How much knowledge does he have?
Some.
Can he tie a square knot?
Yes. I believe so.
But, you've never seen him tie one?
No.
Has he ever told you that he could tie one?
I don't recall.
Which knots have you seen him tie?
I saw him tie a noose one time. Quite skillfully, I might add.
So, you're saying Bob knows how to tie a noose.
Yes, I'm saying that.
A week later at Bob's home, Bob is asked to tie a noose. "Ah, yes," he says taking the rope. After a few attempts he gives up. "I'm afraid I've forgotten how." His wife chimes in,
"He, um, had a stroke last year. He's had some significant memory problems as a result."
"Bollocks," says Bob.
"He was the knot-tying champ of the county four years ago. Now, he's lucky if I don't have to do his tie for church on Sundays."
Bob stares at his feet.
Ask Bob about another knot: "Bob, do you know the technique for tying a square knot?"
"Of course I do! I'm one of the best, if not the best, knot experts in the county."
"So, you believe you have the knowledge necessary for tying a square knot?"
"Yes, for fuck's sake! Give me that god damned rope!"
He does a loop, reverses it, and scratches his head. After a few more attempts, he drops the rope to the floor, gets up from his chair, and leaves the room.
"I think you should leave now," his wife says curtly, walks over and opens the front door. She stands there looking outside, waiting.
Bob had a belief that he could tie both a square knot and a noose. He may not have that belief anymore. His inability to actually tie the knots leads to the only conclusion one could make about his knowledge of tying knots; he doesn't have the knowledge necessary to tie a square knot or a noose. But, did he ever possess such knowledge?
I can ask you if you have knowledge of X, and you can say confidently that you do indeed have such knowledge. But, really what you have is a belief that you have knowledge of X, and until you make a mental effort to arrange the information stored in your brain in a coherent way that allows you direct perception of the mental object we're calling 'knowledge of X', you can't be one hundred percent sure that it is actually there in your mind. Based on previous experience, you are confident that it is there, readily accessible, but this is just a habit of the mind, the propensity for cause-and-effect associations based on the constant proximity in space and time of situations A and B, where B always seems to immediately follow A.
Until it doesn't.
The effect of realizing that B doesn't always follow from A after years of believing it does can be psychologically shattering. It would be at least as much a shock as, if not more than, seeing someone drop an object from rest and then see it fall only halfway to the surface under it remaining suspended in mid-air. Can you recall the first time you witnessed magnetic levitation?
The idea of people having specific identities allows us to assign specific knowledge sets to them. We also describe people in terms of characteristics. He is kind, for example. Of course, what we're doing is talking about the way we believe he'll behave in the future based on how we have seen him behave in the past. Behavioral tendencies, that's all it is. Yet, we think in terms of fictional essential properties of some fictional enduring soul. We can say nothing about what knowledge someone has until he successfully accesses certain information in his brain, processes it in a coherent manner, and then behaves in a certain way that makes it seem to us that he does, indeed, possess some specific knowledge.
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