What Do We Know?

With this lesson, we begin a new unit on epistemology, which is the philosophical study of knowledge claims. In this first lesson on epistemology, we begin by examining the question “What do we mean when we say we know something?” What exactly is knowledge? We will begin with a presentation that introduces the traditional definition of knowledge. Wood then discusses some of the basic issues raised in the study of epistemology and then presents an approach to epistemology that focuses on obtaining the intellectual virtues, a point we will elaborate on in the next lesson.

Knowledge is something that we know that you have facts to back up to form your argument and is justified. Knowledge isn’t something that can be created overnight but something that we form over the course of life. I feel that being raised by my grandmother I gained a lot of knowledge and wisdom because she has years and experience over me and wouldn’t tell me anything to hurt me but to help me in life. We all learn from mistakes but with mistakes gain wisdom then knowledge. We don’t gain knowledge overnight but with growth we become more aware of our worldview.

A belief is defines a true statement, something that exists, or the trust and faith in someone or something. We all have beliefs and have obtained those believes individually in many different ways and whose to say that belief is right or wrong, or true or false. As with a myth, a traditional story, mostly believed to be a false idea or false believe.

Knowledge differs among people depending on a topic. A German rationalist of the seventeenth century, Gottfried Leibniz, set out a sequence of distinctions for our knowledge. Leibniz published his monograph called “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” where our five senses is a way that’ll help clarify our understanding of a topic. Leibniz’s idea is, authentic as he was a mathematician and logician who incorporates both in his writing to emphasize how much further you can expand on an issue. Gottfried Leibniz insists that people think they know the truth, but they don’t have sufficient information for it to be legitimate. We can interpret that he writes to prove self-righteous people wrong and to educate those who are willing to learn.

Knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is a gift from God. Knowledge is God, God is a someone, not a something. Full knowledge concerning God can’t be explained.

Edmund Gettier’s argument that justified true belief is not a sufficient definition for knowledge is correct. There are many scenarios in which the conditions for justified true belief are met but cannot be said to qualify as knowledge; therefore justified true belief is not a sufficient definition for knowledge.

The question of how I know what I know is a question that is one of the most difficult I have encountered. Much of what I know is based on logic and thinking. This is where I may veer off of the Christian Worldview slightly. I believe that God has given humans the ability to reason and think logically, and I use that as much as possible. I think that He intended for us to use our minds to find what we believe to be true, hoping that people would seek God when seeing that He is the only real truth. Cosgrove (2006) makes a great comment on secular humanism and a person’s ability to find value, and in

In this paper I will be writing about knowledge and belief referring to epistemology. I will be answering questions such as, “What is knowledge” and “What is belief”. I will also answer other questions related to the epistemology of knowledge and beliefs. Before we get into knowledge and beliefs, we must define what epistemology is and why epistemology is important.

One consistency in both texts of the Meno (Meno 99c) and Republic (Republic 472d) is that people who use true belief cannot show or explain how their belief is the truth. I believe this is one of the largest distinctions between knowledge and true belief. Knowledge is

This brings us to knowledge of things. Russell believed that “all of our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rest upon acquaintance as its foundation. It is therefore important to consider what kinds of things there are which we have acquaintance” (Russell, 57). You know stuff through acquaintance by directly experiencing it and you know stuff through description from hearing what other have told you from there direct experiences.

Information is one of the concepts that may be measured, evaluated, stored, and shared, but does this have the same connotation as knowledge. Even though these two notions are used interchangeably in most cases, it is difficult to see the difference without having sufficient ground for this. How can one state that justified true belief is knowledge? This problem was deeply examined by a German philosopher Edmund Gettier who explained the difference and provided significant evidence for questioning everything, as Descartes did. Explanations by Gettier are intricate and more related to the true or false correlation between something that a person believes to be the true and something that prevents him or her to think so.

In his work, “Summa Theologica”, Aquinas expresses his unique views on the acquisition of knowledge, and argues against the claims of other philosophers. Aquinas claims that one is born with a blank slate, or lack of knowledge, and obtains knowledge through phantasms, or sensible images, due to the unity of the body and soul. This opinion is generally unlike the views of other traditional philosophers who claim that knowledge is inherent, and Aquinas makes multiple valid arguments against the traditional view.

The original state of knowledge is truth. There is a clear negation in declaring that 'Dr. Smith is aware that that X is correct, even supposing X is false.' One may maintain to know or deem or find out that X is true, which is attuned with declaring that X is false. A query one may regard as then is: What is truth? There are those who consider Protagoras, a philosophical opponent of Socrates, that there are as a lot of interpretations of the notion of truth as there are people who declare that for some statement, X, is accurate for them. Some contemporary and modern supporters of Protagoras consequently say that truth is comparative.

How do we know something?¨ Well people can know something through three ways: 1.)experiential/empirical 2.)cognitive/rational and 3.)constructed/creational. With experiential a person can know something because they have experienced it, basically through the five senses. With cognitive one knows something because it has been thought through, argued, or rationalized. With constructed a person knows something because they created it and it may be subjective instead of objective and it may be based on practice or awareness. There will be five authors that will be referenced in this essay, they are Hume, Kant, and Locke. Empiricism, A-priorism, and Skepticism will be discussed.

Knowledge can be defined as information gained through sense perception, emotion, language and reason, while it is defined by Plato as “justified true belief.” The claim that knowledge takes the form of a combination of stories and facts is however not accurate in history and biology. First, it brings up the questions of what are stories and what are facts. Stories are accounts of past events from somebody’s perspective, while a fact is the truth. When looking at the two areas of knowledge, they each favour one side of the combination over the other. For example, knowledge from history mostly takes the form of stories, while knowledge from biology mostly takes the form of facts. This distinction between the different types of knowledge leads to the knowledge questions of “How do we obtain knowledge in the different areas of knowing?” and “To what extend is knowledge in certain areas of knowledge subjective or objective?”