User:Kinkreet/Epistemology

Knowledge is where our beliefs coincide with the truth. However, the way we gain this knowledge, or the source of our knowledge, is heavily debated. As there are infinite number of possibilities in which we can guess our way into knowledge, by making a statement and assuming it to be true, and if it is true, then we have knowledge. However, much of the debates surrounding knowledge has been based on warranted knowledge, or knowledge which is gained and not given.

As our thoughts must come before our knowledge (you cannot know something as true or false without first knowing what is true or false), if there is a limit to our thoughts, then there would be limit to our knowledge.

Thomism
St. Thomas Aquinas propose the idea which do not contradict neither the idealist nor physicalist

Physicalist
A similar stance is that we can only view the part of the world which relates, interacts or affects us. For example, a knife to a chef would be an instrument to cut food into smaller pieces, to a murderer, it is a weapon for killing. The same object having a different purpose, and two different people seeing the object differently. If reality is a ball, we can only see one side (or a section) of it, and to different people it will appear different depending on which side of the ball they are viewing from, as well as how close they are to the ball. The very fact that different people view the same world differently supports this view.

Idealist
The belief that reality is not physical, but mental. In Plato's Republic, he suggested that humans are prisoners chained from birth inside an underground cave, unable to move their heads. We can only see our shadows and because we cannot move, we assume that shadow to be reality, when in fact it only represents the true reality.

Rationalism
Knowledge must originate from reason alone, and not of senses. It argues that even if sense provides parts of some ideas, reason is required to organize and interpret the sensory experience. If reason is not there, then our mind would just be a jumble of experiences, incoherent and unable to form knowledge. We are able to make sense of our world because we link different experiences together using our idea of cause and effect, even though logically there is no causality between them. It argues that we are born with some innate ideas that are required for us to think rationally; for example reason and logic. John Locke argues that the existence of God is a knowledge which can be deduced from reason alone. Descartes believed that the only knowledge, the knowledge of our own existence as thinking beings, can be derived from reason; and he then extended that argument to form the basis of his ontological argument. Ratioanlists believe there are premises which are intuitively true, for example that the number 3 is a prime number, and that the number 3 is greater than the number 2. From these intuited premises, we can build a valid argument using deduction, stating that there are prime numbers greater than 3. And thus this knowledge can be deduced without sensory perception, or a priori knowledge. Some of these a priori knowledge are claimed to be mathematics, logic, ethics, existence of God and the dualistic self.

a priori knowledge do not need to be gained only from deduction and intuition, but also because there are some knowledge which are inherent with our nature, some knowledge which cannot be separated from us, such as the knowledge that we exist. This forms the Innate Knowledge Thesis: We have knowledge of some truths in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature. Experience can play a part by bringing this knowledge to our conciousness, but the experiences do not provide the knowledge itself. The source of this knowledge can be debated; some says it is from God, some say it evolves through natural selection, while some suggests it carried on from an earlier existence.

There is also the idea of The Innate Concept Thesis: We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature. There are some concepts, such as that of a perfect triangle, or a circle, which cannot be actually realized in reality, and because these ideas can never be obtained from sensory perception, it must be innate. Concepts such as pain have can be realized, and so may not be innate.

The Indispensability of Reason Thesis states that knowledge gained from reason is always superior to that gained by experience. Descartes insists in Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence, Rules II and III, pp.1-4 that because knowledge by reason are a priori knowledge, and thus is certain; whereas knowledge by experience are a posteriori, and are always open to doubt. Descartes began his Meditations on First Philosophy of how we can never trust our sensory experiences because we can be in a dream, or that there is an all-powerful demon constantly deceiving us; only deduction and reason can come up with knowledge which cannot be denied, namely the Cogito ergo sum argument. And the only true knowledge is those which are certain; so to Descartes, only knowledge which are certain can be termed knowledge, and this can only be derived from intuition and deduction.

Leibniz says in the New Essays on Human Understanding that experiences and sense perceptions provide us with the "instances" and the "individual truths", but they can never build up to something which is certain because we cannot be certain that they will occur again, namely that correlation does not imply recurrence. In contrast, truths from reason will eternally be true. The role of experience is to allow us to realize these truths. He further supports his argument that we must have innate knowledge because knowledge of mathematics, which is necessarily true, cannot be derived from experience, because nothing in experience is certain, and nothing uncertain can be derived from something uncertain.

Plato says in the Menos that we already have all the knowledge that we can possibly know. When we inquire into anything, we are simply recollecting it from our memory. It argues that we must either have the knowledge of something or not; if we do, then we do not need to inquire into it, and if we don't then we don;t know how to look for it, and even when we find it, we would not be able to recognize it. Plato solves this paradox by using a dualist view, that the soul already contain all the knowledge that we can know, but during its union with the body, it has lost some of these knowledge, and all we are doing when we are inquiring is to recollect these lost knowledge. In this model, we are able to inquire because we have seen the idea before. However, Plato's stance is unsupported and its sophistication does not answer any of the questions of how we actually gained this knowledge in the first place, or its necessity compared to other theories. Noam Chomsky argues that there is a disparity between the knowledge of language, and the experience in that language for language learners. This suggests that there are some universal grammar which is observed by all that allow language learners to acquire a new language. Chomsky is suggesting an innate concept of grammar, and not of knowledge. Peter Carruthers offers an alternative theory of innate knowledge that even if the knowledge is not present at birth, it is determined to arise during childhood. It is therefore innate not in the sense that it is omnipresent, but then sense that it is inevitable. This answers Locke's argument that the claimed innate knowledge is not present in children and idiots, Carruthers want to say that is because they have not yet developed to have that knowledge; yet again, this is similar to compatibilism where by chainging the definition, Carruthers is able to defend his views. He also offers to try to explain the origin of these innate ideas, that they derive from evolution and natural selection.

Descartes categorized his ideas into three groups: adventitious, fictional and innate. Adventitious ideas are those gained from sense perception; fictional ideas are those created from other ideas we have; and innate ideas are those which are instilled in us before our conciousness, to which Descartes argue, are from God.

My view (Rational Pragmaticism?)
It is certainly true that there are knowledge which are necessarily true, such as the laws of mathematics, which cannot be derived from sensory experience, which can always be brought into doubt. It is also true that if experiences did not exist, we would not be able know any truths as knowledge must present itself in a way which relates to us, for if it does not, we would not understand it. For example it is true that 1+1=2, but if we do not attribute some sort of object to the idea of singularity, like one apple, we would not be able to understand what 1+1=2 means. We can only see the world as its relation to us.

I argue that understand precedes knowledge. Let's take an example, the certain knowledge that '1+1=2' is based on the understanding of the concept of addition, of logic and of equality. Without either of these understanding, '1+1=2' would mean nothing to us, because we cannot perceive it.

In this sense, I agree with the rationalists that concepts such as logic must be innate, for they cannot be derived from sensory experience; but knowledge is not innate. For knowledge to exist, there must be sensory experience, to present those ideas in a way which we can understand. And because these sensory experiences cannot be trusted, there can not be an objective knowledge. All knowledge is therefore subjective, as the only knowledge that there can be, must be able to be related back to us.

The external world provides us with ideas. The external world shows us that after A occurs, B always occurs. The world presents to us the idea of correlation between A and B, to which we inteprete it as causation. We had not the innate idea of causation, it is presented to us. All we have is the framework to which to accept or reject these ideas. When we were young, we had no power to reject these ideas, and thus they seem to us innate.

Empiricism
Empiricism is the theory of knowledge that asserts any knowledge and/or ideas that can be gained, must ultimately is derived from experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, and not from any sort of innate knowledge or construct. It does not imply that we have knowledge, just that if we do, they must be from experience. Empiricism is the basis of the scientific method, and states that all knowledge must be able to be tested against observations. It argues that even though there might be true statements that stem from reason alone, but these knowledge cannot be applied to the world, and so is not useful and thus not knowledge. This rejects the idea that knowledge from reason is superior to knowledge from experience because no knowledge is derived from reason alone. Reason might form the basis of how we relate the ideas, forming links between the ideas, but these links can never form ideas themselves; the only purpose of reason is to link the ideas that we have together.

In response to Descartes' assertion that we cannot trust our senses because we could be dreaming, empiricists argues that because the dream is only a representation of our life, we cannot possible feel anything in the dream we have not felt before in real life. So even though it is very possible that we live inside our dream now, we have once felt that feelings before, and so we cannot always be in a dream. In response to the argument of the all-power deceiver, if such entity exists, apart from altering our sense perception, could he not also alter our reason, allowing us to be ignorant to a set of logic which is inaccurate, or to not allow us the memory to remember such deductions from one step to the next? Rules (Rule VII, p. 7)

Hume in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding split human reason into two kinds - "Relations of Ideas" and "Matters of Fact". The first refers to the "sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic", which relates ideas we have, and thus can be proven true simply by their definition. The second "Matters of Fact" do not necessarily have to be true, and depends on how closely it relates to reality. He argues that because "Relations of Ideas" are only relations, it does not provide knowledge about the world. The "Matters of fact", although uncertain, do provide us with truths about reality. As of "Relations of Ideas", because it does not tell us anything real, it should be disregarded as it can create within us "sophistry and illusion".

Hume's views are reinstated by A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, pp. 86; 93-94 (a version of Logical Positivism (Verification Theory of Meaning)), who says that every meaningful sentence can be divided into two groups: tautology, which is stating the same thing twice, and so by definition it is correct; or sentences which are open to empirical verification. The former, albeit true, provides no information on the world; therefore Ayer concludes that no information can be derived solely by induction and intuition alone. John Locke argued in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter II, Section 5, p. 61 that some of the innate knowledge claimed, such as those which claim that something can either be or not be, is not accepted by children and idiots, and therefore, is not universal to all rational beings, which defy the requirement for innate knowledge for rationality.

One of the main ideas of rationalism is that there are ideas, such as those of geometry, which cannot be derived from experience because those ideas are not present in the world. A line of argument might be that we cannot grasp the idea of the infinite without the innate idea of infinity because everything in this world is finite. But I want to argue that we can. If we have the concepts of numbers, such as 1 and 2, and we have the concept of order, such as that 2 follows 1, then by induction, we can extrapolate this to form all the real numbers, which is an infinite list, while only knowing finite ideas. I would also argue that even ideas such as numbers can be derived from experience. Firstly, ideas can only be known if it relates to something else that contrasts with it. The idea of 1 would be meaningless if there were no other numbers. And so before we see 2 objects of the same type, we would not be able to grasp what 1 is. And so the knowledge of 1 is not really knowledge, it is only a relation of ideas, and this Hume have proven to be unrelated to the world we are in, and so is not knowledge. Only when we apply the idea of numbers to objects (like in '2 objects') will we be able to know these ideas. Hume demonstrates this by using this analogy: Suppose therefore a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years and to have become perfectly acquainted with colors of all kinds, except one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with; let all the different shades of that color, except that single one, be placed before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest, it is plain that he will perceive a blank where that shade is wanting and will be sensible that there is a greater distance in that place between the contiguous colors than in any other. Now I ask whether it be possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are but few will be of the opinion that he can… (Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II, pp. 29-30) Therefore, although we have no concept of this particular shade of blue, through other simple ideas, such as the concept of the primary colours and of shades, we can form complex ideas which is this shade of blue. Because these complex ideas are derived from simple ideas, only the continuation of the simple ideas in our mind is necessary for us to know this shade of blue; otherwise we would have had to know every shade of colour there is and that would be impossible when extended to shapes, to numbers etc. So likewise, the infinite is a complex idea which we can derive from finite simple ideas such as number and series.

Tabula Rasa
We all start off as a blank slate, and any experience we have is like writing on the blank slate.