1. The document discusses epistemology, which is the study of how to acquire and validate knowledge. It covers the main methods of acquiring knowledge: perception through the senses and rational thinking.
2. It then explains the process of acquiring knowledge in more detail: starting with reality or existence, then perception of entities, forming concepts, making propositions that classify concepts, and using inference to demonstrate the truth or falsity of propositions.
3. The document ends by discussing the nature of truth and how to validate knowledge through retracing the steps of acquiring it and ultimately relying on sense perception.
1. The document discusses epistemology, which is the study of how to acquire and validate knowledge. It covers the main methods of acquiring knowledge: perception through the senses and rational thinking.
2. It then explains the process of acquiring knowledge in more detail: starting with reality or existence, then perception of entities, forming concepts, making propositions that classify concepts, and using inference to demonstrate the truth or falsity of propositions.
3. The document ends by discussing the nature of truth and how to validate knowledge through retracing the steps of acquiring it and ultimately relying on sense perception.
1. The document discusses epistemology, which is the study of how to acquire and validate knowledge. It covers the main methods of acquiring knowledge: perception through the senses and rational thinking.
2. It then explains the process of acquiring knowledge in more detail: starting with reality or existence, then perception of entities, forming concepts, making propositions that classify concepts, and using inference to demonstrate the truth or falsity of propositions.
3. The document ends by discussing the nature of truth and how to validate knowledge through retracing the steps of acquiring it and ultimately relying on sense perception.
1. The document discusses epistemology, which is the study of how to acquire and validate knowledge. It covers the main methods of acquiring knowledge: perception through the senses and rational thinking.
2. It then explains the process of acquiring knowledge in more detail: starting with reality or existence, then perception of entities, forming concepts, making propositions that classify concepts, and using inference to demonstrate the truth or falsity of propositions.
3. The document ends by discussing the nature of truth and how to validate knowledge through retracing the steps of acquiring it and ultimately relying on sense perception.
QUARTER 1- INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON 11
LESSEON 2: METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING
2.1: KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH WHAT IS EPISTEMOLOGY? There is no one correct definition of epistemology. The one that I’m going to use came from the philosopher Ayn Rand: “Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper method of acquiring and validating knowledge” (Rand 1990). The purpose of epistemology therefore is two-fold: 1. To show how we can acquire knowledge. 2. To give us a method of demonstrating whether the knowledge we acquired is really knowledge (i.e., true). Since knowledge plays a central role in epistemology let us briefly described its nature. THE NATURE OF 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” (Rand 1990). When you know something (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). So how do you acquire knowledge? Miss Rand’s definition gives us two ways: First, we can acquire knowledge using our senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling. How do you know that the table is brown? Because you see it. How do you know that fire is hot? Because you feel it. 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.
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ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE Let us now explore the first part of epistemology: the process of acquiring knowledge. 1. Reality To know is to know something. This “something” is what philosophers call reality, existence, being. Let us employ the term existence. Existence is everything there is (another name for it is the Universe [Peikoff 1990]). It includes everything we perceive (animals, plants, human beings, inanimate objects) and everything inside our heads (e.g., our thoughts and emotions) which represents our inner world. Existence is really all there is to know. If nothing exists knowledge is impossible. 2. Perception Our first and only contact with reality is through our senses. Knowledge begins with perceptual knowledge. At first the senses give us knowledge of things or entities (what Aristotle calls primary substance): dog, cat, chair, table, man. Later we became aware not only of things but certain aspects of things like qualities (blue, hard, smooth), quantities (seven inches or six pounds), relationships (in front of, son of) even actions (jumping, running, flying). These so called Aristotelian categories cannot be separated from the entities that have it. Red for example cannot be separated from red objects; walking cannot be separated from the person that walks, etc. 3. Concept After we perceive things we began to notice that some of the things we perceive are similar to other things. For example we see three individuals let’s call them Juan, Pablo and Pedro who may have nothing in common at first glance. But when we compare them with another entity, a dog for example, suddenly their differences become insignificant. Their big difference to a dog highlights their similarity to one another (Binswanger 2014). We therefore grouped them into one class or group, named the group (“man” or “human being”) and define what that group is to give it identity (Peikoff 1990). We now have a concept which according to one dictionary means “an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The first concepts we formed are concepts of things like dog, cat, man, house, car. These elementary concepts are called first level concepts (Rand 1990). From these first level concepts we can form higher level concepts through a process which Rand calls “abstraction from abstractions” (Rand1990). Let us describe the two types of abstraction from abstractions: wider generalizations (or simply widening) and subdivisions (or narrowing) (Binswanger 2014): Wider generalization is the process of forming wider and wider concepts. For example from Juan, Pedro and Pablo we can form the concept “man”. Then from man, dog, cat, monkey we can form a higher and wider concept “animal”. And from plant and animal we can form a still higher and wider concept “living organism”. As we go up to these progressive widening our knowledge increases. Subdivisions consist of identifying finer and finer distinctions. For example “man” is a first level concept that we can subdivide according to profession (doctor, entertainer, fireman, teacher), or race (Asian, Caucasian [white], black), or gender (man, woman, lesbian, gay), or nationality (Filipino, Chinese, American) among other things. As we go down these progressive narrowing our knowledge of things subsumed under a concept increases. The result of this progressive widening and narrowing is a hierarchy (or levels) of concepts whose based is sense perception. As we move further from the perceptual base knowledge becomes more abstract and as we move closer to the perceptual level knowledge becomes more concrete. 4. Proposition When we use concepts in order to classify or describe an “existent” (a particular that exist be it an object, a person, an action or event, etc) (Rand 1990) we use what philosophers call a proposition (Binswanger 2014). A proposition is a statement that expresses either an assertion or a denial (Copi, 2002) that an existent belongs to a class or possess certain attribute.
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Proposition is usually expressed in a declarative sentence. When I say, for example,
that “Men are mortals” I am making an assertion of men which are affirmative in nature (thus the statement is an affirmative proposition). When I make an opposite claim however, “Men are not mortals” I am denying something about men and thus my statement is negative in nature (thus the proposition is called a negative proposition) An affirmative proposition therefore has the following structure: “S is P” (where S is the subject, P is the predicate and “is” is the copula stating the logical relationship of S and P) while the negative proposition has the structure “S is not P” (“is not” is the copula expressing denial). Notice that statements like “Men are mortals”, “Angels are not demons”, and “Saints are not sinners” can either be true or false. “Truth and falsity are called the two possible truth values of the statement” (Hurley 2011). (Later were going to explore the nature of truth). 5. Inference How do we demonstrate that the statement is true? By providing an argument. According to Hurley an argument “is a group of statements, one or more of which (the premises) are claimed to provide support for, or reason to believe one of the others (the conclusion) (Hurley 2011). To clarify this definition let’s give an example using the famous Socratic argument: All men are mortals Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. THE NATURE OF TRUTH Now that we know how we know, it’s time to see whether the knowledge we acquired is “really” knowledge i.e., is true. This is the second part of epistemology: validating one’s knowledge. The first step in validating one’s knowledge is to ask oneself the following question: “How did I arrive at this belief, by what steps?” (Binswanger 2014). Thus you have to retrace the steps you took to acquire the knowledge, “reverse engineer” the process (Binswanger 2014). This is what Dr. Peikoff calls reduction (Peikoff 1990). One will therefore realize that the steps you took to acquire knowledge (perception-concept- proposition-inference) are the same steps needed to validate knowledge (but in reverse order). Thus what the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said is true when applied to epistemology: “the way up [knowledge acquisition] is the way down [knowledge validation]” (quoted by Dr. Binswanger 2014). If we perform the process of reduction we will realized that all true knowledge rest ultimately on sense perception. “A belief is true if it can be justified or proven through the use of one’s senses” (Abella 2016). Consider the following statements (Abella 2016): I am alive. I have a body. I can breathe. You can only validate the above statements if you observed yourself using your senses. Feel your body. Are you breathing? Feel your pulse. Observe your body. Is it moving? These and countless examples provided by your senses proved that you’re alive (Abella 2016). Not all statements however can be validated directly by the senses. Some beliefs or ideas need a “multi-step process of validation called proof’ (Binswanger 2014). Nevertheless proof rests ultimately on sense perception. Statements based on sense perception are factual and if we based our beliefs on such facts our beliefs are true (Abella 2016). For example the belief that human beings have the right to life rests on the following claim: 1. Human beings are rational animals. 2. Animals (including human beings) are living organisms.
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A third way to determine if the statement is true is through a consensus (Abella
2016). If the majority agrees that a statement is true then it is true. However there are certain limitations to this approach. Far too many times in history false ideas became popular which ultimately leads to disaster. For example the vast majority of Germans during the time of Adolph Hitler believed that Jews are racially inferior. This is obviously false supported by a pseudo biological science of the Nazi. The result of this false consensus is the extermination of millions of Jews in many parts of Europe. A fourth way to determine whether a statement is true is to test it by means of action (Abella 2016). For example you want to know if a person is friendly. Well the best way to find out is to approach the person. Thus the famous Nike injunction of “Just do it” is applicable in this situation. TRUTH VS OPINION Identifying truth however can sometimes be tricky. The reason is that there are times when we strongly held an idea that we feel “deep down” to be true. For example religious people strongly believed that there is life after death. Some people who embraced democracy may passionately embraced the idea that the majority is always right. Or on a more personal level you may feel strongly that your sister is “selfish”. However we must not confused strongly held beliefs with truth. Truth is knowledge validated and when we say validated we mean they are based on the facts of reality. You must understand dear student that the facts of reality are independent of your thoughts, feelings or preferences (Ayn Rand calls this the primacy of existence [Rand 1982]). That is the characteristic of truth. For example the statement “Jose Rizal died in 1896” is true. You may not like that statement or deny it strongly. That does not change the fact that the statement is true because it is based on what really happened in the past. There are many sources that can validate the truth of that statement if one cared to look.
References Books: Abella, Roberto D. (2016). Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person. Quezon City: C&E Publishing Binswanger, Harry. (2014). How We Know. New York: TOF Publications. Copi, Irving M. and Cohen, Carl (2002). Introduction to Logic (11th edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall Hurley, Patrick J. (2011). A Concise Introduction to Logic (11th edition). Boston: Cengage Learning Mabacquiao, N. (2017). Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing. Peikoff, Leonard (1990). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton Rand, Ayn (1990). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (2nd edition). New York: Meridian Stumpf, Samuel Enoch & Fieser, James (2008). Socrates to Sartre and Beyond (8thedition). New Yok: McGraw Hill Wilber, Ken (2006). Integral Spirituality. Boston: Integral Books Websites: Adapted from articles by Austin Cline: http://atheism.about.com/b/2007/05/29/epistemology-correspondence-theory- oftruth.htm accessed May 31, 2020. http://mrhoyestokwebsite.com/Knower/Useful%20Information/Three%20Different %20Theories%20of%20Truth.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/allegor
