Understanding Knowledge: Types, Sources, and Scientific Methods
Knowledge is a grasp of reality fixed in a subject, expressed, communicated to other subjects, incorporated, systematized, and part of a tradition.
Sources of Knowledge
Sensitivity provides basic experience, but this data is always within a theoretical context that makes it intelligible. Reason produces different forms of knowledge, generally linked to experience: some immediate, like intuition, others mediated through deduction.
Ways of Knowing
- Common or Ordinary Knowledge: Based on everyday experience, lacking systematic rigor and often mixed with prejudices.
- Scientific Knowledge: Seeks systematic organization of knowledge to explain why facts are as they are, unlike common knowledge.
- Technical Knowledge: Knowing how to perform specific activities, aiming to control and dominate the world.
- Philosophical Knowledge: Thinking critically and rigorously to understand the structure of reality and reason.
- Artistic Knowledge: More related to narrative than explanation.
- Religious Knowledge: Sacred or divine.
Evolution of Science
The notion of science was closely linked to philosophy, both considered types of knowledge with pretensions to universality, necessity, immutability, and eternity. The modern notion of science developed during the Renaissance, with the scientific revolution, differentiating science and philosophy. The key elements that differentiate scientific knowledge from philosophical knowledge are experimentation and the application of mathematics to the study of reality. Is philosophy a science? We can say that philosophy is a science in the Aristotelian sense: a knowledge capable of offering a rigorous fundamental structure of reality.
Types of Science
A field becomes a science when it defines its object of study and proposes its own method—a pre-planned, ordered approach oriented toward achieving a specific end. Combining different types of methods, science can be classified as:
- Formal Sciences: Logic (arithmetic, geometry, etc.)
- Natural Sciences: Physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
- Social Sciences: Sociology, anthropology, etc.
Methods of Scientific Knowledge
Method of Formal Sciences
Formal sciences are not concerned with facts of experience but with the way of reasoning. The two most common methods of proof are deduction and induction. Deduction is used in both formal and empirical sciences. Deduction is the process of reasoning that derives a conclusion from one or more given propositions (premises). The system must have:
- Axioms: Fundamental principles unprovable within the system.
- Formation and Transformation Rules: New statements can be drawn to expand the system validly.
- Theorems: Statements deductively derived from axioms or already proven theorems.
Method of Natural Science
Natural sciences use deductive reasoning and inductive demonstration. The complete method is called hypothetical-deductive. Induction is a type of reasoning that gives a general conclusion from a series of individual cases. There are two types: incomplete and complete.
Hypothetico-Deductive Method
This method operates on three levels:
- Protocol Statements: Set goals, express phenomena that can be established empirically.
- Laws: Statements that express the behavior of certain phenomena on a regular and invariable basis.
- Theories: Universal statements that can be drawn from all laws of science.
Mythos and Logos
Philosophy was born in Miletus, Greece. Mythos refers to fantastic tales that attempt to explain the origin and regularity of the cosmos using superhuman forces. Logos, instead, becomes an instrument of inquiry and discussion.