Aristotle to Modernity: Understanding Knowledge and Truth
Item 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Knowledge and Truth
1. According to Aristotle, What Kinds of Knowledge Exist?
- Theoretical Knowledge: Aimed at purely speculative contemplation of truth, without any practical or technical projection. Based on the theoretical capacity of man, proposing general truths from experience with the help of logic and method.
- Practical Knowledge: Aimed at regulating individual and social action through practical wisdom or prudence. This involves the ability to act properly, accurately distinguishing good from evil.
- Productive Knowledge: Aimed at producing material or intellectual creations. Based on man’s ability to operate in accordance with rules. These can be called technical knowledge. Aristotle’s works included in productive wisdom are the Poetics and Rhetoric.
2. What is the Purpose of Theoretical, Practical, and Productive Rationales Today?
- Theoretical Reason: Seeks different scientific and humanistic knowledge, including philosophical. Philosophical disciplines dealing with theoretical rationale generically include formal logic, informal logic, and applied logic.
- Practical Reason: Directs its steps to the orientation of human action in ethical and political spheres. Also interested in the reflection about religion. The philosophical disciplines concerned with practical rationality are, respectively, ethics or moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
- Productive Reason: Projects technical progress and achievements toward the control, domination, and transformation of nature, man, and society. Technical rationality is represented in scientific technology. The philosophical discipline dealing with productive rationality is poietic, or the philosophy of work and art.
3. Descartes as the Primary Representative of Rationalism: His Stance on Knowledge?
According to Descartes, all men are endowed with an innate set of ideas that God has placed within them. These innate ideas are of a logical, mathematical, linguistic, physical, and metaphysical nature. From them, and through the use of a method to ensure the correct use of the fundamental operations of reason, one can build the entire system of all scientific truths. Humans can merely confirm the necessary truth of propositions that reason deductively formulated with the help of the method. For Descartes, human reason, within finite limits, is capable of knowing reality with absolute truth.
4. Hume, as a Representative of Empiricism: His Stance on Knowledge?
Hume’s theory of knowledge is interested in the pole of the object, that is, experience as the primary condition of knowledge. Its principles are opposed to epistemological rationalism. He does not speak of reason but of mind. The human mind is a kind of empty vessel that passively fills with the knowledge we acquire through sensible knowledge. For Hume, the only components of understanding are perceptions, which are divided into impressions and ideas. These components are associated or combined with each other by means of psychological mechanisms and laws common to all men. By these mechanisms and partnership laws, we all form complex and abstract ideas that allow us to know reality. For Hume, experience is the sole source of theoretical knowledge and also the sole criterion of truth.
5. Why Does Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Represent a Synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism?
According to Kant, in human knowledge, we must distinguish two types of equally essential conditions: the empirical (the object or data) and the rational (the subject). Kant addressed especially the latter, which he called transcendental conditions, while acknowledging the indispensable role of the former. Empirical data provides the necessary basis for knowledge, and there cannot be any knowledge beyond or outside its boundaries. Empirical data is organized by concepts, propositions, and reasoning. A science is a system of concepts, propositions, and real reason stemming from the empirical data derived from experience. Kantian philosophy makes a balanced synthesis between subject and object, between reason and experience. Kant seeks a harmonious approach between what belongs to experience and what reason contributes in the process of knowledge.
6. Can You Explain Briefly the Epistemological Positions on Truth? Criticisms?
- Dogmatism: Assumes the possibility of true and complete knowledge of reality. Dogmatism has unlimited confidence in the power of knowledge to know the truth. Criticism: This confidence in the limitless capacity of human reason is naive without accepting it as an unquestionable principle, lacking epistemological foundation. Descartes’ rationalism is a dogmatic epistemological position.
- Skepticism: The opposite of dogmatism. Skeptics believe that human knowledge cannot obtain true and complete knowledge of reality. No knowledge can be considered reliable. Limitations of knowledge, along with historical, social, and cultural factors, prevent the acceptance of an idea or theory as fully true. Criticism: Skepticism strives for an epistemological foundation for the truth of skeptical knowledge. A conclusive demonstration of the limits of human knowledge cannot be done from within but from outside these limits. To know the limits of reason, one would have to be outside or beyond them, which is an impossible position. Skepticism is self-contradictory or paradoxical: it asserts as true that it is not possible to say something is true. Hume’s empiricism is a skeptical epistemological position.
- Relativism: Skepticism denies the existence of truth. Relativism denies the universal and necessary character of that truth. Truth has a scope and relative permanence. There are no absolute truths. All truth is limited. Limits depend on subjective factors (biological evolution, brain design, sensory or mental organization, cognitive factors) or external factors (historical period, society, and culture). Criticism: It is possible for human reason to attain true knowledge of reality.
- Criticism: Shares with dogmatism a confidence in the powers of human knowledge. Believes that scientific apprehension of truth through reason is possible. Tries to scrutinize the origin, conditions, scope, and limits of human knowledge. Attempts to ground epistemological and methodological conditions of theoretical rationale. Its position is not dogmatic but critical.
7. What is Truth as Unveiling?
Truth is to reveal what is hidden from reality. Truth is the unveiling of what is concealed. Truth comes from intellectual activity to show things as they are in themselves, beyond appearances that mask them. Truth as unveiling is a property that discovers and reveals thinking about things; truth is a property of reality. This criterion of truth has been sustained by pre-Socratic philosophers and Martin Heidegger.
8. What is Truth as a Process?
Truth is not only the conclusion or outcome of an investigation but the whole process that led to it, that is, the totality of philosophical thought with all its rational moments or intermediate arguments. This criterion of truth has been defended by Plato and Hegel.
9. What is Truth as Correspondence?
Truth is the match between the proposition and the thought put into reality. The immediate adequacy between what is said and what is, between understanding and the thing. Truth is the correspondence between thinking and being. This criterion of truth has had several supporters: Aristotle, Hume, and Wittgenstein.
10. What is Truth as Practical Realization?
For this theory, the truth or falsity of a proposition is not only a theoretical or software problem but something that depends on the adequacy or inadequacy of its practical consequences. It focuses on practical and functional design. The truth of knowledge is directly dependent on its ability to serve practical purposes. This is obvious for scientific knowledge, as well as for knowledge of control, mastery, and transformation, but so too is it for philosophical learning, while aiming at an educational, ideological, ethical, and political purpose. The truth of knowledge is directly related to its success or ability to serve practical purposes. What is true is useful or beneficial. This criterion of truth was held by thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx.
11. What is Truth and Perspective?
Truth, according to this theory, is comparable to an unlimited prism of faces, each of which reflects a reality that is original, innovative, and valid. Human reason cannot see all these perspectives simultaneously, although it can investigate and discover as many as possible, since this is precisely what truth is. Truth is completed gradually, that is, over history, through the unification or sum of all complementary perspectives. This is found in the theories of knowledge of thinkers like Friedrich W. Nietzsche and José Ortega y Gasset.
12. What is Truth and Understanding?
Truth is the understanding of the meaning of phenomena according to a specific method. The proper method of understanding meaning is called hermeneutics or the hermeneutical method. The starting point of this criterion of truth was the historicist philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey distinguishes between Natural Science and Science of the Spirit. Natural Sciences are mathematics and physical sciences in general, all using the experimental method. Science of the Spirit or Science of Man covers various disciplines: History, Philosophy, Religion, Law, and Sociology. The object of the former is natural phenomena subject to laws. The purpose of the latter is human action and historical and cultural products.
13. What is Truth as Consensus?
Asserts that a proposition is true when it is possible to reach a unanimous or majority agreement within a community of partners. Truth must be understood as a rational agreement or consensus among a community of partners incorporating an acceptable argument, that dialogue on an issue or problem from a position free of prejudice and assumptions. Truth is conceived as the result or product of an intersubjective agreement within a qualified group of individuals. It has been maintained by philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel.
14. When it Comes to Scientific Criteria of Truth, Are They the Same for Experimental Science as for Formal Science? Why?
There are two kinds of scientific knowledge or sciences: experimental sciences and formal sciences. Physics is the ideal of the experimental sciences, and mathematics is the ideal of formal sciences. In both cases, the criterion of truth is methodical in nature. Scientific knowledge is considered as such when its proposals have passed all the stages of the scientific method that make them valid or true. The method of experimental science is different from the method of formal sciences. In the case of experimental science, we talk about material truth as a test of a proposition. True propositions or empirical laws are checked (verified). In the case of formal sciences, we speak of formal validity or proof of a proposition. True propositions or theorems are proved (demonstrated). Testing and demonstration are different procedures: checking is to test empirically, while proving is to test deductively the consistency and internal need of a formal proposal.
15. Explain the Four Stages of the Hypothetico-Deductive Method
- Observation: Scientists always start by picking and choosing those empirical data considered relevant to solving a problem. Observation of facts or data collection is the starting point of the hypothetico-deductive method.
- Formulation of Hypotheses: After observation, the scientist formulates a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a supposition or conjecture providing a causal explanation of a problem.
- Derivation of Conclusions: You cannot check the generality of a hypothesis, but only the specific conclusions that are derived or inferred from it. In properly formulated hypotheses, a set of contrasting implications are always deduced. Implications are empirical predictions of specific facts that follow from the hypothesis and ultimately make it true or false.
- Contrast: The foundation of science is the systematic contrast of its proposals with the facts of experience. We try to verify that a hypothesis is true by contrasting its implications or predictions with the facts. If the results of the contrast are positive, we say that the hypothesis has been verified and confirmed. If the results are negative, we say that it has been falsified and therefore refuted. Verification and falsification are the two methodological procedures of hypothesis testing. A hypothesis can never be fully verified.
16. What are the Limits of Scientific Knowledge?
- Epistemological Boundaries: The desire of man to know should not stop at the frontier of scientific knowledge.
- Technological Limits: Theoretical advances in science depend to a large extent on technological advances that allow for experimental control of the facts involved in the formulation of a hypothesis.
- Socioeconomic Boundaries: Knowledge becomes a social product subject to the productive mechanism of the market society. It is produced to satisfy needs and to obtain substantial economic benefits.
- Ethical Boundaries: The theoretical use of reason seeks to know the truth without any condition or limitation upon the practical.