feature in the Canon while others do not?

Let’s perform an experimental activity.

• Find a piece of paper or a whiteboard. On this piece of paper or whiteboard, write down as many works of literature that you feel constitute “Big L Literature.” Perhaps they are works you read in high school, works which have been made into films, or works you have been taught or told are literary masterworks. Don’t turn the page until you have written them down. Try to think of at least 10, but a larger sample size is better. Once you are finished, continue to the next paragraph.
• Alright, now look at your list. If you know the author of the literary texts you named, write their name next to the work. If you do not know the author, Google the information and write it down. Continue doing this until you have named the author of each work. Once you are finished, read on to the next paragraph.
• Now, as uncomfortable as it seems, label the gender/race/age/presumed sexual orientation of the authors you listed. After you have categorized them to the best of your ability, consider the following questions:
• What percentage of the authors are male?
• What percentage of the authors are white?
• What percentage of the authors are old/dead?
• What patterns do you notice? Why do you think this is?

I have replicated this experiment dozens of times in the classroom, and, in most classes, the vast majority of what students have been taught are “Literary Masterworks” are written by (pardon my colloquialism) dead white males. Although, as time progresses, it seems there is increasing but not proportionate representation on average. For example, while women make up about half of the population, over 80% of the most popular novels were written by men ("Battle"). While there are many possible reasons for this discrepancy in representation (which could be the focus of an entire textbook), what does this mean for scholars of literature? For students? For instructors? For society?

As a cultural relic, similar to art, many scholars suggest literature is a reflection of the society which produces it. This includes positive aspects of society (championing values such as love, justice, and good triumphing over evil), but it can also reflect negative aspects of society (such as discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia, historical lack of opportunity for marginalized authors).

For example, enslaved Africans were often prevented from learning to read and write as a form of control. When Phillis Wheatley published her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) she had to defend the fact that she wrote it, due to popularly held racist views that slaves were incapable of writing poetry. Later, Frederick Douglass wrote about how his enslavers banned him from reading and writing, as they realized "education and slavery were incompatible with each other" (Douglass). He later championed his learning to read and write as the means which conveyed him to freedom. However, even when trying to publish The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ( 1845) his publishers were forced to prove that it was, in fact, an enslaved person who wrote the story and not a white man who wrote it for him. Slave owners actively attempted to keep this book from circulation as it threatened the institution of slavery upon which they depended. Indeed, to this day, Douglass' book continues to be banned in some prisons for its potential to incite revolution (Darby, Gilroy).

How could Black writers enter the canon en masse if they were not allowed to read or write? Or if they were forced to spend all of their waking hours working? And if those who had the means to read and write had to jump through absurd hoops just to have their works published? And if even those texts which were published were banned?

Similarly, throughout much of Western history, women have been discouraged from pursuing reading and writing, as it distracted from society's expectations for women to focus on motherly and household duties. Until the 1700s, women were not allowed to go to college. Even then, very few went: only the extremely wealthy. It was not until the 19th century that women attended college in representative numbers. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own that if there are fewer works of literature written by women, it is only because society, historically, has not given women the time, education, funding, or space to do so. In this extended essay, she describes an imaginary sister of William Shakespeare who could have been just as great of a writer had she the same opportunities as her brother.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.

Woolf argues that in our time those who have been excluded from literature can now join the canon by adding their voices. The inequity of representation in literature -- which has arguably improved, but in many ways persists today -- can be remedied if more people from a wide array of backgrounds and walks of life are empowered to study and create Literature. That is one reason why the current study of literature is so exciting. As a student and budding literary scholar, you have the power to influence culture through your reading and analysis of literature! For one author and scholar's perspective on this topic, please watch this the following TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to see the ways in which such misrepresentations are harmful, and why it is important to veer away from the historically parochial Canon into what Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories" (qtd. Bacon).

• Original video available on TED Talk website
• Transcript of video

What "single stories" do you know? What are the "single stories" people have told about you? What story would you tell if you could? What kinds of stories do you want to read? Throughout this class, you will get the opportunity to encounter many different voices and stories from all over the world. While we faced hurdles of copyright permissions, the authors of this textbook attempted to embody the values espoused in this TED Talk & Chinua Achebe's conception of the "balance of stories." As you read the textbook, consider the stories which were omitted, why they were omitted, and what works of Literature you would include in this class if you could.

Works Cited

Bacon, Katie. "An African Voice." The Atlantic , 2000.

"Battle of the Authors: Are The Most Popular Rated Fiction Books Written by Men or Women?" Wordery , 1 Mar. 2019.

Darby, Luke. "Illinois Prison Bans Frederick Douglass's Memoir and Other "Racial" Books." GQ , 20 August 2019.

Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 1845.

Friedrich, Caspar David. "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." Hamburger Kunsthalle Museum , 1818.

Gilroy, Paul. "Banned Books of Guantánamo: 'An American Slave' by Frederick Douglass." Vice , 14 Nov. 2014.

"literature, n.; 3b & 5" OED Online , Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109080. Accessed 6 September 2019.

Rollison, David. "Big L vs Little L Literature." Survey of World Literature I. College of Marin, 2008. Lecture.

Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral . 1773.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929.

Beyond experiential knowledge: a classification of patient knowledge

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• Published: 04 June 2024

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• Vincent Dumez 1 &
• Audrey L’Espérance 2  

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Patients’ experiential knowledge is increasingly documented as a valid form of knowledge in the health sector and is often said to be a source of valuable information to complement the knowledge of health professionals. Although this increased recognition is outlined in the health science literature and formalized in certain organizational and clinical contexts, it remains difficult for various actors of the health ecosystem to contour the different forms of knowledge patients acquire through their experience as well as to consider them as essential in co-building care plans and as an asset to build care relationships. The aim of this review is twofold: (1) to challenge the dominant model of knowledge in medicine and healthcare by making the various forms of patient knowledge more explicit and tangible and (2) to provide a better understanding of what experiential knowledge consists of by classifying the various forms of knowledge patient acquire, develop, and mobilize throughout their care journey. A narrative review allows to classify six types of patient knowledge according to their source of learning: embodied, monitoring, navigation, medical, relational, and cultural knowledge. The three main sources of learning, namely the self, the system, and the community grounds patients’ learning process in their health journey.

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Patients’ experiential knowledge is increasingly documented as a valid form of knowledge in the health sector (Gross & Gagnayre 2017 ; Jouet et al. 2010 ) and is often said to be a source of valuable information to complement the knowledge of health professionals in clinical settings, medical education, health research, and healthcare management (Pomey et al. 2015 ). Although this increased recognition is outlined in the health science literature and formalized through frameworks, policies, and guidelines in several organizational and clinical contexts, it remains difficult for actors of the health ecosystem to outline the different forms of patients’ knowledge, to consider them as valid and useful in co-building care plans and mobilize them as an asset to build care relationships. In other words, what we call experiential knowledge is not explicit for many of the major actors in the health community, patients included. In a context where patient knowledge is constantly undervalued, patients themselves are not always aware of the variety of knowledge they have acquired and the value it can have in building more equitable care relationships. Patients’ participation in the co-production of decisions more consistent with their rights, needs, and interests also often resides in greater recognition of their ability, and even competence, to interact with a healthcare system dominated by experts and professional knowledge. The elasticity of the concept of experiential knowledge also impacts on the general understanding of healthcare professionals. Many concepts of patient-centered practice emphasize the importance of experiential knowledge as the cornerstone of shared decision-making and partnership in care. However, without a clear understanding of what this means, it remains difficult to put this recognition into action, to bring it to life at the heart of care delivery. This reinforces the clear epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007 ) that remains in healthcare and social services.

We propose a new reading of the literature to give a pragmatic meaning to the concept of experiential knowledge. By clarifying what we mean when using this broad term, we better differentiate the range of knowledge encompassed by this notion of “experience.” A narrative review highlights the differences and similarities between different types of knowledge in order to underline their meaning action. As much as patient experiential knowledge is cited as the foundation of patients’ expertise, biomedical knowledge is still predominant in the design and implementation of healthcare practices, interventions, and policies. The biomedical establishment is known to give a deflated level of credibility to a patient’s narratives (Dumit 2006 ) and lacks the necessary interpretive resources to make sense of a patient's experience of illness and healthcare (Heggen & Berg 2021 ). In the healthcare economy of credibility, patients are given less authority by professional hearers when compared to the value usually granted to biomedical, scientific, and professional perspectives. Without highlighting their variety and specificity, patients' experiential knowledge is given a vague meaning in contrast to professionals' skills and knowledge formalized by academic training. This in turn undermines their perceived value in the production of quality care and decision-making. This can, in part, be explained by the lack of coherence between the definitions given to the concept of experiential knowledge and the ambiguity between the explicit forms of knowledge acquired and mobilized by patients in their journey.

The non-recognition of patients' knowledge by the dominant intellectual classes in health care was described by some as epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014 ) hence bringing to light one of the many shapes of the power imbalances characterizing care relationships. Patients, caregivers, and medical professionals exchange and interpret the knowledge during medical encounters. Patients report frequently that healthcare professionals do not take their testimonies, interpretations of symptoms, and treatment preferences seriously (Heggen & Berg 2021 ). For Glasby and Beresford (Glasby & Beresford 2006 ), neglecting the views and experiences of people who use health services gives a “ false and potentially dangerous view of the world ” (p. 6) bringing them to highlight the crucial contribution that experiential knowledge can bring; a notion taken up by many other authors especially in the field of mental health and chronic disease management (Faulkner 2017 ; Rose 2009 ; Russo 2014 ; Sweeney 2015 ). They show that the development of experiential knowledge starts with experiencing continuously a phenomenon such as a chronic disease or a disability (Castro et al. 2019 ), by analyzing, reflecting repeatedly, and sharing stories about this experience (Gardien 2020 ). This kind of knowledge endlessly develops through observation, imitation, affection, and reflection. Consequently, patients and their support networks are experimenting, adapting, acquiring, and even generating all kinds of knowledge, including scholarly knowledge (Coulter 2011 ).

In this polysemic context, the aim of this narrative review is twofold: (1) to challenge the dominant model of knowledge in medicine and healthcare by making the various forms of patient knowledge more explicit and (2) to provide a better understanding of what experiential knowledge consists of by classifying the various forms of knowledge patient can acquire, develop, and mobilize throughout their care journey. In our perspective, it is essential to better define patient knowledge to give it its rightful place at the heart of the care relationships, whether it is expert or experiential in nature. Recognition and mobilization of knowledge shape patterns of health care relationships. Who owns it, how knowledge is defined, and who is seen as knowledgeable, all play a vital role in weaving the power dynamics between health professionals and patients at the clinical, organizational, and political levels. It is therefore more thought-provoking to ask the following questions: What are the sources of patient knowledge? What forms do they take? How are they activated and expressed?

The need for a classification of patient knowledge

While the literature highlights renewed acknowledgement that patient knowledge matters (Tambuyzer et al. 2014 ), it seems to be a poorly understood concept in the current health care context (McLaughlin 2009 ; Miaskiewicz & Kozar 2011 ; Scourfield 2010 ). The concept of experiential knowledge for instance remains vague and is used to encompass many types of experiences. It also tends to be placed at odds with the expert knowledge of professionals, as if patients were not experts of their condition. However, positioning patient knowledge as expert knowledge did not help to bridge the gap either. As Pols presented it, “the knowledge of the ‘expert patient’ may be assumed to have the shape of up-to-date medical information ” (Pols 2014 , p. 73), therefore diminishing the credibility given to them and contributing in fact to perpetuate the epistemic injustice that proponents were trying to counter. Besides, patient knowledge and professional knowledge in healthcare are both made up of what could be called expert knowledge and experiential knowledge. If professionals have expert knowledge acquired through learning about medicine and science as well as experiential knowledge acquired through their clinical practice, thus patients acquire expert knowledge through learning about their condition and treatments and experiential knowledge through life with their condition and self-care. One or the other of these forms of knowledge is therefore not the prerogative of one of these actors (Akrich 2010 ; Collins & Evans 2002 ; Epstein 1995 ; Jasanoff 2006 ; Pols 2014 ).

Broadly, three groups of patient knowledge are described in the health care literature: embodied or bodily, lay, or experiential, and biomedical. Bodily knowledge or body listening is defined by Price (Price 1993 ) as “ awareness of and attention to understanding and interpretation of one’s body .” (p. 37) He describes a spectrum of awareness going from precognition or vague attention to full cognitive consciousness. Price correlates this knowledge to specific management activities. Mishel (Mishel 1999 ) discusses patients’ familiarization with symptoms triggers and signs of oncoming attacks and argues that they are key to self-management. These embodied knowledge, consist of, and are mobilized, as a source of authority (Salmon 2000 ) by patients “managing their illness through considerable experimentation and testing for variations in body response” (Paterson et al. 2001 , p. 336). The patient as a sentinel designation characterizes chronic patients who have learned to perceive symptoms of seizures to perceive the symptoms of crises early on (Crozet et al. 2018 ). Sentinel patients have developed a personal semiology that allows them to perceive reliable symptoms and act accordingly. According to Crozet and colleagues, the perceptual competence can be improved during the patient education programs by an adapted training on the verbalization of symptoms and listening to the body (Crozet et al. 2018 ).

As for lay expertise or experiential knowledge, it has been defined as practical knowledge embedded in the patient’s experience of managing and living with an illness. Where “ professionals generally concern themselves with disease processes, … laypeople focus on the personal experience of illness ” (Brown 1992 , p. 267). Experiential knowledge takes a variety of forms in the literature. They are sometimes described as medical, cultural, technical, institutional, methodological, etc. (Kerr et al. 1998 ) resulting in a strong conceptual blurring and a dissipation of the distinction between embodied knowledge that takes its source in the body, and knowledge acquired from the experience of living with the illness which is rooted as much in the management of oneself health, the interaction with health care systems and actors, as in the acquaintance with the medical disciplines and the care provided by the community. Experiential knowledge, Borkman wrote in 1976, “ is truth learned from personal experience with a phenomenon rather than truth acquired by discursive reasoning, observation, or reflection on information provided by others ” (Borkman 1976 , p. 446). Experiential knowledge has contextual, subjective, unconscious, and emotional properties (Boardman 2014 ) that offer an intimate understanding of the condition. Pols ( 2014 ) define experiential knowledge as a “knowing in action” (p. 78) understood in terms of its utility or use-value for self-management and for supporting other patients. From this knowledge could stem compassionate capacities and social values possibly leading to the formation of epistemic communities (Mazanderani et al. 2012 , 2020 ).

Biomedical knowledge, on the other hand, is referred to as formal, professional, and authoritative in the literature. Seen as objective, it is concerned with the disease process and the indisputable “truths” about medical science. Very often, this type of knowledge is considered the sole possession of health professionals. As if patients did not have the capacity to access this knowledge and integrate it into their own disease management. However, another part of the health science literature discusses the growing phenomenon of patients mobilizing the latest scientific advances (or information gathered from the Internet) during their medical consultations, often significantly altering the contours of their relationship with their physicians (Anderson et al. 2003 ). Patient with chronic fatigue syndrome (Banks & Prior 2001 ) and more recently patient affected by long COVID (Atkinson et al. 2021 ; Rushforth et al. 2021 ) showed how patients use biomedical knowledge to make sense of and describe their symptoms, both to name their reality and to gain medical and public recognition for their condition. The medicalization of individual narratives is well described by Hydèn & Sachs. ( 1998 ):

To express one’s suffering in terms of illness means that it must fit into and fulfill certain criteria and preconceptions about disease and it’s treatment… this means that to have suffering recognized as a disease and to obtain relief, patients must transform their suffering in a way that enables them to seek help and be accepted as patients for medical care (p. 176)

Peters and colleagues (Peters et al. 1998 ) assert that experiential and medical knowledge are not separate systems by describing how patients incorporated medical beliefs into their description of their symptoms to access physical treatment. Thorne argues that people with chronic illnesses are learning as much as possible about how health science and medicine view their condition (Thorne 1993 ).

While these three categories of knowledge have been well described in the literature, another categorization emerged in France in a group of thinkers adopting a patient-driven approach to the study of patient knowledge and partnership in care. Gross and Gagnayre (Gross & Gagnayre 2017 ) described five types of experiential knowledge patients acquire in the course of their life with the disease: (1) implicit experiential knowledge that aims at adapting to their own body, (2) explicit experiential knowledge that aims at adapting to their environment, (3) situated knowledge that allows patients to form epistemic communities, and (4) scholarly knowledge that supports the previous ones and can allow them to access (5) expert knowledge. Although we find echoes of the above-mentioned literature in these five types of knowledge, it puts into perspective that a classification of patient knowledge should not necessarily be oriented solely around the attributes of the knowledge, but above all consider the reasons why patient learn and mobilize them. This line of work led us thinking about the sources of patient knowledge acquisition and the patient journey as a learning device. The types of knowledge described by Gross and Gagnayre are all acquired in several ways and take their essence from the experience of the self as much as from the interactions with others and institutions, through immersion, submission, collaboration, and contestation. While highlighting the relational aspect of putting patient knowledge into action, this framework of patient knowledge does not allow us to fully clarify their intrinsic nature and their primary sources of acquisition.

Thus, we looked at patient knowledge from the point of view of the learner and constructed the classification around sources of acquisition. With the aim to better recognize, expand, and mobilize patient knowledge at the level of care, it felt important to provide mutually exclusive categories of patient knowledge, not only with the aim of expressing what is, but also by providing space for action. By identifying the sources of acquisition, we uncover learning spaces. By uncovering learning spaces, opportunities to teach are highlighted and learning is accelerated by providing keys to patients and professionals along the healthcare journey, supporting empowerment and capacity building. By emphasizing the sources of patient knowledge acquisition, the massive work undertaken by patients taking place outside the health system is made visible which consolidates their primary position within the healthcare team. By delineating the learning spaces, we therefore value the teaching roles of both professionals and patients as trainers (Karazivan et al. 2015 ) and their (in)ability to effectively transmit one or all of the six types of knowledge we further describe.

Three sources of learning

We classify patient knowledge into three main sources of learning, namely the self, the system, and the community. First, the self is a fundamental source of implicit and explicit patient knowledge (Gross & Gagnayre 2017 ). Patients learn from their body and their mind, and they get to know the many details of their bodily manners, their physical as well as their mental strength and vulnerabilities. Their experience of the sick and healthy body and soul is part of their learning. They get to know what they like, what they need, what feels right and wrong, and define what is their own “natural” state. The self is also a space of observation, reflection, and experimentation. Second, the s ystem is a source of situated, learned, and scholarly knowledge. Through their use of health services and their interactions with actors of the healthcare institutions, patients learn how to be (attitude, manners, conduct), how to talk (vocabulary, concepts, and codes), and what to do (gestures, posture, choreography). Patients have “ a particularly nuanced way of applying the often unspoken and sometimes invisible ‘rules of the game’ of healthcare .” (Willis et al. 2016 , p. 209) Despite professional gatekeeping, patients will strategically acquire knowledge that will enable them to adopt the codes and epistemic repertoires necessary to build relationships with health professionals and secure a credible voice around the decision-making table. As they move through their care and service journey, they will learn how to use the structures of the healthcare system to their advantage or how to circumvent structural barriers more effectively to achieve their health goals. Finally, the community is the third source of patient knowledge. Learning is thus a relational and situated activity. Patients develop knowledge through meeting others and sharing their stories in peer support and user groups (Faulkner 2017 ) and through their constant encounter with health care professionals and caregivers. The community is where the healthcare journey intersects with domestic, professional, academic, and spiritual, etc., journeys. The community is a learning space because it allows for the weaving of links between life with the disease and all the other experiences that build the person's life beyond the disease. The community is the space where links are forged, and care and caregiving take a plurality of forms. We must even consider that the knowledge generated by these relationships can lead to the learning of false information or even knowledge that contradicts recognized care practices. Yet this knowledge materializes into narrative and action repertoires that influence the care relationships of a significant proportion of patients; all the more reason to recognize their existence.

The six categories of patient knowledge

With the three sources of acquisition in mind, we asked: what is the knowledge we acquire through the experience of the self, the system, and the community? Six categories of patient knowledge were, according to our review, described at length by the health science and social science literature: embodied knowledge, monitoring knowledge, navigation knowledge, medical knowledge, relational knowledge, and cultural knowledge (see Fig.  1 .)

Classification of patient knowledge by source of learning

Embodied knowledge is sensory and grounded in bodily experience, anchored in physical sensations (pain, relief, discomfort, level of energy, etc.) and perceptions of the body and mind. In other words, the body is foundational to making sense of the human experience and the experience of illness and/or disability (Craig et al. 2018 ). Bodily vulnerabilities and strengths become signals that patients learn to listen to and use as a basis for making decisions. Decoding the world through the body and the mind forges a type of knowledge of the self and of others that shapes the way patients will conceive their body, their illness, and their relationship to others. This type of knowledge provides a basis for defining their life experience, resulting in a conceptualization that may be at odds with the broader socially constructed perception of what one’s experience is, what one’s body feels like. The experience of the sick or disabled body allows for the conceptualization of the self and of others and thus contributes to social positioning. Patients often speak of their embodied knowledge as the only knowledge others will never have full access to, apart perhaps by peers. This knowledge, more conceptual than practical, is inherent to the activity of being.

Everyday life with an illness, taking care daily of oneself or a loved one, tracking vital signs (e.g., through analog or digital devices), taking medication, regulating care, learning care techniques (e.g., injecting, exercising, massaging, clapping, etc.), making choices about one’s health, noting feelings and symptoms, etc., are all developing and reinforcing patient monitoring knowledge through their care journey. Monitoring knowledge is the capacity to identify with acuity physical, mental, and/or emotional signs either through formal tracking or self-awareness. Patients learn to recognize their symptoms and can make decisions based on bodily sensations, physical and psychological manifestations, etc. Patients develop a sensory perception of symptoms leading to an information processing, resulting in a personalized semiology on which patients base their own diagnosis and treatment plans on a day-to-day basis (Crozet et al. 2018 ). Monitoring knowledge enables patients to cope with crises but also to better manage their disease. They consist of precision know-how as much as the recognition of sensations specific to their condition. Patients know how to take their blood pressure or glucose levels, know how to inject medication, and know what doses of medication are most appropriate at what time for what purpose, etc. They know how to go beyond standard protocols and apply the “codes” of medicine in a “personalized” arrangement of care based on their knowledge of their body and their own physiological, psychological, and emotional reactions to treatments and care. Monitoring knowledge is learned tshrough the practice of the body. It is acquired by continued management of the body and the illness using standardized medical technologies as much as individually crafted techniques and devices. They are useful in achieving an individual goal of self-care as well as in pursuing the relational goal of seeking care.

Navigation knowledge comes from the repeated use of health care and services, from the repeated experience of institutional access and barriers to health care and services, and from searching and finding resources available within and outside the healthcare network (Willis et al. 2016 ). Patients develop knowledge to ensure they have access to the basic necessities and benefits. This type of knowledge is learnt by using the system, by being lost in the institutional structures, and by learning where the services are and how to access them most efficiently (Fischer et al. 2007 ). Service users often have a better understanding of the health system than the professionals themselves, having experienced service breakdowns and barriers to access that cannot be seen from an insider’s position. This knowledge is procedural in nature, insofar as it helps patients position themselves within a complex machinery of actors and institutions. They get to know what information is perceived as valuable and how to use it to be viewed as credible to be heard by care and service providers. It is as much about knowing how to make a medical appointment -for instance where to call, with what information, when—as it is about knowing how to present oneself to obtain the needed care and services—for example, by selecting information or using a specific words during an appointment with a specialist versus a general practitioner.

Medical knowledge is the derivative of two dynamics: (1) meeting with medical practitioners and (2) seeking information about the physiological causes and mechanisms of their illness, their symptoms, the options and types of treatments, the side effects and benefits of such treatments, the drug interactions, etc. Patients understand and use medical language, can initiate a discussion about their care and services with knowledge of the science of their disease or condition, can question treatments or medication choices, know what a diagnosis means, and generate some themselves. Often perceived as the realm of doctors and medical staff, medical knowledge is nonetheless mobilized by patients to bargain for a position of credibility during appointments and to make sense of their illness. Medical knowledge can be useful for telling their own story and therefore for being heard and understood by a larger public. It can become a source of empowerment in the search for a balance between caregivers and patient statuses. Patients become familiar with technical or medical terms, use these terms in an accurate manner, and thus meet the expectations of health care professionals by being “good patients” (Collyer et al. 2017 ).

Relational knowledge is a set of explicit and situated knowledge that enables patients to know who to turn to within their community to access the care they need, to help them with disease management and support the achievement of their life goals. Patients identify the people and organizations that are part of their care team both outside and inside the health care system. Patients develop and sustain a series of relationships that will enable them to obtain and maintain the care they need, and relationships they will rate on a trust scale ranging from blind trust to no trust at all. Yet these relationships will need to be activated at different times to allow both life within the healthcare system to stay minimal and life in the community to be maximized. Relational knowledge sometimes refers to the codes and norms influential to interpersonal relationships and shaping communication with different parties involved in one’s care journey. Relational knowledge is also to learn about the roles each actor plays within the care team, knowing their specialties and their complementarity, how to coordinate their work or avoid conflict. These are not only tools to develop communication skills, but also tools to build judgment. This requires having the words to say things intelligibility for their different interlocutors and may require a certain “culture” when these interlocutors are health professionals. In peer support settings, this knowledge is used to enter therapeutic relationships and sometimes to influence the learning of other patients so that they gain quality of life and autonomy (Gardien 2020 ).

Cultural knowledge includes the norms, values, symbols, constructions of reality, and worldviews that influence the experience of life and illness. It shapes what is considered as right or wrong and how to act accordingly. Cultural knowledge can help uncover how perceptions of health and sickness are constructed and thus consist of stratified differentiated experiences situated in time and space (Aldaheri et al. 2022 ). Examples of how cultural knowledge can influence health communication are multiple: for instance, kinship, age, and gender can be important indicators of who has the right to know and discuss health information with or about another person. Patients know how that can influence their care and what needs to be taken into consideration for the care they need to be provided with respect, to be safe and of quality, in line with their conception of self and their relationship to their community. Patients can identify which norms and values are central to their care and how these are actualized in their health journey. Here, cultural knowledge lies not only in the knowledge of cultural codes but also in how they influence conceptions and preferences about health, care needs, treatment options, and care relationships.

Recognizing patient knowledge: a first step toward partnership and value creation

This knowledge is acquired progressively over the course of a person’s journey. They are not all acquired and made explicit for everyone, nor are they easily mobilized in all contexts. Health and social inequalities and social systems of oppression will affect one’s capacity to learn and/or mobilize knowledge. For example, self-help and mutual aid groups, online patient forums, patient associations are created in part to balanced out these disparities and stimulate individual and collective empowerment. These venues and spaces where sharing and naming stories occur contribute to the transformation of experience into knowledge and to the realization that this knowledge can become power when harnessed in the right context. While recognizing that we are not all equal when it comes to learning, that not everyone has the same chances of transforming an experience into knowledge, that healthcare systems produce inequalities, we still propose to change the focus from “who” can or cannot acquire and mobilize knowledge to “what” knowledge can be acquired and “where/when” knowledge is acquired along one’s journey. We attempt to redistribute the responsibility of learning, which is often left only to patients, by putting it in the hands of professionals as well. By having a clearer idea of the six types of patient knowledge and three sources of acquisition, professionals and decision-makers are partly responsible for mobilizing, activating, and actively developing them throughout the patient's journey. They can no longer be passive in the face of patient learning once their forms have been clarified and the sources of acquisition are identified.

Recognition of patient knowledge and its nature allows both individuals and institutions to account for the important influence of this knowledge on health, on care and service relationships, and on the creation of value in the health and social services system. In many ways, a classification of patient knowledge provides a clear identification and definition of the array of knowledge acquired by patients, and allows us to better grasp what experiential knowledge consists of and to better position patient knowledge in complementarity with the knowledge of health professionals. Patients' various knowledge draws not only on “ systematic, rational or scientific knowledge, but also on social ideas, religious beliefs, situated experiences and specific world views ” (Wilcox 2010 , p. 55). Defining, differentiating, and classifying patient knowledge enables: (1) the recognition of each form of knowledge as cardinal pillars of building partnership with patients and caregivers; (2) the identification of learning strategies by source of knowledge acquisition; and (3) the development and mobilization of patient knowledge as a vital resource in creating value in the health care system at all levels, clinical, organizational, and political. Therefore, designing interventions to develop patient knowledge early (as a preventive tool) or during the care trajectory allows patients to increase their autonomy and, above all, rebalance the power relationship that historically undervalues the patients’ perspectives, experiences, and preferences. Developing patient knowledge early, even before a diagnosis or crisis, could allow for the strengthening of citizens, patients, and caregivers capacities to be an integral part of the care team early in the care journey. This could lead to quality, safe, and accessible care at the right time. Interventions developed in partnership with patients, considering the multiple dimensions of the patient experience, are most likely to strengthen patients' knowledge, while highlighting their value to healthcare professionals throughout the care journey. In this way, these knowledge-based interventions contribute to strengthening the capacity of both patients and caregivers to mobilize their knowledge and make it a driving force behind a more appropriate and value-creating care plan.

Developing patient knowledge and mobilizing it, for instance through therapeutic patient education, can generate great benefits in terms of access to care and continuity of care provided that the complementarity of the health professionals and patients’ knowledge is recognized. Describing and classifying patient knowledge take us away from the issue of interests and preferences of involved parties, biases, and evidence, and redefine care relationships around learning, dialogue, and knowledge exchange.

By way of conclusion, a caveat is in order. Many forms of knowledge coexist in the complex ecosystem of healthcare, dominated by well-documented knowledge-power dynamics. For the plurality and diversity of knowledge to exist, it is imperative to recognize it not only as a tool, but also as a way of life. In this sense, the knowledge presented in this classification cannot be detached from the contexts and cultures in which they are embedded. This is the enormous limitation of a classification work such as this. It has the value of defining better, but the limitation of making the six types of knowledge static and of evacuating their positionality and conflictuality with other coexisting knowledge.

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We would like to thank Ève Gardien for her advice and suggestions, as well as the team at the Centre of Excellence on Partnership with Patients and the Public for the discussions that led to the writing of this article

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• 28 May 2024
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The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?

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Humanoid robots developed by the US company Figure use OpenAI programming for language and vision. Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong/Alamy

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For a generation of scientists raised watching Star Wars, there’s a disappointing lack of C-3PO-like droids wandering around our cities and homes. Where are the humanoid robots fuelled with common sense that can help around the house and workplace?

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might be set to fill that hole. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we are the last generation for which those sci-fi scenes are not a reality,” says Alexander Khazatsky, a machine-learning and robotics researcher at Stanford University in California.

From OpenAI to Google DeepMind, almost every big technology firm with AI expertise is now working on bringing the versatile learning algorithms that power chatbots, known as foundation models, to robotics. The idea is to imbue robots with common-sense knowledge, letting them tackle a wide range of tasks. Many researchers think that robots could become really good, really fast. “We believe we are at the point of a step change in robotics,” says Gerard Andrews, a marketing manager focused on robotics at technology company Nvidia in Santa Clara, California, which in March launched a general-purpose AI model designed for humanoid robots.

At the same time, robots could help to improve AI. Many researchers hope that bringing an embodied experience to AI training could take them closer to the dream of ‘artificial general intelligence’ — AI that has human-like cognitive abilities across any task . “The last step to true intelligence has to be physical intelligence,” says Akshara Rai, an AI researcher at Meta in Menlo Park, California.

But although many researchers are excited about the latest injection of AI into robotics, they also caution that some of the more impressive demonstrations are just that — demonstrations, often by companies that are eager to generate buzz. It can be a long road from demonstration to deployment, says Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose company iRobot invented the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner.

There are plenty of hurdles on this road, including scraping together enough of the right data for robots to learn from, dealing with temperamental hardware and tackling concerns about safety. Foundation models for robotics “should be explored”, says Harold Soh, a specialist in human–robot interactions at the National University of Singapore. But he is sceptical, he says, that this strategy will lead to the revolution in robotics that some researchers predict.

Firm foundations

The term robot covers a wide range of automated devices, from the robotic arms widely used in manufacturing, to self-driving cars and drones used in warfare and rescue missions. Most incorporate some sort of AI — to recognize objects, for example. But they are also programmed to carry out specific tasks, work in particular environments or rely on some level of human supervision, says Joyce Sidopoulos, co-founder of MassRobotics, an innovation hub for robotics companies in Boston, Massachusetts. Even Atlas — a robot made by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company in Waltham, Massachusetts, which famously showed off its parkour skills in 2018 — works by carefully mapping its environment and choosing the best actions to execute from a library of built-in templates.

For most AI researchers branching into robotics, the goal is to create something much more autonomous and adaptable across a wider range of circumstances. This might start with robot arms that can ‘pick and place’ any factory product, but evolve into humanoid robots that provide company and support for older people , for example. “There are so many applications,” says Sidopoulos.

The human form is complicated and not always optimized for specific physical tasks, but it has the huge benefit of being perfectly suited to the world that people have built. A human-shaped robot would be able to physically interact with the world in much the same way that a person does.

However, controlling any robot — let alone a human-shaped one — is incredibly hard. Apparently simple tasks, such as opening a door, are actually hugely complex, requiring a robot to understand how different door mechanisms work, how much force to apply to a handle and how to maintain balance while doing so. The real world is extremely varied and constantly changing.

The approach now gathering steam is to control a robot using the same type of AI foundation models that power image generators and chatbots such as ChatGPT. These models use brain-inspired neural networks to learn from huge swathes of generic data. They build associations between elements of their training data and, when asked for an output, tap these connections to generate appropriate words or images, often with uncannily good results.

Likewise, a robot foundation model is trained on text and images from the Internet, providing it with information about the nature of various objects and their contexts. It also learns from examples of robotic operations. It can be trained, for example, on videos of robot trial and error, or videos of robots that are being remotely operated by humans, alongside the instructions that pair with those actions. A trained robot foundation model can then observe a scenario and use its learnt associations to predict what action will lead to the best outcome.

Google DeepMind has built one of the most advanced robotic foundation models, known as Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), that can operate a mobile robot arm built by its sister company Everyday Robots in Mountain View, California. Like other robotic foundation models, it was trained on both the Internet and videos of robotic operation. Thanks to the online training, RT-2 can follow instructions even when those commands go beyond what the robot has seen another robot do before 1 . For example, it can move a drink can onto a picture of Taylor Swift when asked to do so — even though Swift’s image was not in any of the 130,000 demonstrations that RT-2 had been trained on.

In other words, knowledge gleaned from Internet trawling (such as what the singer Taylor Swift looks like) is being carried over into the robot’s actions. “A lot of Internet concepts just transfer,” says Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, an AI and robotics researcher at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, California. This radically reduces the amount of physical data that a robot needs to have absorbed to cope in different situations, she says.

But to fully understand the basics of movements and their consequences, robots still need to learn from lots of physical data. And therein lies a problem.

Data dearth

Although chatbots are being trained on billions of words from the Internet, there is no equivalently large data set for robotic activity. This lack of data has left robotics “in the dust”, says Khazatsky.

Pooling data is one way around this. Khazatsky and his colleagues have created DROID 2 , an open-source data set that brings together around 350 hours of video data from one type of robot arm (the Franka Panda 7DoF robot arm, built by Franka Robotics in Munich, Germany), as it was being remotely operated by people in 18 laboratories around the world. The robot-eye-view camera has recorded visual data in hundreds of environments, including bathrooms, laundry rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. This diversity helps robots to perform well on tasks with previously unencountered elements, says Khazatsky.

When prompted to ‘pick up extinct animal’, Google’s RT-2 model selects the dinosaur figurine from a crowded table. Credit: Google DeepMind

Gopalakrishnan is part of a collaboration of more than a dozen academic labs that is also bringing together robotic data, in its case from a diversity of robot forms, from single arms to quadrupeds. The collaborators’ theory is that learning about the physical world in one robot body should help an AI to operate another — in the same way that learning in English can help a language model to generate Chinese, because the underlying concepts about the world that the words describe are the same. This seems to work. The collaboration’s resulting foundation model, called RT-X, which was released in October 2023 3 , performed better on real-world tasks than did models the researchers trained on one robot architecture.

Many researchers say that having this kind of diversity is essential. “We believe that a true robotics foundation model should not be tied to only one embodiment,” says Peter Chen, an AI researcher and co-founder of Covariant, an AI firm in Emeryville, California.

Covariant is also working hard on scaling up robot data. The company, which was set up in part by former OpenAI researchers, began collecting data in 2018 from 30 variations of robot arms in warehouses across the world, which all run using Covariant software. Covariant’s Robotics Foundation Model 1 (RFM-1) goes beyond collecting video data to encompass sensor readings, such as how much weight was lifted or force applied. This kind of data should help a robot to perform tasks such as manipulating a squishy object, says Gopalakrishnan — in theory, helping a robot to know, for example, how not to bruise a banana.

Covariant has built up a proprietary database that includes hundreds of billions of ‘tokens’ — units of real-world robotic information — which Chen says is roughly on a par with the scale of data that trained GPT-3, the 2020 version of OpenAI's large language model. “We have way more real-world data than other people, because that’s what we have been focused on,” Chen says. RFM-1 is poised to roll out soon, says Chen, and should allow operators of robots running Covariant’s software to type or speak general instructions, such as “pick up apples from the bin”.

Another way to access large databases of movement is to focus on a humanoid robot form so that an AI can learn by watching videos of people — of which there are billions online. Nvidia’s Project GR00T foundation model, for example, is ingesting videos of people performing tasks, says Andrews. Although copying humans has huge potential for boosting robot skills, doing so well is hard, says Gopalakrishnan. For example, robot videos generally come with data about context and commands — the same isn’t true for human videos, she says.

Virtual reality

A final and promising way to find limitless supplies of physical data, researchers say, is through simulation. Many roboticists are working on building 3D virtual-reality environments, the physics of which mimic the real world, and then wiring those up to a robotic brain for training. Simulators can churn out huge quantities of data and allow humans and robots to interact virtually, without risk, in rare or dangerous situations, all without wearing out the mechanics. “If you had to get a farm of robotic hands and exercise them until they achieve [a high] level of dexterity, you will blow the motors,” says Nvidia’s Andrews.

But making a good simulator is a difficult task. “Simulators have good physics, but not perfect physics, and making diverse simulated environments is almost as hard as just collecting diverse data,” says Khazatsky.

Meta and Nvidia are both betting big on simulation to scale up robot data, and have built sophisticated simulated worlds: Habitat from Meta and Isaac Sim from Nvidia. In them, robots gain the equivalent of years of experience in a few hours, and, in trials, they then successfully apply what they have learnt to situations they have never encountered in the real world. “Simulation is an extremely powerful but underrated tool in robotics, and I am excited to see it gaining momentum,” says Rai.

Many researchers are optimistic that foundation models will help to create general-purpose robots that can replace human labour. In February, Figure, a robotics company in Sunnyvale, California, raised US$675 million in investment for its plan to use language and vision models developed by OpenAI in its general-purpose humanoid robot. A demonstration video shows a robot giving a person an apple in response to a general request for ‘something to eat’. The video on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) has racked up 4.8 million views.

Exactly how this robot’s foundation model has been trained, along with any details about its performance across various settings, is unclear (neither OpenAI nor Figure responded to Nature ’s requests for an interview). Such demos should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Soh. The environment in the video is conspicuously sparse, he says. Adding a more complex environment could potentially confuse the robot — in the same way that such environments have fooled self-driving cars. “Roboticists are very sceptical of robot videos for good reason, because we make them and we know that out of 100 shots, there’s usually only one that works,” Soh says.

Hurdles ahead

As the AI research community forges ahead with robotic brains, many of those who actually build robots caution that the hardware also presents a challenge: robots are complicated and break a lot. Hardware has been advancing, Chen says, but “a lot of people looking at the promise of foundation models just don't know the other side of how difficult it is to deploy these types of robots”, he says.

Another issue is how far robot foundation models can get using the visual data that make up the vast majority of their physical training. Robots might need reams of other kinds of sensory data, for example from the sense of touch or proprioception — a sense of where their body is in space — say Soh. Those data sets don’t yet exist. “There’s all this stuff that’s missing, which I think is required for things like a humanoid to work efficiently in the world,” he says.

Releasing foundation models into the real world comes with another major challenge — safety. In the two years since they started proliferating, large language models have been shown to come up with false and biased information. They can also be tricked into doing things that they are programmed not to do, such as telling users how to make a bomb. Giving AI systems a body brings these types of mistake and threat to the physical world. “If a robot is wrong, it can actually physically harm you or break things or cause damage,” says Gopalakrishnan.

Valuable work going on in AI safety will transfer to the world of robotics, says Gopalakrishnan. In addition, her team has imbued some robot AI models with rules that layer on top of their learning, such as not to even attempt tasks that involve interacting with people, animals or other living organisms. “Until we have confidence in robots, we will need a lot of human supervision,” she says.

Despite the risks, there is a lot of momentum in using AI to improve robots — and using robots to improve AI. Gopalakrishnan thinks that hooking up AI brains to physical robots will improve the foundation models, for example giving them better spatial reasoning. Meta, says Rai, is among those pursuing the hypothesis that “true intelligence can only emerge when an agent can interact with its world”. That real-world interaction, some say, is what could take AI beyond learning patterns and making predictions, to truly understanding and reasoning about the world.

What the future holds depends on who you ask. Brooks says that robots will continue to improve and find new applications, but their eventual use “is nowhere near as sexy” as humanoids replacing human labour. But others think that developing a functional and safe humanoid robot that is capable of cooking dinner, running errands and folding the laundry is possible — but could just cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “I’m sure someone will do it,” says Khazatsky. “It’ll just be a lot of money, and time.”

Nature 630 , 22-24 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01442-5

Updates & Corrections

Correction 31 May 2024 : An earlier version of this feature gave the wrong name for Nvidia’s simulated world.

Brohan, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.15818 (2023).

Khazatsky, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.12945 (2024).

Open X-Embodiment Collaboration et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.08864 (2023).

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2 (page 19) p. 19 What is literature and does it matter?

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The question ‘What is literature?’ arises because critics and theorists hope, by saying what literature is, to promote what they consider the most pertinent critical methods and to dismiss methods that neglect the most basic and distinctive aspects of literature. In the context of recent theory, the question ‘What is literature?’ matters because theory has highlighted the literariness of texts of all sorts. To reflect on literariness is to keep before us, as resources for analysing these discourses, reading practices elicited by literature: the suspension of the demand for immediate intelligibility, reflection on the implications of means of expression, and attention to how meaning is made and pleasure produced.

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English version podcast ‘Scandal and controversy in Russian literature’ launched

Following the success of the Dutch version, the podcast 'Scandal and Controversy in Russian Literature' is now also available in English. Senior University Lecturer Otto Boele guides listeners through eight infamous texts in this version.

Among the many emotions stirred by Russian literature over the past 200 years, the triad of indignation, disbelief and moral panic is a particularly persistent phenomenon. Literary critics, state authorities and even dismayed readers have regularly shown their obsession with the supposed impact of novels and other ideologically charged literature on the moral state of society.

Boele:‘The books I review are not necessarily literary masterpieces, they may even be very mediocre novels, but they were relevant at the time, wildly popular and, most importantly: controversial.’

To highlight this scandalous aspect of Russian literature, Otto Boele examines eight infamous texts, paying particular attention to the commotion they caused.

No prior knowledge required

Listeners need no prior knowledge of Russian literature and are introduced to a variety of current topics, ranging from Russia's ambiguous relationship with the West and socialist utopianism, to sexual morality, Soviet youth culture and political dissidence in contemporary Russia. All in all, the podcast series offers a fresh perspective on the history of Russian literature, largely ignoring the obvious masterpieces and focusing on ‘bad’ but undeniably influential novels.

Links to the “Scandal & Controversy in Russian Literature” episodes:

Introduction by Otto Boele and Kay Mastenbroek .

• Russia gave nothing to the World “Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady” by Pyotr Chaadaev (1829-1836).
• The worst novel ever written “What Is to Be Done?” by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1863).
• Thou shalt not copulate “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Lev Tolstoy (1890).
• A pornographic novel of ideas “Sanin” by Mikhail Artsybashev (1907).
• Remorse of a terrorist “The Pale Horse” by Boris Savinkov (1909).
• Four little brats in Tallinn “A Ticket to the Stars” by Vasilii Aksyonov (1961).
• A very dark novel “The Sad Detective” by Viktor Astafiev (1986).
• Farewell Europe “The Big Green Tent” by Lyudmila Ulitskaya (2011)

Otto Boele: 'A podcast for anyone interested in Russia and keen to understand how literature has reflected and shaped the development of this vast country over the past 200 years.'