Knowledge, Belief, and

Truth
Discussions and Debates
Critical Thinking: Why Does it
Matter?
• Why is critical thinking important?

• Important and valuable for two main reasons

• Increases our chances of gaining knowledge
• Essential to being autonomous

• Ideally we want more than just to have an opinion about the facts; we
want to know what they are
• Critical Thinking is aimed at knowledge
Knowledge and Truth
• Traditional definition of knowledge: justified true belief

• What is truth?

• Three attitudes one might take to some subject matter

• Realism
• Relativism
• Nihilism
Knowledge and Truth…
• The scene is a campus security office, where two students are being
questioned. A few minutes earlier, they were engaged in a fistfight in
the cafeteria. The campus police ask them again and again how the
fight started. The stories conflict. Because each student seems
genuinely convinced that the other one was the aggressor and there
were no witnesses, the campus police have no hope of discovering
the truth. But is there a truth to discover? Or are there two truths,
one for each student’s story?
Knowledge and Truth…
• How many jelly beans are there in a jar?
• For a Realist
• (1) There are truths about a subject matter and (2) what those truths are is
independent of what anybody thinks they are.
• For a Relativist
• (1) There are truths about an area but (2) what they are depends (in some
way or other) on what we (or someone) take those truths to be.

• Be careful about what the realist and relativist disagree about

Knowledge and Truth…
• For a Nihilist
• There is no single, right answer to the question how many beans it contains. Every opinion is just as
good as any other opinion. There is no right answer! There are no truths at all about a subject matter.
• One could be a realist about one subject matter and a relativist about another and a
nihilist about a third

• For years grade school students faced this question on their science tests: “True or False—
The famous rings of the planet Saturn are composed of solid material.” If the students
marked “true,” they lost credit, because the “truth” was that Saturn’s rings were
composed of gas or dust. Then, in 1973, radar probes revealed that all those wrong
answers had been right. Saturn’s rings are, in fact, composed of solid matter. This
confusing case seems to suggest that the truth changed. Did it really?
Knowledge and Belief
• Knowledge is justified true belief
• What do we mean by belief?

• Believing something to be true is taking a certain attitude toward it:

An attitude of acceptance
• Belief is not the only form of acceptance
• Assuming something or presupposing something are different kinds of
acceptance
• The idea of freedom of belief
Knowledge and Justification
• Knowledge is justified true belief
• To say that a belief is justified is to say that it is based on or grounded in good
reasons
• There are different kinds of reasons to believe something

• Three questions to ask

• (1) What kinds of reasons does Ahmed have for believing this? (2) What kind
of reasons is critical thinking concerned with? (3) What is it for reasons of that
kind to count as good reasons?
Knowledge and Justification…
• Distinction between “producing” reasons and “sustaining” reasons

• There are emotional and pragmatic reasons

• Emotional reasons that involve the individual him/herself
• Emotional reasons that involve one’s community, culture, or heritage

• There are epistemic reasons

• At the heart of critical thinking

• A belief that is based solely on emotional or pragmatic reasons cannot possibly count
as knowledge, even if the belief is true.
Sufficient and Acceptable Reasons
• A belief is justified enough for knowledge only if it is based on good
reasons.
• Reasons have to be sufficient to support the belief
• Reasons have to be acceptable to support the belief
Emotions and Evidence
• Emotions can also make it difficult to collect the evidence we need for
our belief to be justified, or even from investigating further.
• Emotions can also get in the way when we identify too much with our
own opinions and beliefs or with our own methods for collecting or
evaluating evidence.
• Knowing how to distance oneself from one’s beliefs and opinions in
order to think critically about them is not easy.
• Sometimes, in order to decide what to believe or do, we need to
acquire new evidence.
• direct observation, testimony, measurement, testing, and experiment.