Knowledge and Truth.pdf

METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING October 2030 Knowledge and truth October 2030  QUESTION Have you ever experienced believing in something you thought is true but in the end you discovered that it is false? According to philosophy if you want to know the truth you have to use, not emoti...

METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING October 2030 Knowledge and truth October 2030  QUESTION Have you ever experienced believing in something you thought is true but in the end you discovered that it is false? According to philosophy if you want to know the truth you have to use, not emotions, but thinking. To think however is an act of choice which is not always done properly. Sometimes we need guidance to straighten our thoughts.  Knowledge According to Ayn Rand knowledge is a “mental grasp of reality reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation” When you (Rand know something 1990). (be it the behavior of your friend, the movement of the planets, or the origin of civilizations) you understand its nature. You identify what it is. And it stays with you. Knowledge is a retained form of awareness (Binswanger 2014). How do we acquire knowledge? First we can acquire knowledge using our senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling. This method of acquiring knowledge is called empiricism and it has many adherents in the history of philosophy such as John Locke, George Berkley, David Hume. Second we can acquire knowledge by thinking with the use of our minds (what philosophers call the rational faculty). This is what rationalism advocates. (Some well-known rationalists in history are Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). However thinking is just half of the story of knowing (in fact the second half). The reason is that thinking involves content. To think is to think of something. You cannot think about nothing. This is where sense perception enters the picture by feeding our minds with data coming from the outside world so that we can have something to think about.  ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE REALITY PERCEPTION CONCEPT PROPOSITION INFERENCE  REALITY PERCEPTION To know is to know something. This Our first and only contact with reality is “something” is what philosophers call through our senses. Knowledge begins reality, existence, being. with perceptual knowledge. Existence is everything there is (another name At first the senses give us knowledge of for it is the Universe). It includes everything we things or entities (what Aristotle calls perceive (animals, plants, human beings, primary substance) inanimate objects) and everything inside our Later we became aware not only of things heads (e.g., our thoughts and emotions) which but certain aspects of things like represents our inner world. qualities, quantities, relationships, Existence is really all there is to know. If these so called Aristotelian categories nothing exists knowledge is impossible. cannot be separated from the entities that have it.  CONCEPT PROPOSITION After we perceive things, we began to notice When we use concepts in order to classify or that some of the things we perceive are describe an “existent” (a particular that exist similar to other things. be it an object, a person, an action or event, The first concepts we formed are concepts of etc) A proposition is a statement that expresses things like dog, cat, man, house, car. These either an assertion or a denial that an existent elementary concepts are called first level belongs to a class or possess certain concepts. From these first level concepts we attribute. can form higher level concepts through a Proposition is usually expressed in a process which call “abstrac tion from declarative sentence. And can be divided into Let us describe the two types of abstraction abstract ions”ons: wider generalizations (or abstracti two affirmative or negative proposition from “Truth and falsity are called the two simply widenings) and subdivisions (or possible truth values of the statement” narrowings)  INFERENCE EXAMPLE How do we demonstrate that the statement All men are mortals is true? By providing an argument. Argument “is a group of statements, one or Socrates is a man. more of which (the premises) are claimed to provide support for, or reason to believe one Therefore Socrates is An argumen of the expresse otherst (the s a reasonin conclusio n) g process which logicians call inference. Arguments mortal. however is not the only form of inference, but logicians usually used “argument” and “inference” interchangeably. THANK YOU!