Aristotle’s Epistemology and Scientific Discourse
Epistemology
A. The Possibility of Knowing
Plato addressed sophistry, relativism, and skepticism in many of his dialogues, seeking to demonstrate the possibility of knowing the truth. Like Plato, Aristotle believed that humans naturally desire knowledge because it brings perfection, pleasure, and happiness. This potential for knowledge is reinforced by an anthropological concept that defines humans as rational beings. A teleological conception of reality, applied to humans, leads Aristotle to argue that humankind’s defining activity is intellectual and theoretical.
B. The Aristotelian Concept of Knowledge and Science
Aristotle distinguishes between theoria and praxis, recognizing that reality is diverse and presents itself in various ways. He identifies different levels and types of knowledge.
Levels of Knowledge
- Experience: Arising from interaction with specific things, this everyday, individual knowledge is not teachable.
- Productive Knowledge: Related to technology as a tool to produce the beautiful or useful.
- Scientific Knowledge: Knowledge of causes. This, along with productive knowledge, is teachable.
Types of Knowledge
- Theoretical Sciences: Aim to discover truth and seek knowledge for itself and the universal. These include Physics (second philosophy), Mathematics, and Metaphysics (first philosophy, studying first principles, causes, and Being).
- Practical Sciences: Study human behavior and the way of life, encompassing Politics, Ethics, and Economics.
- Poietic Sciences (Productive): Seek knowledge as a means to create beautiful and useful things. These are considered arts rather than sciences and include gymnastics, sculpture, music, dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, and medicine. These are contingent.
In Book IV of his Metaphysics, Aristotle refers to a science called Analytics, later known as Logic, which he considered an instrumental science for all other sciences.
C. Characteristics of Scientific Discourse
Aristotle’s scientific discourse is systematic and logical. Despite the distinct types of knowledge, they are connected by logic. It relies on apophantic language, which affirms or denies a predicate of a subject within a framework of truth as correspondence. Every proposition is either true or false based on its correspondence with the reality it describes. Aristotelian discourse is systematized and ordered into areas.
According to Aristotle, connecting the universal and the particular requires a formally structured discourse. Previously assumed true statements (premises) necessarily lead to other claims (conclusions) following specific rules of formation and transformation in the deductive process. This structure is called a syllogism. A syllogism is correct if the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. However, correctness only guarantees the conclusion’s validity based on the premises, not its truth. The scientific truth of the conclusion depends on the truth of the premises. Aristotle distinguishes between two types of premises:
- Those needing demonstration by more general principles (hypotheses, definitions).
- Those not needing demonstration (unprovable axioms or self-evident first principles, known by intuition from experience, preventing an endless process of demonstrations without definitive conclusions).
D. The Object of Research: Considerations of Reality
For Aristotle, the object of knowledge is reality. While Plato considered the Idea as reality, making knowledge the understanding of the universal Idea, Aristotle believed reality encompasses more than just the Idea. Reality is primarily substance, the first reality, composed of matter and form (hylomorphic conception). Analyzing language, specifically its apophantic use, and the conviction of a correspondence between language and reality, provides the key to understanding Aristotle’s concept of reality. This analysis reveals that when we speak, we attribute predicates to a subject. This leads to ten categories of reality: substance (entity) and predicative realities (quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion). The categories are the forms of Being.
Aristotle observes that when we predicate something, we do so about a specific, unique individual, which is the primary object of knowledge. This particular subject is the substance, ousia, or first reality. Substance is the essential category, applied to a thing when we know what it is in itself, not in relation to others. Substance is “being” itself. The question of essence applies only to things existing independently. There are two types of substances: first substance (the individual) and second substances (real but not existing separately from the first substance).