Rationality, Knowledge, and Truth: Philosophical Perspectives
Theoretical and Practical Rationality
Theoretical reason is oriented toward contemplation and knowledge of reality, seeking to unravel, explain, and understand it.
Knowing Metaphysics
Metaphysics explores the fundamentals of events, knowing, and acting. It involves constant reflection and interpretation of experience with universal validity claims, aiming for a deep and coherent understanding of meaning and truth beyond particular objects and scientific explanations.
What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is an activity that seeks to capture a state of affairs in a way that can be shared with others.
Degrees of Knowledge
- Opinion: A state where the subject believes something is true but is not sure.
- Conviction: Believing something is true without justification.
- Knowing: An opinion based on both subjective and objective grounds.
Possibility of Knowledge
- Dogmatism: The naive attitude of those sure of their knowledge, assuming the capacity of our cognitive powers.
- Skepticism: Considers obtaining reliable knowledge impossible due to insufficient justification.
- Subjective Relativism: Denies universally valid truths; truth depends on each subject.
- Relativism: Truth depends on culture, age, or social group.
- Pragmatism: Identifies truth with usefulness.
- Criticism: A middle ground between dogmatism and skepticism.
- Perspectivism: Proposed by José Ortega y Gasset.
Realism vs. Idealism
- Realism: Reality exists independently of the subject.
- Idealism: Reality does not exist independently of the knowing subject.
Phenomenological vs. Hermeneutic
- Phenomenological: Aims to know things in their pure and simple presence to consciousness.
- Hermeneutics: Aims to understand human actions.
Security States as to the Truth
- Ignorance: Admitting lack of knowledge about a subject.
- Doubt: Inability to confirm or deny the truth of a statement.
- Subjective Certainty: Affirming the truth of a statement without admitting error.
Criteria of Truth
- Authority: Accepting a statement as true because it comes from a credible source.
- Tradition: Accepting what has been accepted over time and enjoys popular support.
- Correspondence: What we think is true if it matches empirical reality.
- Logical Consistency: Absence of contradiction within a system of statements.
- Utility: A statement is true if it is beneficial and useful.
- Evidence: What is presented as indisputable and intuitively true.
Truth as Correspondence or Appropriateness
Truth is consistency between what is said about something and what that something is.
Meanings of “Reality”
- Negative definition: As opposed to appearance.
- Contingent reality: Something present but may cease to be.
- Necessary reality: Something absolutely real.
- Sensory reality: What we perceive through the senses.
- Psychic reality: The reality of our thoughts, imaginations, and desires.
- Virtual reality: Perceptions and sensations generated with technical support.