knowing vs Knowing

I have a suspicion that if there is a type of knowing that merits a capital letter (a different spelling) then you already acknowledge that it's not knowing, but something different. But if you are talking about something different to knowing when you talk about Knowing, then what do you reveal about knowledge?

The author of the SEP entry on Descartes's Epistemology thinks that it is helpful to split knowing into two kinds: the defeasible kind (knowing) and the indefeasible kind (Knowing).

I'm puzzled as to why he would do this. Descartes was, presumably, only talking about one kind of knowing - or at least, he thought he was. I don't remember him ever saying that the demon only wrecks one kind of knowledge, but it's OK - there's this other kind of knowledge out there.

The thing I find weirdest about this knowing/Knowing distinction, is why anyone would think that such a conceptual division could be explanatory. Obviously this person must think the split is intuitive and explanatory, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. But what motivates them to split the concepts, rather than decide they've screwed up and need to start again?

I guess the answer is pretty easy. The temptation to make the distinction between two kinds of knowledge lies in our intuition that we often say we know things like football scores, which bus goes near our flat in the evenings, and so forth, but which don't survive the method of sceptical doubt.

Since we want to continue to describe this ordinary stuff as knowledge, even though it can be doubted, then we need a weak concept of knowledge. But weak knowledge isn't everything - there is the second kind of knowing, that does survive sceptical doubt. That's the kind of Knowledge we really want. So, there are two kinds of knowledge.

Note that Descartes didn't make this distinction. As far as he was concerned, if you could doubt it then you couldn't know it. In order to preserve knowledge (with a small "k"), he had to invoke a benevolent God who would ensure that we weren't fooled about ordinary things. He didn't split knowledge into two varieties.

And nor should he have. We can't solve the problem of knowing by conjuring a new concept (not unless discovery of a sceptical argument creates a new class of knowledge). We're in the business of explaining and understanding the concepts we have - we can't just create new concepts to resolve these conceptual difficulties.

When Descartes talks about certainty, he at least believes he is talking about knowing. If he thought he was talking about a better, rarefied form of Knowing, then he wouldn't have written the Meditations as a manual for acquiring proper knowledge, but as an account of his amazing discovery of something called Knowledge (like knowledge, but Better).

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