Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Objectivity In history
Objectivity of science
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Objectivity In history
"That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow." Until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. Post-WWII, it doubled every 25 years. It now appears to grow exponentially. This has resulted in the revision of the information previously thought of as knowledge. This raises these knowledge issues: if knowledge that is accepted today is sometimes discarded tomorrow, and the aim of the natural sciences is to provide the complete objective truth, can science ever achieve this aim? And in the study of history, is information that is considered to be true in the past still useful, and can and should knowledge ever be ‘discarded’? 2500 years ago, Plato defined knowledge as a true justified belief. This condition of ‘true justified belief’ must be met to consider information as knowledge. However, this definition is problematic because it is obstructed by Gettier problems (situations in which someone has a belief that is concurrently true and evidenced, but yet fails to be knowledge). These are situations in which the above conditions were seemingly met but that many philosophers disagree that anything is known. There are differences in opinion for what is meant by justification, and what amount of justification is sufficient for one to believe that it is true. According to science, the stronger and more valid the justification, the more likely it is that a knowledge claim is true. Thus, the scientific method evolved, to provide the highest level of certainty. It is often presumed that the objective of science is to provide certain objective knowledge, but we can see that that’s impossible. How can science reconcile itself to with problem, when what science aims for is certainty? ... ... middle of paper ... ...int. Lagemaat, Richard van de. ‘Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma’. Cambridge university press. 2007 King, David. The commissar vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia. Metropolitan Books, 1997. Majumder, Sanjoy. "Golden Temple Attack: UK Advised India but Impact 'limited'" BBC News. BBC, 02 Apr. 2014. Web. Verghese, B. G. "The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Myth and Hate as History." The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Myth and Hate as History. The Hindu, 23 June 2004. Web. . Warburton, Nigel. "Chapter 5: Science." Philosophy: The Basics. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1995. N. pag. Web. Zagzebski, Linda. "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems." The Philosophical Quarterly44.174 (1994): n. pag. Web.
The overall goal of science is to be able to gain an understanding of the phenomena being studied by conducting different scientific investigations that create knowledge that qualifies one or more of the three levels of understanding.
The Theaetetus is composed of three main parts, each part being allotted to a different definition of what constitutes as knowledge. While the Theaetetus is focused primarily on how to define knowledge, the arguments faced by Socrates and Theaetetus greatly resemble arguments made by different later theories of knowledge and justification. I will argue in this essay that due to the failure faced by Socrates and Theaetetus in their attempt at defining knowledge, the conclusion that would be best fit for their analysis would be that of skepticism. In doing this I will review the three main theses, the arguments within their exploration that resemble more modern theories of knowledge and justification, and how the reason for the failure of the theories presented in the Theaetetus are strikingly similar to those that cause later theories of epistemology to fail.
Life without knowledge would be worthless. Talking about knowledge what i mean is knowledge about something. The description of the state of some object is knowledge. The object may be either abstract or physical. Some examples of abstract things include memory, feelings and time. But how we obtain knowledge? Many philosophers tried to find an adequate answer to this question. They came up with so many theories summarizing the process of knowledge. But none of them all was able to state a clear definition of pure knowledge. One of those philosophers is Plato. In this essay I am going to discuss the concept of knowledge according to Plato’s philosophic conception of knowledge. I will clarify what knowledge is not perception. And from this I will move to explain the justified true belief theory. Then I will show the lack in this theory by referring to counterexamples: the Gettier cases. To end up with a conclusion that states what is my understanding of the process of knowledge.
Knowledge, its source and truthfulness have been under question for a long time. People have always wondered what exactly constitutes facts and if there are any defining laws that can be attributed to all knowledge or information available in the world. Many philosophers speculated on how information can be interpreted according to its falsity or truthfulness, but have not come to definite conclusions. Edmund Gettier has provided one of the key pieces in understanding and trying to figure out what knowledge really is.
The Web. 20 Dec. 2013. James, Lawrence. The. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India.
The methods that available in the production of knowledge are limited by the ethical judgments, but the definition of whether the method is ethical or not depends on a couple different things. The first one is the personal judgments. Each person would have different judgments for the same method. However, one personal based judgment cannot be universal. The second one is the social judgment. It is related to the personal judgment. When a personal opinion for a method is agreed by most of people in the society, this opinion would become a social judgment.
Lagemaat, Richard van de. Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
The meaning, scope and reliability of what we call knowledge is without a doubt completely based on our ability to remember things. We have to remember our justifications of why we find things to be true and the truth in being justified in believing things to be knowledge. The vast libraries of human knowledge as well as the things we as individual hold to be basic truths only exist insofar as we can remember them. The most basic source of knowledge being memory is the grounding force in it as well. Without memory of truths past, present and future, we can know nothing. Memory grounds knowledge, and always will as long as humans have the capacity to do so.
Plato and Aristotle propose theories of knowledge in which they both agree that the knower is measure by the known and that knowledge is an exchange within the world. However, their respective theories may be considered polar opposites of one another especially when considering that Aristotle rejects Plato’s theory and admits that ‘informed opinion’, is a form of knowledge whereas Plato rejects opinion as a form of knowledge.
Knowledge is rarely considered permanent, because it is constantly changing and adapting as time passes and new discoveries are made. This title roughly translates into the question: to what extent is knowledge provisional? In other words, to what extent does knowledge exist for the present, possibly to be changed in the future? At first glance, one’s mind would immediately stray to the natural sciences, and how theories are constantly being challenged, disproven, and discarded. Because of this, one might be under the impression that knowledge is always provisional because there is always room for improvement; however, there are some cases in which this is not true. There are plenty of ideas and theories that have withstood the test of time, but on the other end of the spectrum there are many that have not. This essay will evaluate the extent to which knowledge is provisional in the areas of the human sciences and history.
The Justified True Belief (JTB) theory of knowledge, often attributed to Plato , is a fairly straightforward theory of knowledge. It states that something must be true if person S believes proposition P, proposition P is true, and S is justified in believing in believing that P is true . While many consider the JTB theory to be vital to the understanding of knowledge, some, such as American Philosopher Edmund Gettier, believe that it is flawed. I tend to agree with Gettier and others who object to the JTB theory as an adequate theory of knowledge, as the JTB theory allows for a type of implied confirmation bias that can lead people to be justified in believing they know something even though it isn’t true.
van de Lagemaat, R. (2011) Theory of knowledge for the IB diploma, Cambridge University Press.
presenting biased representations of Indian history. India’s identity cannot be discovered without an understanding of its past. interpretation of India’s past as secular or religiously fanatical. will be the possible mould for one of the worlds largest secular. democracies.
Knowledge has a preliminary definition which is that it is justified true belief. Due to its dynamic nature, knowledge is subject to review and revision over time. Although, we may believe we have objective facts from various perceptions over time, such facts become re-interpreted in light of improved evidence, findings or technology and instigates new knowledge. This raises the questions, To what extent is knowledge provisional? and In what ways does the rise of new evidence give us a good reason to discard our old knowledge? This new knowledge can be gained in any of the different areas of knowledge, by considering the two areas of knowledge; History and Natural Sciences, I will be able to tackle these knowledge issues since they both offer more objective, yet regularly updated knowledge, which is crucial in order to explore this statement. I believe that rather than discarding knowledge we build upon it and in doing so access better knowledge, as well as getting closer to the truth.
The major strength of science is that it has uncertainty and skepticism. Science never claims to be hundred percent accurate. There is always some degree of ambiguity and probability in science. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty in quantum mechanics is a good example of this. According to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty, we can never be sure of the position of the quantum particles. There is always a degree of fuzziness in nature and a fundamental limit to what we can understand about these particles and their behavior. We can only calculate the probability of the nature of the particle and ho...