Space is inferred by relationship of things.
Category: philosophy
Time is only known one way
More precisely, time can be known only by the change in the physical relationship of things.
The non-awareness of
The processes of sensation, perception, and knowledge-building are not understood at first. We only gradually become aware of them.
Self-awareness
To be aware of one as a self requires cumulative experience. It is a kind of revelation.
What is knowledge?
What exactly is knowledge?
If we take a dictionary definition of the term knowledge then it is the information, skills, and understanding that you have gained through learning or experience.
And if we take definitions of the definition of knowledge then information are the facts or details that tell you something about a situation, person, event etc. A skill is the ability to do something well, especially because you have learned and practised it. To gain is to gradually get more and more of a quality, feeling etc, especially a useful or valuable one. Learning is knowledge gained through reading and study. Experience is knowledge or skill that you gain from doing a job or activity, or the process of doing this.
Definitions are inescapably tautological. Because we cannot avoid the circularity of definitions we take it as a constant and move on.
Perhaps the most important of the definition of the main definition is from the term experience. In short, knowledge is a process. When the process of knowing comes to an end – death – the possession of information ends. It is this point that we must keep in mind (ironically as information) at all times in the pursuit of knowledge and philosophy.
Naive or Direct Realism
Naive realism holds that its philosophy of perception can be summed up in the following way:
- There exists a world of material objects.
- Statements about these objects can be known to be true through sense-experience.
- These objects exist not only when they are being perceived but also when they are not perceived. The objects of perception are largely, we might want to say, perception-independent.
- These objects are also able to retain properties of the types we perceive them as having, even when they are not being perceived. Their properties are perception-independent.
- By means of our senses, we perceive the world directly, and pretty much as it is. In the main, our claims to have knowledge of it are justified.
I am satisfied with Statements 1 and 2.
But I have trouble with part of Statement 3 – “The objects of perception are largely, we might want to say, perception-independent”. “largely” seems to suggest that there is something that is perception-dependent.
The concept of object-property in Statement 4 is also problematic. Whether an object has properties or not is unknown.
And Statement 5 also suggests that perception is an unproblematic or non-existent medium. Direct perception must mean without needing sense faculties. A damaged eye or clouded view must necessarily suggest that the medium is not perfect and therefore not direct.
Meta-epistemology
When I first come online as a being (whatever that may be) is that I am confronted by a reality. I sense the reality but I do not know that I am sensing it. I only see “data” coming in. That data is somehow stored and slowly I begin to make sense (note the metaphor) of it. We call this experience and knowledge. As I build up my knowledge of the reality I begin to understand its limitations and possibilities within it. It is only after some time that I can understand what experience is, and what knowledge is, and that it may or may not a thing. Having these experiences I have to make a decision on how to perceive it and deal with it.
External reality and anti-realism
In anti-realism, the external reality is hypothetical and not assumed. This sounds like a reformulation of the veil-of-appearance argument. Our knowledge of the external world is one mediated by the sense, and never amounts to direct knowledge. The conclusion is that our perception of the world is secondhand information.
Certainty
We can approach but never arrive at certainty.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the last mind
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the latin title of Wittgenstein’s first and only work published within his lifetime. It translates roughly to A Treatise on Logic and Philosophy.
The stance then is that of logic.
I do not agree that logic is the best place to start. Logic, to me, seems to be an activity of the mind. And the mind is physical object take performs such processes. To me, place to start is ontology and then epistemology.
Someone commented in a previous post that it is ironic that one must use logic to even start to ask ontological and epistemological questions. I agree. And that tells us something about the inescapability of the act of thinking in order to get to the understanding. Logic, in other words, is a physical act. Logic cannot occur without the availability of the body or mind. This extends to knowledge (the epistemological act) as well. Logic and knowledge do not exist without a mind perform these acts. When the last mind extinguishes form this world so too does logic and knowledge. What continues to remain is the physical world, the reality. And logic and knowledge will restart when another mind comes into (for lack of a better word) being.
signature103 