What is knowledge?

One thing that always "gets my goat" to use a southern colloquialism, is when someone tells me that they "know" something that we are debating (you know who you are). I never really had a good understanding of why this is until I recently took a class in apologetics taught by Dr. Greg Bahnsen.

Knowledge, according to Dr. Bahnsen, requires three things.

1. Belief. To know something, one must first believe it to be true. This should not really be surprising or debatable.
2. Basis. To know something, one must have a reasonable justification for the belief. The belief you have must not be based on invalid data or invalid or arbitrary reasoning.
3. Truth. To really know something, that thing that you know has to be true. The thing known must accurately represent the truth of the situation.
   

I really like this definition. It covers bases that the typical use of knowledge misses. An example he used was a man looking at a clock on the wall, for an instant. The clock says 3:00. Does the man then know that it is 3:00? Most of us would believe it to be 3:00, so this condition is met. What about basis? The basis condition is not met. The clock could be broken or incorrect, and that has not been ruled out. So the knowledge is not real knowledge. Note that it does not matter whether it really is 3:00. If the basis condition is not there, the knowledge is false. If, on the other hand, the man brought 657 watches for comparison, and they all agree, and had previously been calibrated properly and are of varying design, then we could say the basis condition is met. In this case, the knowledge is real, if and only if it really is 3:00. If, by some extraordinary means, all the watches were wrong, and equally wrong amongst themselves and the clock on the wall, then there is no knowledge.

We are fallen beings. From a less religious perspective, just to remove that as an unspoken argument for the unknown reader, we have shortcomings. We don't know everything. If we did, the pages of Nature would be bare. But, conceding we have shortcomings, we still tend to move forward without humility. We take belief and we unduly promote that belief to knowledge. For in this fallen state, this state of incompleteness, we can know nothing. But we still have to talk about knowledge. To remove the word from common vocabulary would be pointless. So for conversational usage, knowledge is, in my opinion, nearly interchangeable with belief. But for more specific discussion, like debate, knowledge requires a more stringent definition - a definition which, in my opinion, removes the capability of knowledge from the human condition.