Habits and Our Language About Knowledge
Great is the power of habit/custom.
–Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Book II, Section 17
This aphorism emphasizes an important lesson about human life. For example, one can cultivate moral and intellectual virtues by developing good habits, yet the same holds for vices, mutatis mutandis.
But customs can confuse. By linguistic habit, we use words such as ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ to refer to mental states ranging from fallibly justified belief to infallible belief based on epistemic certainty. It doesn’t follow, however, that knowledge itself is relative to the semantics of our vocabulary in these different contexts.