Theory of Knowledge: Philosophic Beginnings

At their core, taxonomies and other classification systems are ways of organizing and managing knowledge. To understand the history of classification systems, it behooves us to explore the history of thinking about knowledge. So what is knowledge? The Greek philosopher Plato defined it as “justified true belief”. However, the twentieth-century writer Bertrand Russell commented that “at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.”