Philosophy - Part 1 Chapter 3

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(I may misunderstand what books say.)
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Part 1: The Nuts and Bolts of Philosophy

Chapter 3: What These Is to Know About Knowing

Epistemology is the study of knowledge - what knowledge is, what we can know, and how we know it. Epistemology has been amajor concdrn of philosophers ever since Descartes called attention to its imporance in the 17th century.


A Time of Crisis

In Descartes's day, people's believe were changing drastically. The printing press had been around long enought that books wer widely available and more people than ever before could read and write. As people were more informed, they could more easily challenge old ideas, especially religious ideas. In additon, science told eople the shocking news. Earth is not the center of the universe. The traditional idea that the commoners work and the nobility spend the money the commoners made was challenged was also being challenged.

Christopher Hill
A historian. In his words, the world was being turned upsid down.


Descartes's Reason

Then along came Descartes, who wanted a solution for this problem of no knowing what to believe. He attempted to figure out what we can know for certain without relying on tradition, on outside authority, or even on what our senses tell us.

He said we can trust our reason if we settle down quietly and block out the world and all its craziness. Reason, for Descartes, could be relied upon to tell us waht is true and what isn't.

 "Cogito ergo sum." = "I think therefore I am."Descartes reasoned that the very fact that he could think told him for certain that he existed.


Look Ma, No Senses!

Descartes's certainty that he existed led him to feel certain about other things, too, such as the existence of God, the fact that the sky is blue and ants have six legs, and so forth.

Descartes's solution to the epistemological preblem of what we can know is called rationalism.

lexicon
Rationalismis the belief that we can have knowledge without experience.

Empiricism
is just the opposite - it's the belief that we can only be sure of something once we've tested it - once we've experienced it, so to speak.


Getting Testy

While Descartes was philosophizing about rationalism in France, philosophers in England wer thinking up a different solution to waht we can know. This alternative solution is known as empiricism.

Empiricism is the belief that the best way to be certain of something is to test it with your senses - through actual experiences. Empiricism became a major aspect f what we now call science - figuring things out by running tests and experiments.

During the Middle Ages, empiricism was not the obvious, common sens idea that it has become today. People tended to confuse how things worked and what things actually did with what things menat and how people felt about them. Gold, for instance, was not just a mineral you could make jewelry out of. People gave gold special meanings and thought it had special power, spiritual properties. Their feelings about gold actually kept them from studying gold empirically, through actual experience. In fact, before the empiricists came along, people tended to think the whole world and everything in it worked more or less by magic.

Francis Bacon
John Locke
During and after the 17th century, empiricists like Francis Bacon and John Locke were rejecting the old, magical ideas and arguing that physical (empirical) reality works according to machanical principles. By studying things empirically, these philosophers believed that they could figure out waht these principles were.

To a degree, they were right. Still, empiricism alone can't tell us everything we want to know about reality and is far from the last word in philosophy.


Can We Get There from Here? 

Logic
Both rationalism and empiricism rely on logic to get from one idea to the next.
Logic is a tool for figuring out everything that can truthfull be said, based on what is already known to be true.

Logic can be very slippery. It works great when applied to math, but when you substitue ideas for numbers, all kinds of funny things can happen.

1) Words can have more than one meaning.
2) You usually have to start with at least one set of assumptions.
    Even if your logic is good, you assumptions may be mistaken,
    which can lead to false conclusions.
3) People's personalities come into play.
    Someone may use slippery words and mistaken assumptions
    for the sole purpose of deceiving someone else.

Logis works best when people are left out of it and it is applied only to mathematics.

Still, there are a number of ways we can use logic to deal with ideas. Among the most important of these to philosophers are induction and deduction.


Going Down: Deduction

Deduction is the process of figuring out things that are necessarily ture, provided that the assumptions we start with, called the premises, are true.

A premise is an assertion that begins an argument and leads to a conclusion.

A syllogism is a logical statement with three parts that presents a conclusion deduced from two related premises. Aristotle provided a famous example of a kind of deduction that he called a syllogism. It consists of three statements: two premises and a conclusion.

The conclusion is only certain if the premises are in fact true.


Going up: Induction

Induction is a way of making generalizations about things. Induction, like deduction, moves from premises to conclusions. But unlike deduction, induction leads to conclusions that may not be true even if the premises are true. Inductive conclusions are only probable, not certain. Induction is drawing conclusions from particular evidence; if certain things are true, we can induce that other things of the same kind will probably be true.

For example, we go out and find a good number of crows and all of them are black, it's a pretty good bet that all crows are black. But can we be sure? Even seeing a million black crows doesn't mean for certin that there isn't a crow out there somewhere that is lime green. The best we can do is say that all crows are probably black.

Induction is, in some ways, less certain than deduction, but induction can do a lot that deduction can't. Induction, for example, can help generate hypotheses.

A hypotheses is a generalization that we think might be true, but that might not actually be true.
A hypotheses is a theoretical statement that explains things but that may be disproved or confirmed by new evidence.


Double-Checking Your Hypothesis

Hypotheses are useful things to have in mind while trying to figure out new things. One way philosophers and scientists learn is by constantly testing their hypotheses with new ideas and information. If you information supports the hypothesis, it is just that much more likely that it's true. But what if the new information proves the hypothesis wrong?

An example is the discovery of x-rays. X-rays did not make sense at first, since then-current ideas about how molecules worked were not capable of explaining them. To explain x-rays, scientists had to throw out the old ideas about molecules and come up with new ones able to explain the new evidence. As a result, people developed all kinds of new knowledge about radioactivity that their old hypotheses had prevented them from considering.

The idea what we learn the most when we discover how much we don't know is a key idea in modern science, where people are looking for ways to challenge each other's hypotheses about how reality works.

Karl Popper
An Austrian philosopher argued that science depends on the principle of falsifiability. We can't every prove that general statements are always true, but we may be able to prove they are false. We can't ever prove all crows are black, since there may be a green crow hiding somewhere out there. But if someday we do find a green crow, then we have falsified the general claim that all crows are black.


The Ping-Pong Ball Called Dialectic

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates became famous for his ability to poke holes in other people's philosophies. He believed that learning how little we know for certain was the best way to gain knowledge.

Socratic method - Socrates asked people questions in order to get them to think about the limits of their knowledge. Eventually, he led them to conclusions that howed them how they were mistaken. This procedure of teaching by asking questions is called the Socratic method - after Socrates. The Socratic method involves the logical testing of propositions or premises.

Socrates tested ideas logically by seeing if they held up next to other ideas. Moving back and forth between ideas helped him to see how accurate they were. This back-and-forth movement, called dialectic, has become important to philosophers ever since.

lexicon
Dialectic
is movement back and forth between an idea and something that the idea isn't. This may involve thinking about an idea in terms of another idea or comparing and contrasting two or more ideas.


Pro and Con?

Dialectic is the Greek word meaning "discussion." This kind of discussion may take the sonewhat rambling form of the Socratic method, or it can be more rigidly structured as in Aristotle's Topics in which he considers the pros and cons of a number of stated subjects.



Both Sides Now

Dialectic can be useful not only in deciding specific questions. The idea is that it can be easier to understand something when you are able to see it in relation to what it isn't. Can you really understand chocolate ice cream if you've never tried vanilla? Of course not.

Dialectic not only helps us understand opposing ideas, it can also lead to a new way of combining opposed ideas into a new unity. For instance, rationalism and empiricis. These methods of studying knowledge were in conflict for over a century. Both of them had different strengths and weaknesses. Rationalism could do things empiricism could not and vice versa.

The rationalist said that empiricism doesn't tell us anything about things that have been of major importance to philosophers, like whether Gods exists or whether human nature is basically good or evil.

The empiricists, on the other hand, complained that the rationalists had no hard evidence for the theories. Rationalist philosophy was an extremely speculative enterprise. The rationalists may have been just fooling themselves into believing that their minds were capable of obtaining metaphysical knowledge.

Although you could say that one approach makes up for the weaknesses of the other, you can't just combine the wo into a bigger, stronger philosophy, because they're in conflict. The work of one perspective undoes the work of the other.

But if you think dialectically, hitting the Ping-Pong ball of your ind back and forth between empiricism and rationalism, you may be able to see each perspective as a part of the other.


Can he or Kant He? Combining Reason and Experience

Immanuel Kant
A German Philosopher brought rationalism and empiricism together in two ways. First, he looked at rationalist ideals as empirical conditions of the mind. In other words, he reasoned that the fact that philosophers seem to want to believe in God (a rational ideal) shows us wha the mind is like (an empirical fact). Rationalist thought, that is, is an empirical fact of the mind. 

Next, he looked at empirical things and reasoned that we can only know them with our minds. As a result, there is a lot about "the world as it is" that depends on how our minds work. This view is called idealism.


lexicon
Idealism
is the belief that reality is largely dependent on the mind.

The dialectic is not only good for little things like deciding whether to have cake or pie for dessert, but also for deep, trippy stuff like seeing the relationship between the mind and reality. It can be a whole way of knowing and of seeing what knowledge is.


Can History Think?

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A German philosopher, a follower of Kant.
For Hegel, dialectic is not just something the mind does in order to think about reality; it is something reality does to the mind. Hegel believed that human consciousness develops and changes through history, and that this historical process is dialectical.

Hegel would say not that Kant worked out this dialectical relationship, but that it worked itself out within human consciousness. For Hegel, individuals are less important than what everybody thinks. What everybody thinks is influenced by the conflict of opposing ideas that takes shape in history.

Hegel's use of dialecic puts a whole new sin on the study of knowledge by suggesting that what we know andhow we know it depends on where we stand in history.  The reason that figures things out is not the individual's reason, as it was for Descartes, but the shared human consciousness at work in history. Hegel believed that everyone's knowledge if part of a bigger knowledge. In place of "I thing there fore I am," hegel might sya, "History works the same way thinking does, therefore a shared human consciousness exists."

Hegel viewed ideas both as ways of understanding reality and as giving shape to reality as it changes trough history.

Hegel = the shared, universal human consciousness

 
Marx on the Mind

Marx argued that the dialectic of history was not evidence of a universal human consciousness as Hegel described it. Instead, dialectical movement in history involved changes in the ways society takes care of people's material needs.

This means Marx was more interested in the dialectical, or contrasting the dialectical relationship between industrialism and farming than rationalism and empiricism. Marx believed that history was structured by changes in economic relationships. These economic relationships, he argued, influenced the way people think.

Like Hegel, Marx thought the mind of the individual was only part of the larger picture. For Marx, the larger picture was picture was the economic forces that determined people's social relationships.

Since, for Marx, social relationships influence the way people thin, "knowledge" is limited and structured by the way we see to our material needs. Marx called this structured knowledge ideology.

lexicon
Ideology
is a system of beliefs or ideas that reinforce the values of a particular class or group of people.

To see knowledge as ideology is very different from seeing knowledge as reason. Thus Marx's veiw of knowing is very different from Descartes's. For Descartes, we can get knowledge by reasoning independently of worldly experience. For Marx, ideology develops in response to economic forces. Descartes if thinking about knowing from inside the mind, asking what the mind can do entirely on its own; Marx is thinking about knowing from outside society, asking how economic forces shape the way people think.


■ Different views of knowing include rationalism (for example, Descartes),
   empiricism (Bacon and Locke), idealism (Kant and Hegel), and ideology (Marx)
■ Rationalism is the view that knowledge is possible without experience.
■ Empiricism is the view that knowledge comes from experience.
■ Ideology is a system of beliefs or ideas that reinforce the values of a particular class or
   group of people.
■ Different logical techniques for acquiring and testing knowledge are
    induction, deduction, and dialectic.