How do we require reliable knowledge?(two seminal theories of the source of knowledge)
Reason(Rationalism) and the Senses(Empiricism)
Rationalism
the view that knowledge can be obtained by relying on reason without the aid of senses. In this view, reason is a key source of knowledge we have about the universe.
(some knowledge can be known without some perception)
rationalist view about knowledge
that real knowledge is based on logic, the laws, and the methods that reason develops.
rationalists hold that the best source of knowledge is?
mathematics, a realm of knowledge that is obtained entirely by reason and that we use to understand the universe
Empiricism
the view that knowledge can be attained only through sense experience. Sense experience is the source of all our knowledge of the world that surrounds us. (all knowledge comes from sense perception)
empiricist view
that real knowledge is based on what our sight, hearing, smell, and other sense tell us is really out there, not what people discover in their heads.
transcendental idealism
influential alternative, attempts to integrate the insights of empiricism and rationalism,
What is memory?
the ability to bring facts or our past experiences into our present consciousness or activities.
-important aspect of knowledge
-without memory we wouldn't remember who we are
-wouldn't retain any knowledge of the world
-without it we wouldn't retain any
what are the three kinds of memory
Habit memory: our ability to remember how to do something that we learned in the past, such as how to ride a bike
Personal memory: our ability to bring into our present consciousness a representation of events that we personally and directly experienced i
Perception
refers to the process of seeing,hearing,smelling,touching,and tasting by which we become aware of or apprehend ordinary onjects like a chair, trees.
What do rationalists claim about reason being the source of knowledge?
the belief that reason, without the aid of sensory perception, is capable of arriving at some knowledge,some undeniable truths about the world.
-When rationalists claim that some of our knowledge is based on reason rather than perception, they mean that w
what rationalist term is it called when knowledge is acquired through reason alone
a priori: it is not acquired through sense experience, and it is necessarily true and indubitable. examples are mathematical truths and the laws of logic.
-rationalist claim that some of our knowledge about the world is acquired by the use of reason alone
Traditional Indian philosophy agrees on what
that sense perception is a source of knowledge, however several indian philosophers hold that sense perception is ultimately erroneous, and that we must rely on other sources of knowledge to what is ultimately true.
The Indian philosopher Shankara was a rationalist who...
held that our knowledge of ultimate reality is not acquired through our sense but through reasoning and meditation which are the key to knowing the ultimate reality.
developed the idea of sublation: process of correcting an error about reality when it is
Descartes : Doubt and Reason
methodological point of departure"-- an attitude of doubt of skepticism toward what we think we know
-said that he suffered an epistemological "credibility gap" because he always wondered what he could believe and what he could be certain of.
-with new s
explain Descartes rationalistic foundation of knowledge
as an example, a piece of wax that the mind knows is the same physical body when it melts but that to the senses looks completely different. Descartes concludes that reason, without the aid of senses, is what knows the body of the wax.
-He points out that
Descartes rationalism of our knowledge of God and the world
- he argues that he could not have produced the idea of a perfect being, God, and neither could he have acquired it through the senses; only God could have put it into his mind, so God must exist. Because God is good, he does not deceive, so we can rely o
innate ideas
ideas that are present in the mind from birth: we are born with them.
-Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz have generally agreed that we have innate ideas, but it is hard for other philosophers to accept.
what does rationalist Plato say about innate ideas?
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What do Rationalists such as Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and the Indian Jain philosophers believe about what kind of ideas can be innate?
believe that the ideas and truths that the mind knows without relying on its senses are innate- in other words, we were born with these ideas in our minds, or they developed from what we were born with. We could not have acquired them by observation becau
Platos Meno
- he provides the best example of a person- a slave boy in this case- becoming aware of the innate ideas he had in his mind but did not consciously know he had.
-Plato tells us how Socrates once made a slave boy "remember" his knowledge of geometry.
-Socr
what does Descartes say about innate ideas?
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what does Leibniz say about innate ideas
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Rationalists
Plato, Descartes,
Continental Rationalist
Leibniz
Spinoza
DEscartes
British Empirist
Locke, Berbele, Hume
Philosophers of the school of Jainism
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Descartes view of Clear and Distinct ideas about the controversy over recovered memories
- says that clarity and distinctness of ideas were indicators of true knowledge
- says that as indicators of valid knowledge are applied to recovered memories , they would suggest that such memories are valid.
Both in the East and the West, what view emerged?
a view of epistemology emerged that contrasts sharply with the rationalist view of knowledge and that is now called "Empiricism
What is Empiricism?
the view that all knowledge about the world comes from or is based on the senses.
-react sharply to rationalistic claims, empiricists claim that the human mind contains nothing except what experience has put there.
- teaches that true knowledge is a poste
a posteriori
pertaining to knowledge that is empirically verifiable; based on inductive reasoning from what is experienced.
Locke and Empricism
-John Locke says that in the womb mind is a blank slate, Locke says that in the womb the minds is a black slate in Latin a "tabula rose" on which experience makes it mark. when we come into the world and since being in the world we are constantly experien
Primary and Secondary Qualities according to Locke
he claimed hat primary or measurable qualities such as weight and shape are really "in" the objects we perceive, where as secondary qualities such as colors, tastes, and sounds are not "in" the objects we perceive but are sensations in us that objects we
George Berkeley towards Lockes view and his claims
-agreed with Locke that all our ideas originate in sensory experience
- also he accepted Locke's argument that secondary qualities are SUBJECTIVES and insisted that primary qualities were also subjective
- says first need to be perceived and second only m
Berkely's idea could have become ..?
solipsism, which means the position that only I exist and that everything and everyone else is just an idea in my subjective consciousness, so that what is real is whatever seems real to me in my own private world of ideas.
Berkeley's claim towards God
#NAME?
Berkeleys ingenious efforts resulted in what philosophy?
#NAME?
Hume and skepticism
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two ways of sense perception
impressions: -quite vivid -from perception
ideas: -from the mind -not vivid
Inductive Generalizations
-Inductive generalizations are probable arguments whose premises indicate that something is true of a limited sample, and whose conclusion claims that the same is true of the whole population
-the limited group of cases in the premises is called the sampl
The Problem of Induction
what justification do we have for inferring that what was true of a sample in the past will be true of a whole population in the future?
-argued that since inductive generalization has been successful in the past it will be successful in the future is its
Humes view on an External word existing
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what does Hume say about causality
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What basic premise by Descartes did Hume accept?
It is possible that the ideas in our minds may not correspond to a reality outside the mind
what does the Humean skeptic suggest about when memories are recovered
they simply become one more element in this jumble of ideas in the mind. no more possible to know whether one of them is true than it is to establish that any of our other ideas correspond to an independent reality
post modernism
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three approaches to knowledge
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what do empiricist say about Science giving us knowledge?
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Inductive reasoning
one of the most influential views of the relationship between scientific theories and sensory observations is inductionism
- which is a view that holds that science is based on inductive reasoning
-which means reasoning moves from any particular observati
What do people use the term scientific to suggest
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What did Mill do to improve Bacons views?
-an empiricist who laid out what he called "canons" or methods of induction
-these were rules for determining which generalizations were supported by the many particular factors and observations the scientist collected,
-claimed that the scientific method
What are Mills three features of the scientific method
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what do the inductionist empiricist say about real science?
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Inductionism problems
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Hypothetical Method
Whewell pointed out that advances in scientific knowledge do not depend only on generalizations based on several observations.
-he says the greatest advances occur when scientists make a creative guess or "hypothesis" about what causes or explains a parti
reason
the ability to synthesize, to relate, and to creatively formulate new conceptual structures
Paradigms and Revolutions in Science
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how is the scientific method distinguished from pseudoscience
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is the theory of recovered memories science or pseudoscience
although the theory of recovered memories meets some of the criteria, it fails to meet others and so seems in some respects to be based on pseudoscience
what are Kuhns five criteria for a scientific theory
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Memory does not provide us with what?
new knowledge, nut preserves knowledge that we acquire from other sources
what was Humes propostition?
that meaningful concepts must be derived from impression was a crucial step in his attempt to undermine our claims to knowledge, and if a concept is not based on the sensations or impressions of our sense experience then it must be meaningless
- he sais c
What is truth?
in different situations in real life we seem to believe truth means different things and is established in different ways:
truth may be
-what gets us what we want
-what fits with our other beliefs and meanings
-what corresponds with what is "out there" in
the three traditional theories of truth
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knowledge is
a belief that is justified and true
justification is
another name for the reasons or evidence that make a belief probably
basic beliefs vs nonbasic beliefs
beliefs that need no justification verses beliefs that must be justified to be acceptable
Foundationalism holds that nonbasic beliefs are
ultimately justified by basic beliefs
-argue that if all beliefs had to be justified by other beliefs then we would have no real justification for any of our beliefs
-belief A had to be justified by B and B had to be justified by C, C had to be justified
coherentism holds that
there are no basic beliefs and that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs
-with A being justified by B,C,D, then D must also be justified by A describing that our beliefs form an interconnected system or "web"of beliefs
-our beliefs "cohere" with eac
knowledge as justified true belief
#NAME?
traditional characterization of knowledge
knowledge is
1 a belief that is
2 justified and
3 true
A ) B
A can't go anywhere without B but B can go anywhere without A
The Gettier example
- founded by Edmund Gettier
- example of this is when someone has a justified true belief but does not have knowledge
-the notion of justified true belief does not fully capture what knowledge is
-it showed that knowledge is more than justified true belie
Justification
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what do empiricist argue about basic beliefs
- are those that describe what we seem to be experiencing such as "i seem to see red
what did Wilfred Sellar argue
that all our beliefs must be justified by otherbeliefs, so there are no basic beliefs that serve as the foundations of all our other beliefs
correspondence theory
says truth is an agreement or correspondence between a proposition and that it is true when it agrees with or corresponds to a fact
-not many things are true but the things that are true are solidly true
-example "water boils at 212 degrees F at sea level
Russel is an
example of a correspondence theorist.
-explains correspondence by saying that a sentence corresponds to a fact when the relations among the words or constituents of the sentence mirror the relations among the term or parts of a fact.
- says the truth or f
Coherence theory
- a belief is true if it "coheres" with other beliefs that we regard as true
-insists that properly speaking truth is a property of a related group of consistent beliefs
-Geometry is a good example of this theory in operation
Alfred Tarski developed
an interesting and important version of the corres theory that does not refer to "facts" or "correspondence"
-says truth is a property of sentences, a sentence is true when things area as it says things are
-Nix est alba is true in latin
-if and only if
-
Blanshard argued
that we can verify a statement only by using other statements so there is no way of determining the truth of a statement other than by seeing whether it coheres with other accepted statements
-coherence theory is right
-says each belief was related in som
pragmatic theory
says that a belief is true if it works and is useful- for example by letting us make accurate predictions
-different from the other theories
-claim it is possible we know only our experiences so truth cannot be what corresponds with reality
-view the cohe
JAmes in Pragmatism argues
that the truth of an idea depends on the practical difference it makes: "true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify" an idea is validated or verified if as a consequence of believing the idea we find we are led to experi
Does truth matter
-cp\orrespondence theory of truth says truth depends on an objective reality but the other two theories say truth depends on what a group accepts
-such relativist theories imply that beliefs accepted by any group are true and as valid as only other belief