Can Skepticism Be Defended, Perhaps In A Limited Form?
1. Introduction
This essay centres around what it means to know something is true and also why it is important to distinguish between what you know and do not or can not know.
The sceptic in challenging the possibility of knowing anything challenges the basis on which all epistemology is based. It is from this attack on epistemology that the defence of scepticism is seen.
2. Strong Scepticism
Strong scepticism states that it is not possible to know anything. That is we cannot have absolute knowledge of anything. This can however immediately have the reflexive argument turned on it and have the question begged of it: “If it is not possible to know anything then how is it you know that nothing is knowable ?”. Strong Scepticism is therefore unable to be defended.
3. A Definition of Knowledge
Knowledge can be said to be information that the brain has received that meets a certain set of criteria. When someone states that they know something they must also believe that, that something is so. If they did not believe in it then how could they take it in as knowledge ?, they would instead be doubtful of it and look for evidence or justification as to why they should believe it.
Secondly for someone to believe in something they must also believe that it is true. If they did not believe that it was true then what is mentioned above would not occur.
So, so far it is decided that knowledge should be true belief. How does one come to the conclusion that something is true however ?. We seek justification. The justification really is the most important part of the criteria because without it one cannot say something is true and therefore cannot say that one believes.
This does however bring up the question of how does something become justified ?, do we hear it from other people ?, see it on the news ?. The justification of something really depends on its predictability. If something becomes predictable then it can becomes justified aswell. For example, I know that the sun will rise tomorrow is a fair thing to say because I believe this is so, I believe this is true, and I am justified in believing this due to my past experience* of the predictableness of the sun rising each day.
The only problem with meeting the set of criteria laid out above is that one must use one senses to do so and as shall be shown ...
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belief is not to produce true belief. Instead theistic belief allows the believer to avoid
it is seen that knowledge can hurt. It is also shown that sometimes one can know
obtain true knowledge without faith. you must have faith in God, who is the essence of
...ective and previous knowledge, as well as comprehension and understanding of information are things that determine the end result. Even the definition of a concept or reality can be different. Gravity is just a word attributed to a physical law but other civilizations might use different terminology. Does the name of a physical law make it knowledge or does the law itself, being in existence, make it true, thus being true knowledge. It seems that knowledge is simply a general and unspecifically
that it "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient
Group of individual who gained special enlightenment or as it said “ that these Gnostic Christians
Those who have belief were taught it or learn in a formal setting. It can be changed, altered or
Epistemology is purposed with discovering and studying what knowledge is and how we can classify what we know, how we know it, and provide some type of framework for how we arrived at this conclusion. In the journey to identify what knowledge is the certainty principle was one of the first concepts that I learned that explained how we, as humans, consider ourselves to know something. The certainty concept suggests that knowledge requires evidence that is sufficient to rule out the possibility of error. This concept is exemplified in cases like The Gettier problem in the instance that we suppose (S) someone to know (P) a particular proposition. As Gettier established the Justified True Belief as a conceptual formula for knowledge, certainty can be understood with the proper perspective and background. The certainty principle explains that knowledge requires evidence to be “sufficient” to rule out the possibility of error. This means that what we determine to be acknowledged as “knowledge” must present justification in order to be accepted believed as knowledge. This is important because Skepticism doubts the validation of knowledge and how we come to any such conclusion of justifying what we “know” indubitably as knowledge. This is the overarching problem with skepticism. Instead of having a solid stance on how to define knowledge, skeptics simply doubt that a reason or proposition offered is correct and suppose it to be false or flawed in some manner. See the examples below as identifiers of the skeptic way of life.
In “The principles of human knowledge” George Berkeley responds to the skeptics view about the external world. As we already talked about, skepticism is against the belief that you can know anything because even saying that you “know” something is a big contradiction itsel...
"Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you your self test and judge to be true."
"Knowledge, Truth, and Meaning." Cover: Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. .
Today, faith is the cornerstone of all major religious knowledge claims because there is no definitive way of...
To further investigate this topic we first have to define what exactly belief is, which the dictionary (dictionary.com) defines it as "Mental acceptance and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something." Belief however is greatly connected to knowledge, since if you think about it, they are in approximately the same area, where belief is the base of the pyramid, and knowledge is the top. Knowledge was originally based on belief. From the very beginning, a person would believe in a theory, and then base their knowledge on that belief and this produces faulty arguments. This "knowledge" would be passed on to through generations as a fact, and since people would be taught these theories at a young age, they would not even think of questioning this fact and where it came from, accepting it as it is, and as it was taught to them by their parental units.
wanted to understand the world around them, but many of them believed that God created
The title as given by IB implies that there is a difference between something that is true and something that is believed to be true. It suggests that different ways of knowing can portray a truth. This point is problematic, because I do not think that something that is believed to be true and truth itself can be differentiated. In fact, I believe that it is difficult to acquire logical, unbiased truth; I think that the closest man can gather about truth can also be called “consistent knowledge”, meaning that the information is knowledge that is unchanging. To what extent can different ways of knowing affect a display of truth?