Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science pre seminar

Knowledge and Theaetetus:

If I were to define knowledge before reading any of the texts I would say knowledge is what the knowledgeable people perceive to be correct knowledge. I would that real knowledge is tested through scientific methods, except from the obvious knowledge about our surroundings which can be self evident for obvious reasons.

Socrates argues to Theaetetus that knowledge is perception. What I think of this is that knowledge can never be absolute. Knowledge is individual and can never be a general concept for the state of things, except if all individuals agree on what is the correct state of things. Of course no person can ever truly agree on something that another person perceive because perceiving is an individual concept. Socrates says: "When the same wind blows, one of us feels cold and the other not?" This means that we can never know whether the wind is cold or not, all we can know if it the wind makes us cold.

When Socrates argues that we do not see "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears I interpret this the same way as I interpret whether the wind is cold or not. It is not the wind hitting the skin that defines the coldness of the wind for it is the same for every person exposed to the same wind. The wind hits the skin and the skin measures the temperature, then it is up to oneself (the brain) to decide how to read what the skin signals. This is basically the same as an engineer measuring things, in some cases what the engineer measures is alarming and in some cases or for any other engineer it is completely fine. The skin, the eyes and the ears are only tools for measuring things regarding our senses. The eye does not decide what we see and the eyes cannot decide and make a common interpretation of what we see. It can only measure the light hitting the receptors inside the eyes. “With” in this case means that the eyes and ears themselves are not interpreting the signals, but they are just tools of measurement and then it is up to the engineer to define and make sense of this signal.

Empiricism says that sensory experience creates knowledge, and this seems to be true regarding Socrates argument that knowledge is perception. What we perceive to be the correct state of matters depends solely on our sensory experience regarding the matter along with our previous sensory experience which is what created our own opinion about the world. I would say this is true regarding some knowledges. For example someone argues that the stove over there is hot and you will get burned if you touch it. Whether you treat the words you hear through your ears as knowledge depends on many things. For example how trustworthy is that person, and that basically means how did that persons words combine with your previous experiences with the world did they seems to fit or does that person lie or misconceive the world compared to how you see it? It also depends on your previous experience with stoves. Did you get burned before? Do you know that a stove generates heat? Is there a red light indicating that the stove might still be hot? All of this can be seen as old sensory experience interacting with new experience creating knowledge.

Critique of pure reason:

“We assume that our cognitions must conform into objects” basically means that in our natural way of thinking is thinking about objects even if the thought is not itself about and object we can grasp or has any experience with. For example when we think of happiness we think of some person that is doing some task that makes the person happy and then how the happy person present himself instead of thinking about the happiness and only happiness without anything else involved.

Kant says that in this way of thinking we cannot learn from concepts about objects without sensing the object and put it into picture. For example, how can we learn what a fork is without putting the fork into place as an object in a situation that we are familiar with, for example eating at the table? Kant argues that in some cases it might be useful to think the other way around. Especially in the fields of metaphysics where we are dealing with things hard to put into picture (e.g. quantum physics etc.) we can try to think about these things as if they must somehow conform to our cognitions. Kant argues that this way of thinking might help us understand things we cannot comprehend.