Knowledge and Certainty

1. Knowledge and Certainty An Introduction to Epistemology

2. Epistemology • Philosophy has always aimed to go beyond our ordinary, unreflective awareness of things. • The philosopher typically subjects our everyday convictions to careful logical scrutiny, exposing inconsistencies and misconceptions, and attempting to arrive at a critical standpoint which will enable us to discard what is confused, and supply a solid rational justification for what is retained.

3. Epistemology • Using the tools of reason, of logical analysis and conceptual clarification, and philosophy tries to replace what is doubtful and uncertain with something more coherent and stable. • The goal, in short, is to move beyond mere belied, towards systematic knowledge and understanding.

4. Epistemology • What is the difference between mere belief, and the more stable and reliable kind of cognition that is entitled to be called knowledge, or true understanding?

5. Epistemology • How can we DEFINE knowledge? • What is the ORIGIN of knowledge? • How can we ACHIEVE knowledge?

6. Epistemology • Epistemology – from the Greek word episteme, meaning ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’

7. Innate Knowledge: Plato, Meno

8. Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) • Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue. • There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato's dialogues: that figure is Socrates. • When Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved.

9. Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) • The historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about him.

10. Socrates

11. Meno • We have within us ‘true thoughts which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions.’ • The idea’s of the soul’s immortality: it ‘remembers’ or ‘recollects’ truths it know in a previous existence. • The point is made through a detailed mathematical example.

12. Meno

13. Meno • Pp. 4 – soul immortal and recollection. • Pp. 6 – not teaching but only asking him questions. • Pp. 11 – knowledge as recollection.

14. Knowledge versus Opinion: Plato, Republic • From the Menodialouge: ‘True opinions are fine and useful as long as they stay with us; but they do not stay, and they depart from the mind. So they are not of great value until you fasten them down by working out the reason why. This process, Meno my friend, is recollection, as we agreed earlier. Once they are fastened, they become knowledge and then they are more permanent. Hence knowledge is a finer and better thing than true opinion, since it is secured by a chain’ (Meno, 98a 1-5).

15. Republic • Knowledge and opinion are said to be different powers or faculties. • The ordinary everyday objects of opinion can be said to be what they are (beautiful, or large, or heavy or whatever) only in a qualified sense. • True knowledge, being more stable and permanent, must relate to what really is – to objects that count as beautiful or large or heavy in an utterly unqualified and restricted way.

16. Republic • Plato introduces whate come to be known as the Forms – eternal, unchanging, absolute realities, which are the objects of knowledge. • Contrast between particulars and abstract.

17. Aristotle (384 B.C.E. – 322 B.C.E.)

18. Demonstrative Knowledge and its Starting-points: Aristotle, Posterior Analytics • Knowledge develops naturally from sense-perception, since the human mind has the capacity for noticing and remembering general similarities which underlie the flux of sensory experience. • Deductive knowledge, scientific knowledge.