RENAISSANCE
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KNOWLEDGE
EPISTEMOLOGY
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge . One major branch in epistemology dates back to Plato is the attempt to define just what knowledge is. Traditionally, philosophers have defined knowledge as true, justified belief.
First, to state that knowledge is belief means that to know something, you must believe it.
Second, knowledge must be true because one cannot really know anything that is false. If something is false, one may very well believe it, and even believe they know it. But according to the philosophical definition one does not really know it.
Third, real knowledge is justified, because one's belief must have reasons. If you were to choose a number from 1 to 1,000 - for example 463 - and a friend correctly guesses 463, did your friend know you had picked 463? Since he/she was merely right by accident, it seems wrong to say he/she knew it. Knowledge cannot be serendipitous - one must have reasons for forming some true belief in order for that belief to qualify as knowledge.
Question: Can all true justified beliefs qualify as knowledge? Consider the following case: You are driving through the countryside and you see a barn. You form the belief, "That is a barn!" It is clearly a justified belief. It is also a true belief. You have, in fact, just seen a real barn. However, unbeknownst to you, you are in Fake Barn County, where most of the farmers do not build barns. They build the facade of barns. Therefore, the argument continues, it was not knowledge because you had seen a fake barn, you would have formed a false belief.
Conclusion: Not all true justified beliefs are knowledge!
Disciplines of Thought
Relativism
Definition: Relativism constitutes the perception that truth, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are the products of changing norms and cultural frameworks, and that their authority or relevance is confined to the context that produced them.
Example: Relativism would be suggesting that there are no markers of "right" and "wrong", such that things like the "human rights" that have been conceived of today can’t be applied to eras in the past and that we cannot pass judgment on people without considering them in the context of their eras. So trying to figure out whether or not Pontius Pilate would be considered a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ person is different across the norms of different eras is useless without putting him in his cultural and historical context.
Thinkers: Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Bernard Crick, Sophists (Ancient Greece)
Postmodernism
Definition: Postmodernism is typically defined by skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality. It asserts, similarly to relativism, that things like knowledge and truth the product of unique systems and their sociopolitical era, and thus both contextual and constructed.
Example: Postmodernism came about in the wake of the enlightenment and was a sort of rigorous questioning of some of the grand assumptions made by the thinkers that came before it. It took partly from the work of people like Nietzsche (in his deconstruction of Christian morality) and applied this to other issues. Post Modernism would suggest, for example, that we should question basic tenants of social norms and modern thought — like the belief that it is morally wrong to be unfaithful to a partner or the belief that anything is inherently morally questionable in an objective way.
Thinkers: John-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derreida
Scientific Realism
Definition: Scientific realism is defined by a favorable attitude towards theories and models, recommending belief in both the observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. It means that theoretical claims and observed research by themselves constitute knowledge.
Example: This is the idea that knowledge comes from experiments, so that data and theoretical models are what constitute knowledge about the world — so that our theory of evolution or the theory of relativity are things that are considered knowledge would be a form of scientific realism.
Thinkers: Ernan McMullin, Richard Boyd
Logical Positivism
Definition: Logical Positivism is the view that traditional metaphysical doctrine can be rejected as meaningless because scientific knowledge is the only factual knowledge.
Example: This would be rejecting the branch of philosophy that deals with the “first principles of things,” including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space. So this might be rejecting Plato’s arguments about the "forms of things" and some of the more abstract parts of his allegory of the cave in favor of scientific principles about the construction of matter like what we know about atoms from physics and how matter is constructed.
Thinkers: Hans Hahn, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege
Ontological Realism
Definition: The “ontological claim of realism” as put by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, is that there are no objective facts. The ontological realist concludes that there is nothing in the world fully answering to our moral concepts, and no facts or properties that render moral judgment objectively true.
Example: This is the idea that there is no fact, not even anything that we can justify our moral concepts of good and bad with — so an ontological realist would suggest that we cannot define anything as objectively bad, even up to and including murder, because we cannot make objective judgments about goodness and badness.
Thinkers: J.L. Mackie, William Alston
Social Constructivism
Definition: Social constructivism maintains that human development and knowledge is constructed through interaction with other humans. Social Constructivism applies the more general philosophy of constructivism to the social in that it is essentially a sociological theory of knowledge.
Example: This is the idea that we primarily create new knowledge or acquire knowledge from interacting with other people rather than the natural world — essentially that my knowledge of the fact that a thing might be painful or sad is not a result of my observation of the natural but a product of social interaction and when I have seen others feel pain or sadness. This is because truth itself, for social constructivists, is a product of the social environment.
Thinkers: Peter L. Berger, Lev Vygotsky, Thomas Luckmann
