Information and Knowledge: Combining Justification, Truth, and Belief

Introduction One often hears phrases such as "knowledge industry," "knowledge age," and "knowledge is power," yet the term "knowledge" often remains poorly or completely undefined. How can knowledge be defined in a rigorous and discipline independent way, how can knowledge diffusion be modeled, and how can knowledge and its components be empirically studied? While there is seldom complete agreement on precisely what constitutes belief, truth, or justification, these concepts are important cornerstones to the development of a concept of knowledge and related ideas. In particular, many philosophers define having knowledge about a statement as occurring when the statement is justified, true, and believed, or a variant of this definition (Lycan, 2006). Empirical studies show that the folk notion of knowledge is largely consistent with the combination of justification, truth, and belief (Starmans & Friedman, 2012). In this work, we move beyond laboratory studies in experimental philosophy to examine how information-based models of justification, truth, and belief might be applied to other kinds of models, testing our work by applying it to Max Weber's famous description of the relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism in societies (Weber, 2002). For Weber, Protestants felt that all occupations should be treated as worthy of hard work because they were blessed by God. Working hard and being successful was evidence that one was blessed by God, and this contributed to the rise of Capitalism. Other reasons for the relationships between Protestantism and Capitalism have been suggested (Young, 2009) and when we refer below to Weber's model, we refer to the existence of a (possibly non-causal) relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism. Information may be defined as the characteristics or state of the output of any process (Losee, 2012). Given this general definition of information and the processes that produce the components of knowledge, the concept of knowledge may be precisely defined and measured in terms of information about several different phenomena. When beliefs and justification are communicated, this can result in the diffusion of knowledge. Conversely, the transmission of knowledge statements necessitates the transmission or diffusion of justification and belief. This model is applied to different domains, illustrating some of the potential contributions of this model, combining information-based models of justification, truth, and belief to produce an information-based model of knowledge. We begin the presentation below by examining the nature of information in a precise and discipline-independent manner. We then consider how philosophers have described knowledge. Next, we consider the similarity between statements so that we will be able to consider a way of "combining" informative statements. Statements consistent with philosophical notions of justification, truth, and belief are considered. Combining these statements of justification, truth, and belief to produce statements of knowledge are next discussed. An empirical application of this approach is the diffusion of knowledge in society. Diffusion of statements of justification and belief are considered. Max Weber suggested the association between Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism: data that support the increase in knowledge with the introduction of Protestantism are given. Information While information may be defined or measured in a variety of ways, below we will treat all and only the characteristics of the output of any process as information about that process and the inputs to other processes (Losee, 2012). While one can measure the information present at these outputs, and thus the state of the process, using quantitative measures from information pioneers Nyquist, Hartley, and Shannon (Cover & Thomas, 2006; Gleick, 2011; Shannon, 1993), this general approach to information allows us to capture the interests of many different disciplines. …