Epistemology The Philosophy of Truth and Knowledge

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EpistemologyThe Philosophy of Truth and
Knowledge

• with some
• Metaphysics

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• Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and
  a culture that tries to skip it will never grow
  up.
• Thomas Nagel  (1937 - )

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Before Anything Else

• One must always concentrate on
• INTERPITATION
• Before
• EVALUATION
• Know what is require or asked before giving
  claims and opinions

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Pronounce GHOTI

• touGH
• wOmen
• emoTIon
• fish

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The Nature of TRUTH

• "Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too
  much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It
  was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead
  Places." Benet http//www.tkinter.smig.net/Outings
  /RosemountGhosts/Babylon.htm
• Getting to the truth is indeed hard
• But what is the truth?
• And
• How much truth can we handle?
• Truth Knowledge the concern of
• EPISTEMOLOGY

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Certainty

• Are there limits of our knowledge?
• Can we humans expand our knowledge?
• Will we someday know everything?
• How do we come to know things?
• What is Truth?
• How do we know when we have the truth?
• Is any of this important?

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Varying Truth?

• Two Meanings
• Denotation dictionary meaning
• Connotation the contextual meaning
• Sensitivity to the Truth A wise man cannot be
  insulted, for if what is said is true he takes it
  as is, and if what is being said is false he
  deals with it if he must or ignores it if he
  should.
• Sensitivity Insecurity

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Piaget and Truth

• Assimilation taking something new into your
  mental schema, your Gestalt
• Accommodation when something is so different
  you have to change your mental schema to take it
  in
• He realize it was necessary to go through that
  journey and find the truth Ghassan Ismail

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Basic Ideas of Epistemology

• Worlds Inner and Outer
• Inner world composed of concepts
• Compound Concepts Beliefs
• Beliefs True or False Correspondence .
  to outside of
  self
• If uncertain opinion
• If certain KNOWLEDGE

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Distinction

• Concrete Ideas
• ideas that represent something real
• i.e.
• chairs, desks, hands, air, football players

• Abstract Ideas
• ideas that represent something made up
• i.e.
• justice, beauty, truth, the American way

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Distinction

• Content the thing
• Vs.

• Context the environment

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Distinction

• Quantity
• How much of a thing
• Vs.

• Quality
• Properties of a thing

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Distinction

• Substance the composition of the thing
• Vs.

• Form the shape and function of the thing

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Knowledge and Certainty

• To be known
• 1) must be a belief
• 2) must be true
• 3) must be justified

• KNOWLEDGE
• Justified
• True
• Belief
• (Plato)
• Problem
• How Justify?
• Why Certain?

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The Two Means of Justification

• EMPERICISM learn thru sensory experience and
  through thinking

RATIONALISM learn only thru thinking
Note Empiricists accept what Rationalists believe
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The Greeks

• Pre-Socratics thinkers who today would be
  called scientists
• Socrates applied logic to man/ considered
  nature of beauty, truth, justice, i.e., abstract
  ideas
• Plato Rational Idealist thinker wrote down
  Socrates ideas, then turned Socrates into his
  mouthpiece school Academy
• Aristotle Empiricist Materialist thinker
  created modern logic and science attended
  Academy school Lyceum
• Alexandre the Great sent to Lyceum by Phillip,
  his father used Aristotles ideal to conquer
  known world

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The Empiricists

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Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

• 1)We see a thing
• 2) We know what a thing is must see essence or
  cannot know
• 3) By induction, we generalize the type of thing
  4) We know something like the thing by its
  similar essence.
• Problems 1) Ever seen an essence?
• 2) How do generalizations occur?
• 3) How apply?

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John Locke (1632-1704)

• 1) Tabula Rosa mind is born a Blank Table
  (VS. innate ideas)
• 2) Passive Mind mind that receives impressions/
  Receives Sensations
• Active Mind combines impression to think
• Analogies
• 3) Primary Qualities properties built in to
  things/
• Secondary Qualities properties which depend on
  receiver

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If Locke is Right Problem!!!

• Ego-centric Predicament cannot get out of head
  to justify inner world to outer
• ---- LOSE WORLD.
• Cannot justify what is anyone elses head matches
  what is in our head
• ----- LOSE COMMUNICATION/people
• Incl. Problem of the Inverted Spectrum

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David Hume (1711-1776) "Hume is our Politics,
Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume
is our Religion." This statement by 19th century
British idealist philosopher James Hutchison
Stirling

• Argued all beliefs come from senses
• Proof all that we know (Satan) is a
  composite of sensory input material
• To Know To Perceive
• All abstractions are singular
• dog, grandfather, house

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The Argument Form That Leads To

• 1) Everything I know I have ultimately learned
  thru my senses if I have no sensation of
  something then I cannot know of it.
• 2) I have no sensation of the connection between
  a cause and its effect
• Therefore, I lose causation because I cannot see
  the connection

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Problems Hume Points Out

• Causation cannot see the connection of cause
  and effect lose causation
• Substance cannot perceive things themselves,
  only perception of things
• lose the world
• ALL WE KNOW IS IMAGES
• Worst Mind cannot perceive that which receives
  our self so lose me

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Summary of Empiricists

• People who argue that sense experience is a
  legitimate means of knowledge
• Aristotle the king argued we have to know
  essence
• Locke tabula rosa, active and passive minds,
  qualities, then ego-centricism
• Hume if learn all through senses, the lose
  causality, substance, and mind
• So, for many, empiricism leads to skepticism

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Consider SUBSTANCE very carefully

• Substance is what the world is made of, that
  which underlies the world, what is real.
• Matter / Mass / Molecules / Atoms whatever you
  want to call it.
• What is it????????
• ALL WE ACTUALLY KNOW IS SENSATIONS - what we
  hear, feel, taste, smell not what causes the
  sensations

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So Skepticism

• Skepticism is the belief that no knowledge is
• possible a result of Empiricism

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The Rationalists
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Can Rationalism be the Solution?

• Rationalism is the belief that only through
  thinking can we derive truth

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Rationalism

• Begins
• with
• Plato

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Platos Assertion

• The Problem with Learning
• IF we do not already know everything
• 1) How do we know what we are suppose to
  learn?
• 2) How will we know that we have learned it?
• OBVIOUSLY, we must already know everything

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How Plato Works

• The Doctrine of Recollection
• Before we were born we knew everything the
  trauma of childbirth makes us forget all that we
  know!!!
• Learning, and, therefore, knowledge is nothing
  more than recalling.
• When we are young we need much stimulus to spark
  recollection, but when older we need quiet to
  allow recall.

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How This is All Possible

• PLATOS METAPHYSICALLY VIEW
• The Allegory of the Cave (Important Cultural
  Heritage)

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Idealism

• Platos Epistemological solution depends on his
  Metaphysical ideology
• There is no physical reality!!!
• By eliminating physical things he rids himself of
  the pesky problem of reality
• We can be certain of what we think we know
  because all that exist is what we think we know.
• There are problems what do you think they are?

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Descartes an Attempt to Bring Back the World (a
four-part argument)

• 1) Cartesian Doubt an argument
• 1. Everything I know I have learned thru my
  senses P
• 2. If something fools you, do not trust it
  P
• 3. My senses have fooled me P
• 4. I cannot trust my senses from 2,3
• 5. I cannot trust anything I think I know
  from 1,4
• Therefore, I must doubt everything from 5
• So COGNITO, ERGO, SUM
• I THINK, THEREFORE, I AM
• Also Dream Thesis, Brain in a vat, evil genius

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I think, therefore, I am

• From this one certainty, Descartes tries derive
  the material world
• 2) He begins by proving God exist
• The Ontological Argument for the Existent of God
• 1. Anything that exist is greater than anything
  that does not exist
• 2. God is conceived as the greatest of things
  (Supreme Being)
  
• Therefore, God must exist (From the idea of God
  God Exists)

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After he has Himself and God

• 3) Why senses appear to deceive
• 1. God is perfect
• 2. Deception is lying an imperfection
• 3. God, being perfect, would not build an
  imperfect thing
• Thus, we are not built where our senses fool us
• So, why does it appear that our senses fool us?
• Because our free-will (ability to decide) is
  limitless, but our judgment (information) is
  limited thus, we make decisions sans enough
  information

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Descartes Final Solution

• 4) If we wait until our judgment catches up with
  our will we will not make mistakes.
• So, before saying we know anything we must
• Clearly and Distinctly Perceive It
• Thus, we get the world back and life is good

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Problems with Descartes

• 1) I think, therefore, I am
• is circular the fallacy of begging the
  question
• 2) Existent is not depended on conception, thus
  God does not necessarily exist because of the
  humans view Him
• 3) If free-will is unlimited, then our knowledge
  would also have to be unlimited before we could
  decide anything
• 4) How can know when we clearly and distinctly
  perceive?

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So, perhaps the only way to know anything is to
give up the world

• Wait, what about Kant?

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Immanuel Kant22 April 1724 12 February 1804

• In Kants Critique of Pure Reason he made a
  number of observations which I have used. He was
  a German Idealist, not like me
• Einstein told us about the universe in the 20th
  century, but Kant told us about the mind of man
  in the 17th

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Kants Critique of Pure Reason

• The Critique is a response to the questions that
  Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, and other
  contemporaries had posed about perception and
  reality. Attacking the age-old question of
  knowledge versus experience, Critique proposes
  that all people are born with an inborn sense of
  raw experiencea phenomenon that Kant dubbed
  transcendental idealism. Whereas the
  Enlightenment had been built around the idea that
  man can discover the laws of nature with his
  mind, Kant countered that it is the mind that
  gives those laws to nature. In so doing, he
  elevated skepticism to unfathomable heights,
  cemented his place high atop the pantheon of
  philosophy, and knocked the Enlightenment down a
  few rungs.
• SparkNotes

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• Kants work with skepticism perfectly sums up the
  German Enlightenments mistrust of empiricism.
  The Critique suggests that we all are born with
  our own ideas and perceptions of the world and,
  as such, can never know what is real and what
  is our perception. In other words, reality is
  in the eyes of the beholder. However, because
  nothing really exists separate from its existence
  in the eyes of the observer, then perceptions and
  observations in the world cannot be trusted. As a
  result, empirical evidence cannot be trusted
  either. By thus stating that only a select few
  universal truths in the world were valid
  (SparkNotes)

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So, My Key Points

• First, We are not determined by our experiences,
• Rather, it is how we are built that determines
  what we can experience.
• We have experiences which change the way we are
  built (mentally) which, in turn, determine what
  we can experience.

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Key Points

• Second, Some concepts are built-in (innate), such
  as black, and when we experience them they are
  turned on inside our brains.
• Kant - A Distinction types of knowledge
• a priori/Analytic known without experience,
  and
• a posteriori/Synthetic known thru experience

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Key Points

• Third, Logic is at the core of our structure
  (V.W.M. Quine)
• Sensation
• Perception
• Conception
• Logic
• World

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Key Points

• 4) Worlds (Kant)--
• Phenomenal experienced
• Nomenal underlying

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The interesting things about Kant is that, like
Einstein, he never empirically proved his ideas,
but, like Einstein,his ideas were proven by
others

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Noah Chomsky

• Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his
  book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
  (1955, 75) in which he introduces
  transformational grammars. The theory takes
  utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax
  which can be (largely) characterized by a formal
  grammar in particular, a Context-free grammar
  extended with transformational rules

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• Children are hypothesized to have an innate
  knowledge of the basic grammatical structure
  common to all human languages (i.e. they assume
  that any language which they encounter is of a
  certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge
  is often referred to as universal grammar. It is
  argued that modeling knowledge of language using
  a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity"
  of language with a limited set of grammar rules
  and a finite set of terms, humans are able to
  produce an infinite number of sentences,
  including sentences no one has previously said.
  Wikipedia

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So how do we know what is TRUE?

• Humanity and the universe are based on the same
  floor plan LOGIC
• Logic as you know it is expressed by mathematics,
  which is used to describe all human knowledge
  (George Boole in the 19th century showed us how
  to say anything in math)
• Thus, when we connect with the fabric of the
  universe we can be certain of our experiences

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Further, Logical Empiricism works for
materialists and for idealists, also.So, what
we have to do now is explore METAPHYSICS