Epistemology

About This Presentation

Title:

Epistemology

Description:

Epistemology Theory of Knowledge Traditionally divided into two categories A. Rationalism B. Empiricism Rationalism: Those who assert that by reason alone we ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:734

Avg rating:3.0/5.0

Slides: 84

Provided by: lss80

Category:

more less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Epistemology

1
EpistemologyTheory of Knowledge
2

Traditionally divided into two categories
A. Rationalism
B. Empiricism

3
RationalismThose who assert that by reason
alone we can discover knowledge
4

I. The school emphasizes that our senses
cannot give any certain knowledge
II. True knowledge is already within our minds
in the form of innate ideas which we do not
acquire, but are born with
III. Plato and Descartes are examples of
Rationalism

5
EmpiricismThose who assert that we obtain
knowledge solely by our senses
6

I. Empiricism has usually developed in
countries where the dominant interests have been
practical and worldly (US and Great Britain)
II. Modern Empiricism grew out of the
philosophical struggles in 17th century England,
when that country was rapidly developing,
commercially and industrially
III. Roger Bacon, John Locke, George Berkley,
and David Hume are examples

7
Plato(Aristocles)
8
Writings

I. Socratic Period
A. The Apology contains account of
Socrates speech in defense of himself at his
trial
B. The Crito A Platonic defense as being a
loyal citizen of Athens

C. The Euthyphro. The Laches, and the
Charmides discusses the ideas of goodness and
prudence
D. The Protagoras discusses virtue and its
teachability
E. The two Hippias (the Major and Minor)
seen as a spirited erotic tale the Major
attempts to understand the concepts of beauty

II. The Transition Period
A. The Lysis treats the concept of
friendship
B. The Cratylus devoted to the philosophy
of language
C. The Euthdemus directed against the
logical fallacies of some of the later Sophists
D. The Menexenus discussion of Sohistic
rhetoric

III. The Period of Maturity (theory of ideas
being developed)
A. The Meno again takes up the teachability
of virtue
B. The Phaedo doctrines of ideas and
immortality of the soul are interwoven
C. The Symposium the theory of Ideas
applied to the realm of the beautiful

D. The Republic rests on same dualism as The
Phaedo, concerned with this world and its
problems, contains material on ethics, the
Allegory of the Cave, and the myth of the fate
of the soul
E. The Phaedrus (Once regarded as first work
of Plato), a work on love and Eros contains
Orphic-Pythagorean theory of transmigration of
souls

13
The Works of Old AgeA decline in Ontology

I. The Parmenides Socrates defending himself
against a series of criticisms of the theory of
ideas by Zeno and the Eleatic School
II. Theatetus epistemelogical concerns on
theory of ideas

III. The Sophist a continuation of The
Theaetus, main attack is the Sophists
IV. The Statesman views the true ruler as the
Knower who alone possesses truthenlightened
despotism
V. The Philebus a short discussion on the
one and many, shows relationship of pleasure to
the good

VI. The Timaeus the only dialogue concerning
natural sciencecontains a theory of creation
VII. The Critias discusses the ideal agrarian
state projected onto the earliest days of Athens
VIII. The Hemocrates describes the
degeneration from the original ideal state to the
present
IX. The Laws (last work), basic concepts of
The Republic are reemphasized, some concessions
to real life

16
Platos Epistemelogy

I. Cannot be found systematically in any one
work
II. The Theaetetus considers knowledge,
conclusion is negative
A. Knowledge is not sense- perception
B. Knowledge is not simply true judgment

C. Knowledge is not true judgment plus an
account
D. Characteristics of true knowledge
1. infallible
2. of the real

18
Theory of Form or Ideas

I. Knowledge is related to the good, but not
the good itself
II. Knowledge is in the eternal realm of the
essences
III. There is a world of being
(Parmenides)unchanging ideals
IV. There is also the world of becoming
(Heraclitus)ever-changing

V. There is a third realm (The Timaeus) called
space
VI. An interpretation of the theory of ideas
A. Any attempt to reduce it to a principle
and interpret it as a whole is futile
B. The concept of the idea must not be
interpreted as being a subjective concept in the
mind it has an objective reality

C. Ideas have a three-fold significance
1. Ontologicalin that they represent real
being
2. Teleologicalall ideas have ends and aims
to their being
3. Logicalthe ideas enable us to bring order
into the chaos of Individual beings

D. The ideas exist in a sphere apart from our
reality
1. The Phaedo teaches that the soul existed
before its union with the body in a
transcendental realm
2. The process of knowledge consists
essentially in recollection
3. God or the demiurge form things of this
world according to the model of the Forms

E. The Philebus, there is a strong Pythagorean
influence
1. Nature is reality is numbers
2. Uses Pythagorean opposites
3. Origin of Ideas is the One

23
Allegory of the Cave

I. Found in Book 7 of The Republic

II. Knowledge advances by stages
A. From sense perception it proceeds to pure
thought (pure mathematics)
B. From pure thought is proceeds to the idea
(mathematical knowledge to dialectical science
C. From the ideal to the realm beyond (from
ideas to the Good)

III. The allegory shows the ascent of the mind
from the lower sections to the higher as an
epistemological progress
A. Prisoners represent the majority of
humankind
B. We live in a world of shadows
C. The view of the world is distorted by the
shadows
D. We cling to our distorted views

IV. The cave also represents the importance of
proper education

27
(No Transcript)
28
Descartes (1591-1650)

29
I. Cartesian Doubt A. Considered to be the
founder of modern philosophyfirst philosopher
to allow the new physics and astronomy to effect
his philosophical system
30

II. During the Thirty Years War (1619) in
Bavaria he had a dream in which he said the
spirit of Truth opened to him the treasures of
all the sciences
A. He recorded this incident in Discourses on
Method (1637)
B. Second major work is the Meditations
(1642)
1. In the Meditations he preaches the duty
of doubt

2. Wanted to go beyond the senses to
beginning of knowledge
3. In the Second Meditations he uses wax as
an example of how our senses deceive us
4. By concentrating only on what he knew for
certain, he began what we know as Cartesian
doubt

C. The methodology of Cartesian doubt
1. Begins by doubting everything that he
could manage to doubt
a. First begins doubting sense- experience

b. What thing I cannot doubt is my own
experience While I wanted to think everything
false, it must necessarily be that I who thought
was something and remarking this, I THINK
THEREFORE I AM, was so certain that all most
extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were
incapable of upsetting it. I judged that I could
receive it without scruple as the first
principle of the philosophy that I sought

2. Having set a secure foundation, he sets to
work to rebuild the edifice of knowledge
a. I am a thing that thinks
b. My existence is different from the
physical world that the soul is wholly
distinct from the body
c. Why was the Cogito so evident? Because
it is clear and distinctthus, all things
that we conceive clearly and distinctly are true

d. He deals with knowledge of our
bodieshere he uses the example of wax
e. Proving the existence of an External
World can be done only by proving the existence
of God

3. His Proof of Gods existence (A revision of
Anselms Ontological Argument
a. Everything has a cause (including our
ideas)
b. We have an idea of God
c. Nothing less than God is adequate to cause
our idea of God

4. Besides the ideas of self and God, there was
another set of ideas which were seen to be innate
without any reference to the external worldthe
truth of mathematics
5. All other knowledge comes to us us from the
outside world

III. Empirical Emphases
A. Descartes realized that one could proceed
by deduction only a short distance from the apex
of a pyramid
B. A deduction from intuitively self- evident
principles is of a limited usefulness in
scienceit would yield only the most general of
laws

C. He also posited a belief that one cannot
determine from a mere conclusion of general
laws, the cause of physical processes
D. For one to be able to deduce a statement
about a particular effect, it would be necessary
to include among the premises information about
the circumstances under which the events occur

E. An important tool for observation and
experimentation is to provide knowledge of the
conditions under which events of a given type
takes place

IV. Primary Qualities and Secondary Qualities
A. In his doubting process he had to prove
what is clear and distinct about a physical
objecthe would use a lump of wax as an example
1. We understand the real nature of wax
through intuition
2. Such intuition is to be distinguished
from the sequence of appearances

3. He would distinguish between those
primary qualities which all bodie must possess
and secondary qualities which exist only in
the perceptual experience of the subject

B. He believed that God created a universe of
infinite extension (thus, no vacuum) and
motionscience thus reduced to measurement and
mathematics
1. All change must come through motion
2. Motion could neither increase nor
decrease, but only transferred from one body to
another

3. The universe continues to run as a machine
and each body persists in a state of motion in a
straight line the geometrically simplest form in
which God set it going, unless acted on by an
external force

V. General Scientific Laws
A. From his understanding of extension, he
would develop several important physical
principles
B. He seemed to believe that because the
concepts of extension and motion and clear and
distinct, certain generalizations about these
concepts must be considered as a priori truths

1. One generalization is that all motion is
caused by impact or pressure due to his belief
that no vacuum can exist, thus every entity must
be touched by another entity
2. However, he denied the possibility of
action-at-a-distance in an effort to defend a
thorough-going mechanistic view of causation

3. Such a view would be revolutionary in
his daythis belief would be a denial of
magnetism and gravity
4. Another generalization is derived from
the idea of extension is that all motion is a
cyclical rearrangement of bodies if one body
changes its location, a simultaneous
displacement of others bodies is necessary to
prevent a vacuum

C. Descartes wrote that God is the ultimate
cause of motiona perfect being would create a
universe all-at- once and this perfect being
would keep motion going, otherwise the universe
would run down

49
Empiricism
50
John Locke
51
Essay Concerning Human Understanding

I. He attempts to show how various concepts or
ideas come from or are built up from different
kinds of experience
II. Denial of Innate Ideasthere are no
principles or ideas that we have any reason to
believe we have prior to, or independent, of our
sense experience

III. The White Paper (Tabula Rosa), Locke
believed that our minds are like a white
papervoid of all characters, without any ideas
IV. Two sources of knowledgeperception and
reflection

IV. Simple Ideas
1. Simple ideas are the most basic of our
knowledge
2. Simple ideas are presented to us in
sensation and reflection
3. Once the mind experiences simple ideas, it
has the power to store up, to repeat, and to
combine them

V. Primary and Secondary Qualities
A. Primary qualities are those items in our
experience which must belong to the objects that
we are
B. Secondary qualities are nothing in the
objects themselves, but powers to produce various
sensations in us by primary qualities, e.g.,
color

VI. Kinds of knowledge
A. Discussed in the Fourth Book of the Essays,
how reliable can knowledge of sensation and
reflection be?
B. Our knowledge is the result of the
examination of ideas it see if they agree or
disagree in some respectsfour kinds

1. First kind is achieved by the inspection
of two or more ideas to see if they are
identical or different
2. Second kind is the discovery that two or
more ideas are related together in some manner
3. Third kind is about ideas which deals with
the coexistence of two or more ideas belonging
together

4. Fourth kind of knowledge is the discovery
of whether or not any of our ideas are
experiences of something that exist outside of
our minds, i.e., if they are of some real
existence

VII. External Reality
A. In order to keep his theory of knowledge
from ending to calling knowledge ones persons
experience based on ones observations, he
attempted to show that even with our limited
knowledge gained from experience we have some
basis for claiming that we know something about
what goes on outside of our minds

B. The Mind is incapable of inventing simple
ideasthus they must be the result of something
outside of our minds

VIII. His view on prospects and limitations of
science are found in his Essay
A. He had a view accepting a primitive
concept of atoms, thus in order to be able to
predict mechanical behavior one would need to

1. Know the configurations and motions of
atoms
2. Know the ways in which the motion of atoms
produce ideas of primary and secondary qualities
in the observer
3. If these two conditions were met, then one
would know a priori that certain properties
would be identified with entities

B. However, we are ignorant of the
configuration and motion of atoms
1. This ignorance is contingent
2. Know the ways in which the motion of atoms
produce ideas of primary and secondary qualities
in the observer
3. But, we still could not reach a necessary
knowledge of phenomenon since we are ignorant of
the ways in which atoms manifest certain powers

C. The atomic constituents of a body possesses
the power through motion, to produce in us ideas
of secondary qualities such as colors and sounds
D. Also, the atoms of a particular body have
the power affect the atoms of other bodies so as
to alter the ways in which these bodies affect
our senses

E. Only by divine revelation could we know
the ways in which atomic motions produce effects
on us
F. He also held that an unbridgeable
epistemological gap separates the real world of
atoms and the realm of ideas that constitute our
experience

IX. He recommended a methodology of correlation
and exclusion for scientific investigation based
on a compilation of extensive natural histories
A. This understanding involved a shift in
focus from real essences (atomic
configurations of bodies) to nominal essences
(the observed properties and relations of bodies)

B. He insisted that the most that can be
achieved in science is a collection of
generalizations about the association and
succession of phenomena
C. He somewhat degenerated natural sciencea
trained scientist may have judgment and opinion,
not knowledge and certainty

X. He did believe that there do exist necessary
connections in natureeven though the connections
are opaque to human understandings.
A. The usage of the term idea was between
gaps
1. Ideas are effects of operations in
the real world of atoms
2. Thus, red is produced by processes
external to the subject

B. He was confident that the motions of atomic
constituents of matter that give rise to our
ideas of colors and tasteeven though we cannot
learn just how this takes place

69
David Hume
70

I. Carried British Empiricism to a skeptical
blind alley
A. By contending that belief in the identity
of the self or objects in the external world was
simply the result of a habit
B. Identity is nothing really belonging to
these different perceptions and uniting them
together but it is merely a quality which we
attribute to them because of the union of their
ideas in the imagination.

II. In An Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding he divided the perceptions of the
mind into two classes
A. Thoughts or ideasthe least forcible and
livelythey are reflections of impressions
B. Impressionsresults from direct
experience what we see, hear, feel

C. The creative power of the mind amounts to
no more than the faculty of compounding,
transposing, augmenting or diminishing the
materials afforded us by our senses and
experiences

73
The Synthesisof Immanuel Kant
74

I. He initiated a Copernican Revolution in
philosophy
A. Reaction to radical empiricism of David
Hume
B. Freed theology from corrosion of classical
empiricism while maintaining rationality of
religious belief

II. Kant responded that Hume and the
empiricists had a passive and dualistic view of
cognitionwhich conceived of the mind as simply a
receptor of particular sense impressions
A. Kant emphasized that the mind is
activeinstead of beginning with the object as
something already given to which the mind must
conform, he reverses the order and conceives of
the object as in some respect constituted by
the a priori contributions of the knower

B. The mind imposes upon the material of
experience its own forms of cognition,
determined by the very structure of human
understanding
C. The raw material of experience is thus
molded and shaped along certain definite lines
according to the cognitive forms with the mind
itself

D. These forms of the mind are the way we
put things together
E. All experiences presuppose these a priori
categories which are not themselves observable

III. The cognitive forms of experience
determine the possibility of objects of knowledge
A. The categories of experience determine our
knowledge of phenomena

B. If the word object were taken to refer to
things-in-themselves, things apart from any
relation to a knowing subject, then we could not
say they are known by the human mind
C. We cannot, thus, know noumena,
things- in-themselves, i.e., supersensible
objects, for we lack the necessary cognitive
organ

IV. He looks at the nature of judgment of
judgment in four ways
A. Analytical judgment(rational
deductive)in which the predicate is
contained within the subject and may be known
by analysis of it, e.g., bald men have no
hair

B. Synthetical judgment (empirical
inductive)one in which the predicate is not
contained with the subject., e.g., the rose is
red
C. A priori judgment (rational)one which
asserts a universal and necessary connection,
e.g., 2 2 4, always and must be, a judgment
before the fact

D. Post-priori judgment (empirical)one which
does not assert a universal and necessary
connection a judgment after the fact, e.g., the
rose is red
E. For Kant, the major question is whether
there are synthetical, a priori judgments (i.e.,
those judgments in which predicates are not
contained within the subject but are still
universal and necessary)he concluded there
weremath is an example