Understanding the Concept of Knowledge in Educational Philosophy

What does it truly mean to know something? Not just recall a fact, not simply believe something to be true – but genuinely know it? This question has occupied philosophers, educators, and curriculum designers for centuries, and the answers they’ve arrived at shape everything from how classrooms are structured to what counts as learning. The philosophy of education places the concept of knowledge at its very center, because before we can teach, we must first agree on what knowledge is, where it comes from, and how it relates to truth, belief, and experience.

Defining knowledge: more than just facts
The relational nature of knowledge
Plato and the justified true belief
Dewey’s pragmatic view: knowledge through experience
The National Curriculum Framework’s perspective
Three divisions of knowledge: a priori, a posteriori, and experienced
A priori knowledge
A posteriori knowledge
Experienced knowledge
Why these distinctions matter for teachers

Defining knowledge: more than just facts

At its most basic level, knowledge is often described as an awareness of facts, a familiarity with situations and individuals, or a practical skill. But this surface definition barely scratches the philosophical depth beneath it. According to Wikipedia’s treatment of the subject, propositional knowledge – the kind most discussed in academic philosophy – is generally characterized as true belief that is distinct from mere opinion or guesswork by virtue of some form of justification. In simpler terms: you don’t just believe something at random; you have good reason to hold it as true.

Knowledge also extends to facts about the relationships and principles that govern the natural and social world. When a scientist understands how gravity operates, or when a sociologist grasps how caste structures influence social mobility, they possess knowledge not just of isolated facts but of systemic relationships. This broader understanding – covering laws, patterns, and principles – is what elevates information into genuine knowledge.

It is equally important to distinguish knowledge from closely related concepts. Information is raw data or reported content; it becomes knowledge only when a person understands it, can verify it, and integrates it meaningfully. Belief is a mental state of acceptance, but a belief can be false. Truth, by contrast, exists independently of what any individual believes – the Earth orbited the Sun long before anyone believed it did. Knowledge, then, requires all three to align: a belief must be true, and there must be justification for holding it.

The relational nature of knowledge

One of the most important – and frequently overlooked – dimensions of knowledge is that it is fundamentally relational. Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum; it involves a relationship between the knower and the object of knowledge. A chemistry textbook sitting unopened on a shelf contains information, but not knowledge. Knowledge arises when a person engages with that content, processes it, and establishes a meaningful cognitive relationship with it.

This relational aspect means that the knower is never a passive container into which facts are poured. Consider how a child comes to understand water – not by memorising a molecular formula, but through direct engagement: touching it, drinking it, observing how it freezes or evaporates. The knowledge that develops is shaped by the child’s engagement with the object. This idea is central to constructivist approaches in education, where, as the University of Arkansas’s Introduction to Education explains, students construct knowledge through an interaction between what they already think and know and the new ideas and experiences they encounter.

Plato and the justified true belief

Western philosophy’s most famous attempt to define knowledge comes from Plato. In his dialogues, particularly the Meno and the Theaetetus, Plato developed what has come to be called the justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. For a mental state to qualify as knowledge rather than mere belief, three conditions must be met: the belief must be held by the person, the belief must be true, and the person must have adequate justification for holding it.

Plato’s framework had enormous influence. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that philosophy’s centuries-long reflection on knowledge has generated theses, theories, questions, distinctions, and taxonomies – all essentially building on or responding to this foundational challenge: what exactly separates knowing from believing? The JTB account remained dominant until 1963, when philosopher Edmund Gettier published a short but devastating paper demonstrating cases where all three conditions are met and yet we would intuitively not say the person truly knows. These Gettier cases showed that justified true belief is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge, prompting philosophers to search for a fourth condition or an entirely different framework.

Despite its limitations, the JTB account remains the starting point for most epistemological discussions in education. It establishes a crucial benchmark: knowledge is not mere guesswork or unsubstantiated belief, but a carefully justified relationship with truth.

Dewey’s pragmatic view: knowledge through experience

John Dewey took the conversation in a radically different direction. Where Plato was concerned with abstract, eternal truths, Dewey – writing in the early twentieth century – argued that knowledge is inseparable from action and experience. His philosophy, known as pragmatism, holds that the meaning and validity of any idea lies in its practical consequences.

For Dewey, knowledge is not a static body of truths waiting to be discovered and memorised; it is something that develops dynamically through the learner’s active engagement with real problems in real contexts. A detailed study of Dewey’s educational philosophy explains that he defines the pedagogic process as “knowledge-based practice” – meaning we experience a situation first, then act intellectually or practically, and knowledge is the culmination of that activity. Knowledge, in this view, does not refer to an external, independent reality observed from the outside. It actively participates in and is shaped by practice.

Dewey also argued that the social environment is paramount to how knowledge develops. Learning is not an isolated individual act but a social process. The teacher’s role is not to transmit information but to organise meaningful experiences and facilitate students’ engagement with content based on their readiness. This distinction – between transmitting knowledge and facilitating its construction – continues to shape progressive education today.

Dewey was also careful to note that not all experiences produce genuine knowledge. Experiences must be educative – they must connect meaningfully to future experiences and contribute to growth. An experience that misleads or confuses, or that leaves no lasting intellectual imprint, is what he called mis-educative. Teachers, therefore, bear responsibility for selecting and structuring experiences carefully.

The National Curriculum Framework’s perspective

India’s National Curriculum Framework (NCF) draws meaningfully from constructivist and experiential traditions when defining knowledge in educational contexts. Rather than treating knowledge as a fixed collection of facts to be transmitted from teacher to student, the NCF frames it as something that emerges through structured activities, interactions with the environment, and engagement with others. As EBSCO’s research overview on philosophy of education notes, influential thinkers like Dewey have long advocated for educational approaches that respect individual learning styles and promote active engagement – a philosophy the NCF broadly embraces.

The NCF’s approach means that knowledge in the school curriculum is not simply content to be delivered and tested, but a set of structured experiences and activities through which students build understanding. This aligns curriculum design with the philosophical insight that knowledge has a relational, experiential dimension – it must be actively made, not passively received.

Three divisions of knowledge: a priori, a posteriori, and experienced

Philosophers have long recognised that not all knowledge is acquired in the same way. The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s treatment of epistemology notes that since at least the seventeenth century, a sharp distinction has been drawn between two primary categories: a priori and a posteriori knowledge, a distinction that played a particularly significant role in the work of Immanuel Kant.

A priori knowledge

A priori knowledge is knowledge that is independent of sensory experience. The term comes from Latin, meaning “from what comes before” – that is, before experience. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the a priori/a posteriori distinction is fundamentally epistemological: it concerns how, or on what basis, a proposition might be known or justifiably believed. A priori truths can be established through reason and logical analysis alone, without needing to go out and observe the world.

Classic examples include mathematical truths and logical tautologies. “All bachelors are unmarried” is a priori – you do not need to survey bachelors to know it’s true; it follows directly from the meaning of the terms. Similarly, “2 + 2 = 4” requires no experiment to verify. Wikipedia’s entry on the subject traces an early philosophical use of this concept to Plato’s theory of recollection in the Meno, where knowledge is treated as something inherent to the human mind rather than derived from the outside world. Kant later gave the distinction its modern philosophical weight, arguing that some knowledge is both a priori and synthetic – it extends our understanding without being derived from experience.

In educational terms, a priori knowledge forms the backbone of subjects like mathematics, formal logic, and certain areas of linguistics. When a teacher guides students through a geometric proof, no ruler is strictly necessary – the conclusion follows from the axioms through pure reasoning.

A posteriori knowledge

A posteriori knowledge, by contrast, is knowledge that depends entirely on empirical experience – on what we observe, test, and encounter through our senses. The Latin phrase means “from what comes after” – that is, after experience. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, if the truth of a proposition depends on how the world actually is in some respect, then knowledge of it requires empirical investigation.

This is the domain of science, history, geography, and social studies. Knowing that water freezes at 0°C under standard conditions, that the Mughal Empire fell in 1857, or that the Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest – all of this is a posteriori knowledge. It could, in principle, turn out to be wrong if new evidence emerged, because it rests on contingent facts about the actual world rather than on necessary logical truths.

The scientific method is fundamentally a posteriori in structure: hypotheses are formed and then tested against data gathered from observation and experiment. This is why scientific knowledge can evolve – new evidence can revise or overturn old conclusions in a way that can never happen with a priori truths like mathematical axioms.

Experienced knowledge

Beyond the a priori/a posteriori distinction lies a third category especially relevant to education: experienced knowledge, sometimes called practical or procedural knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge embedded in doing – in skills, habits, and competencies that are built through direct participation. It is knowledge of how, as opposed to knowledge of that.

A student may know that a bicycle has two wheels and that balance is maintained through centripetal force (a posteriori propositional knowledge), but the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle is something different. It develops through repeated physical engagement, failure, correction, and eventually mastery. Dewey’s experiential learning philosophy is most directly concerned with this category – the idea that students learn most deeply when they are engaged in hands-on activities that require thinking critically and solving real problems.

This category of knowledge is particularly important in vocational and professional education, in the arts, and in any field where performance and skill matter as much as theoretical understanding. It also reminds educators that examinations testing propositional recall do not capture the full scope of what students can know and do.

Why these distinctions matter for teachers

Understanding the different forms and sources of knowledge is not a purely academic exercise. It directly affects how teachers design lessons, sequence content, assess students, and think about what counts as genuine learning. A teacher who treats all knowledge as propositional fact to be memorised will design very different lessons from one who sees knowledge as relational, experience-based, and constructed through engagement.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasises that the relationships between epistemic autonomy, epistemic responsibility, and epistemic dependence are important in clarifying the aims of education. At its best, education does not just fill students with facts; it develops their capacity to reason, investigate, question, and construct their own well-justified understanding of the world.

Recognising that some knowledge is a priori helps teachers understand why mathematics needs to be taught through logical reasoning rather than rote memorisation. Recognising a posteriori knowledge’s dependence on evidence is why science education emphasises inquiry and experiment. And recognising experienced knowledge is why the best curricula include projects, practicals, fieldwork, and creative tasks – activities through which knowledge becomes genuinely owned by the learner.

What do you think? Does the way you were taught in school align with any of the philosophical views of knowledge discussed here – Plato’s emphasis on justified true belief, Dewey’s insistence on learning through experience, or the NCF’s structured activity-based approach? And in your view, which type of knowledge – a priori, a posteriori, or experiential – is most neglected in formal schooling today?

References

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Table of Contents

Defining knowledge: more than just facts 🔗

The relational nature of knowledge 🔗

Plato and the justified true belief 🔗

Dewey’s pragmatic view: knowledge through experience 🔗

The National Curriculum Framework’s perspective 🔗

Three divisions of knowledge: a priori, a posteriori, and experienced 🔗

A priori knowledge 🔗

A posteriori knowledge 🔗

Experienced knowledge 🔗

Why these distinctions matter for teachers 🔗