Knowing and Believing

Abstract

Prichard held, like some others before and since, that there is a categorial difference between knowing and believing:To know is not to have a belief of a special kind, differing from beliefs of other kinds; and no improvement in a belief and no increase in the feeling of conviction which it implies will convert it into knowledge. Nor is their difference that of being two species of a common genus. It is not that there is a general kind of activity, for which the name would have to be thinking, which admits of two kinds, the better of which is knowing and the worse believing, nor is knowing something called thinking at its best, thinking not at its best being believing.