That obvious next question is, “So what counts as justification?” There is no unobjectionable answer, and I don’t think we need one. And an HR head who predicted that an applicant would do well can not claim to have known that he would do well, if she believed he was a good hire because he had the same birthday as her son. Similarly, an economist who predicted a downturn for the wrong reasons cannot claim to have known that a downturn was coming. Mark is free to speculate, conjecture, hypothesize and so on that Steve is up to no good but he can’t legitimately claim to know that he is. If Mark’s justification for his belief is that Steve is a jerk and he looks strange, then it seems to me that he’s not warranted in asserting that he knows that Steve is fudging his numbers - even if Steve is indeed fudging his numbers. Mark can only claim to know that Steve is manipulating his sales figures if: (1) Steve is actually manipulating his sales figures (truth condition) and (2) Mark has very good reason to believe that Steve is manipulating his sales figures (justification condition). According to this account, one can only claim that one’s belief counts as knowledge if the belief is in fact true and one is justified in believing that it’s true. Probably the most orthodox position in epistemology is that knowledge is justified true belief.
I think folks standing around water coolers and sitting in boardrooms could benefit from reflecting on what the philosophers have come up with - and from applying it (more frequently). Philosophers have given a lot of thought to that question and have offered a number of answers. The challenge here is sorting wheat from chaff: How can you tell when they really do know something and aren’t just making false claims? But obviously many people do know some things, and a few people know many things. In my last post, I argued that an admission of ignorance - saying, “I don’t know” - is an indication of intellectual honesty. That is, if he means that people very often confuse their interpretations with the facts, then he’s onto something. However, if the statement is understood as a descriptive claim about human psychology, it’s not clear to me that it’s wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously asserted: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Understood one way - that there are no objective truths - his remark seems quite clearly false.
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