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Foundational debates in epistemology - Coggle Diagram
Foundational debates in epistemology
Descartes
"Cogito ergo sum': I think, therefore I am.
We have thoughts, and therefore we must exist
Evil demon: we could have our reality manipulated by an evil demon
Russell: this then becomes a problem moving forward for every piece of 'knowledge' asserted
Wax analogy: we know that melted wax is the same as hardened wax through our clear and distinct perception
Humans have 'clear and distinct' perception granted to them by God to effectively perceive the world. God is all-loving, so would not make us see wrongly.
Arnauld: the cartesian circle
God is immutable and perfect, therefore must have originated from outside of us as we are not those things
There are three types of substance: god, body and mind/soul
Leibniz
The mind is like a marble slab, with knowledge which must be uncovered by sense experience
There is knowledge which we know innately, eg. law of excluded middle: things cannot both be and not be, law of identity: things which share the same properties are the same thing, principle of sufficient reason: things must have a sufficient reason to exist
There exist necessary and contingent truths
Necessary: analytic a priori thought, must be true as a result of logic. Could not be otherwise.
Contingent: a posteriori, dependant on other truths/empirical experience. Could be true or false.
Sense experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition to know things
Moral knowledge is known through reason alone and can't be arrived at through sense experience
Chomsky: we have a 'linguistic faculty' which allows us to learn language/concepts
Locke
Tabula rasa: we are born a 'blank slate' and then learn things through experience
'The mind is furnished through experience alone'
Ideas are arrived at through two sources
Sensation: our senses interacting with the external world
Perception: our mental cognition/understanding of our sensations
Since we only think in terms of ideas, and all ideas derive from experience, knowledge cannot antedate experience
Two qualities to physical things
Primary qualities: size, shape, distance, can be known objectively through sense experience
Secondary qualities: colour, smell, cannot be known objectively, don't necessarily exist outside of the observer
Ryan: how do infants gain consciousness for the first time/assimilate knowledge if they are born with none? Knowledge ex nihilo
Berkely: collapses into subjective idealism
Berkely
Things only exist when they are being percieved
Master argument: Imagine a tree which is not being perceived. You cannot, since you are perceiving it now.
God perceives everything all of the time so it continues to exist.
Subjective idealism
Takes Locke's view to its 'logical conclusion', rejecting the primary and secondary distinction
When we perceive things we only perceive their primary and secondary qualities, and both through the mind. Both are therefore mind dependant.
Hume
Two types of knowledge (two pronged fork)
Matters of relation: necessary, analytic facts arrived at through reason, eg. a bachelor is an unmarried man
Cannot tell us anything about the universe, arrived at through deduction
Matters of fact: synthetic, a posteriori ideas arrived at through sense experience eg. the sky is blue
Tells us about the universe, can be flawed
Problem of induction: since we only know of cause and effect through sense experience, and we don't observe the essence connecting cause and effect, we could be wrong
Denial of a necessary statement should be incoherent, but we can deny cause and effect
Kant
Two claims about knowledge
Rationalists: we can only have analytic a priori knowledge, necessarily arrived at through deduction
Empiricists: we can only have synthetic a posteriori knowledge, new knowledge of the world arrived at through sense experience
We can have synthetic a priori knowledge, new knowledge gained through deduction
eg. 7+5=12. 12 is not contained in either 5 or 7, but is arrived at necessarily
Saul Kripke: we can have analytic a posteriori knowledge, eg. Hesperus is Phosphorus.
Two worlds
Phenomenal: the world we experience through our senses
Noumenal: the actual world
We can never fully grasp the noumenal world
Anil Seth: our reality is a 'controlled hallucination', as the brain 'throws up conscious experience'