Knowledge can be defined in a number of ways, but its most intrinsic form can be fundamentally broken down as the entire collective of truths, information, and principles as obtained through education or experience. Moreover, according to a general philosophical consensus, knowledge is further defined as something that is true, something that a person believes is true, and something that the person is justified in believing to be true. In essence, this addresses the validity and verification of the knowledge that is acquired, the relative uncertainty of the knowledge, as well as the justification between the validity and belief of knowledge. Validity is the extent to which something, such as information or principles, is true, and verification …show more content…
In order to adequately answer the question of whether gaining knowledge increases doubt of that knowledge, the concepts of validity, relativism, and verification must be applied to several areas of knowledge and ways of knowing. In this case, it will be focusing on the areas of knowledge of natural sciences and religion, and the way of knowing of reason. The acquisition of new knowledge inherently increases doubt, as knowledge is relative, and we may now have insight on information that challenges previously held notions. To that extent, I agree with the argument expressed in the question.
In order for the question to be answered in its entirety, one must first break it down into a few fundamental knowledge questions. Regarding the knowledge concept of validity, one must ask, how valid is acquired knowledge if one can disprove its origins or evidence? In regards to relativism, how can one be certain of knowledge if that knowledge is relative and dependent on previous knowledge? Finally, pertaining to the knowledge claim of verification, with the gaining of more knowledge, how can one verify new and old information? The broadest yet most essential question is one that concerns the relativism of knowledge. Without the ability to be certain about any knowledge, whether it is true or
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Uncertainty about previous knowledge could drive the quest to validate and thus discover new knowledge to satisfy any doubt. In this way, we are able to increase knowledge and decrease doubt, by having the new knowledge gained to assuage any uncertainties. An example is the concept of spontaneous generation, stating that living organisms develop from nonliving matter. It was first formulated by Aristotle and was accepted until the 19th century, when doubt arose concerning this theory, as it became apparent that larger organisms did not follow this notion and could not be produced by nonliving material. Louis Pasteur wanted to test this, and performed experiments that eventually disproved spontaneous generation, showing that microscopic beings were not produced by nonliving material, but instead were carried on dust and germs. This concept has been continuously proven over the centuries and now is a part of the foundation for biology. As a result, Pasteur provided new information while doing away with any doubts surrounding spontaneous generation, increasing knowledge while decreasing
Knowledge has been defined as a justified true belief, but Gettier says that this is not sufficient for the definition of knowledge. Is the well-known definition of knowledge compromised by this claim by Gettier? The Gettier cases do not undermine the definition of knowledge. A response to the Gettier problem is infallibilism, which states that in order for my belief to be certain, it must be impossible for me to have made a mistake.
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.
...gainst the existence of knowledge has been supported by the regress problem and infinite regress argument. The questioning of knowledge and its existence has led to many responses in order to counteract the skeptics’ ideas. Flaws have been observed in the perspective of the skeptics and responses have arisen from these inconsistencies. However, difficulties have been seen in the views of infinitism, coherentism, and foundationalism. The idea that concludes the argument of infinite regress without portraying the flaws seen in other responses is that of non-doxastic evidence.
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.
Justified true belief was the accepted definition of knowledge until Gettier wrote this article. It has three necessary conditions that were considered jointly sufficient for the definition of knowledge. It states that a subject knows a proposition if and only if the proposition is true, the subject believes in the proposition, and the subject is justified in believing that the proposition is true (121).
How we approach the question of knowledge is pivotal. If the definition of knowledge is a necessary truth, then we should aim for a real definition for theoretical and practical knowledge. Methodology examines the purpose for the definition and how we arrived to it. The reader is now aware of the various ways to dissect what knowledge is. This entails the possibility of knowledge being a set of truths; from which it follows that one cannot possibly give a single definition. The definition given must therefore satisfy certain desiderata , while being strong enough to demonstrate clarity without losing the reader. If we base our definition on every counter-example that disproves our original definition then it becomes ad hoc. This is the case for our current defini...
In this paper, I offer a solution to the Gettier problem by adding a fourth condition to the justified true belief analysis of knowledge. First though, a brief review. Traditionally, knowledge had been accounted for with the justified true belief analysis. To know something, three conditions had to be met: first, you had to have a belief; second, the belief had to be justified; third, this justified belief had to be true. So a justified true belief counts as knowledge. Gettier however showed this analysis to be inadequate as one can have a justified true belief that no one would want to count as knowledge.
"Knowledge, Truth, and Meaning." Cover: Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. .
This is a result of a person’s cognitive limitations and technology’s limitations. It is for this reason, though, that it is not necessary of science to be beyond any possible doubt. That is not the purpose of it. As people further pursue their interests in characterizing the natural world, they build upon each other. Scientific inquiry is subject to change, yet it still amounts to knowledge. One should not be skeptical in this respect. If a theory is disproved, it is still a fact in the sense that it is not the case anymore. All experimentation whether wrong or right is knowledge. This is what scientists do in the sense of “building upon” one another; it amounts to progress. People are able to judge whether or not specific investigations into matters of fact are legitimate. Because people can evaluate their experiences (i.e. pick out what is truly characteristic of the external world on the basis of justified empirical inquiry), people can learn from their inquiry into matters of
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.
If we have X knowing that Y is some kind of cases of M M might fail the analysis of knowledge and when this happens we cannot claim that something is part of the area of knowledge or that it’s knowledge as a whole.Consequently, the hypothetical belief of certain knowledge should exist because it can provide the needed test cases or give the needed examples for justification of an event that will help us to prove that something is true. Example of this is the old information that we knew as a society about the Holocaust. We knew that Hitler started and created the events around the Holocaust. And we know thanks to the propositional knowledge that indeed Hitler ordered the Holocaust. But thanks to the new information that was found about the Holocaust several chapters of history might be re-written because they show that actually there were a lot more events that happened which may fall in the category of the Holocaust in other countries before even Hitler thinking about such things. But even with these new documents, we cannot say that we have new knowledge without justification because as stated above a specific subject M might fail with the analysis of this type of knowledge. In this
In many aspects of our lives, the use of faith as a basis for knowledge can be found. Whether it is faith in the advice of your teacher, faith in a God or faith in a scientific theory, it is present. But what is faith? A definition of faith in a theory of knowledge context is the confident belief or trust in a knowledge claim by a knower, without the knower having conclusive evidence. This is because if a knowledge claim is backed up by evidence, then we would use reason rather than faith as a basis for knowledge . If we define knowledge as ‘justified true belief’, it can be seen that faith, being without justification, can never fulfill this definition, and so cannot be used as a reliable basis for knowledge. However, the question arises, what if a certain knowledge claim lies outside of the realm of reason? What if a knowledge claim cannot be justified by empirical evidence and reasoning alone, such as a religious knowledge claim? It is then that faith allows the knower to decide what is knowledge and what is not, when something cannot be definitively proved through the use of evidence. When assessing faith as a basis for knowledge in the natural sciences, the fact arises that without faith in the research done before us, it is impossible to develop further knowledge on top of it. Yet at the same time, if we have unwavering faith in existing theories, they would never be challenged, and so our progress of knowledge in the natural sciences would come to a standstill. Although I intend to approach this essay in a balanced manner, this essay may be subject to a small degree of bias, due to my own non-religious viewpoint.
Truth is essentially divided into two main types of truth. There is empirical truth that is what is observed, what can be tangibly learned from observation. For an example we look at, Starbucks makes coffee and other hot beverages. This is a form of empirical truth, which is what is observed. Other than the empirical truth, there is truth. Truth is defined by us, by our beliefs, experiences, observations. This is the problem that there is with the nature of truth, because our experiences, and beliefs may differ from someone else giving them different truth. There are several theories on truth, and they are the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. In this paper, we will be focusing on the Correspondence Theory and the Coherence Theory ( insert citation, IEP website).
In my Theory of Knowledge class, I learned that belief and truth can be very contrasting ideas. In my opinion, I can believe something that may not necessarily be true. However, there can also be truth that is impossible for me to believe. Belief is a mental state in which someone is confident in the existence of something, but may not necessarily have objective proof to support their claim. Truth is objective and public; it is eternal and unchanging without biast. People can believe in something different and can also all believe in the same idea. The overlap between truth and belief creates knowledge; therefore, an acquisition of knowledge will bring us further to what we believe to be a ‘truth’. Knowledge can be acquired in several ways, such as using emotion, reason and sense perception. These ways of knowing affect how we perceive reality, and help us create our beliefs.
To provide solutions to philosophical problems such as, how world process was created, man must be in possession of rational, intuition, and intuitive knowledge. Rational knowledge is human reasoning and requires verification. The ability of man to reason while giving logical step by step demonstration and arguments is referred to as human knowledge and it has a rational source. According to Carriero and Broughton (2011), genuine rational knowledge is provided by clear and separate knowledge of wholesome intellect with sense deliverances interaction. Sen (1996) considers rational knowledge as the knowledge of change in states of specific entities, in the sense that human experience is a confirmation of change. What are its classes, provisions and philosophical problem associated with rational knowledge? The paper seeks to examine rational knowledge by addressing the above three issues.