Epistemology

Well, I promised it a long time ago, and here it is. Finally, here is my post--or maybe posts depending on how long this is--about epistemology. I'm not sure if I can do a great job of explaining what I learned about epistemology at L'Abri. All I know is what I learned from listening to four lectures about it by a professor from Calvin College named Lee Hardy, and even what little I know will be hard to convey through a blog. But, we'll give it a go anyway. I need to say at the beginning that much of what I write will be directly from my notes and so a lot of it will be directly from Dr. Hardy's mouth. I can't remember what I wrote down verbatim from the tapes and what I paraphrased so some of these words may not be my own.

A basic definition of epistemology is that it is the study of the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. So, if that's the definition, then a good starting point for thinking about epistemology is to ask yourself, "How do I know what I know?" In other words, how do you get your knowledge? Here are some of the main ways that most of us would answer that question:
--perception: we use our senses
--memory: we remember what we did or what happened in our lives
--introspection: we look at our feelings and interpret them
--testimony: we listen to and trust what people tell us
--reason: we use logic to make sense of the world around us
But the question that philosophers dealing with epistemology raise is, "How do you know that you can trust the faculties that you listed to produce beliefs which are true?" How do you know that those faculties--in particular your senses and reason--are giving you accurate information? Those are the questions that philosophers have been asking for a really really long time, and, as of yet, there's not really one universal answer to it. How do we know things? And how do we know that we know?

If epistemology is the study of knowledge, then we should define "knowledge." Knowledge is a form of belief. It is true belief that is justified (e.g. just because you guess that the card picked out of a deck is going to be an ace of spades--and it turns out it is--doesn't mean you 'knew' that). So we study epistemology to discovery a theory of knowledge. From a theory of knowledge we should expect a theory of truth and a theory of justification, a theory that will tell us under what conditions a belief is true and under what conditions we are justified in accepting that belief.

At the time of Descartes (Rene Descartes 1596-1650, regarded as the father of modern philosophy), most of the philosophers accepted the Correspondence Theory of Truth. This theory of truth stated that a belief is true is it corresponds to the way the world is. So, the statement "The sky is blue" is true if the sky actually is blue. The theory of justification at the time was called Strong Foundationalism. Let me try to explain this:
We all walk around with a system of beliefs that are interrelated; we believe A based on B. For example, we believe that we live with humans because our friends and family are humans. But, there must be some beliefs that are not based on any other beliefs; beliefs that we're entitled to right off the bat and which will serve as a basis--or foundation--for all the other beliefs that we have. Strong Foundationalism states that the only beliefs that can be in that foundation are beliefs that are absolutely certain and that everything we believe must be built on that foundation using logic. We should be able to trace all of our beliefs back to that indisputable foundation.

Now, Correspondence Theory and Strong Foundationalism had existed in one form or another ever since Plato and Aristotle; so then what marks the difference or change from Ancient to Modern philosophy? How did we get started down the road to the postmodernism that we are in today?

The answer is the Representational Theory of Consciousness. Whereas in Ancient philosophy the major point of interest was in being or ideas, in Modern philosophy there was a shift to focusing on consciousness as the foundation of human knowledge. The ancient philosophers were interested in being or the thing itself, but the modern philosophers are interested in the consciousness of being or the consciousness of the object. When the focus turns to our consciousness then we must ask ourselves, "Is the thing perceived (a tree, for example) the physical external thing (the actual tree)?
Modern philosophers would say no. They say this because they see no evidence that our consciousness of an object must necessarily mean that the object exists in reality. This new (and by "new" I mean new in Descartes' time) turn in philosophy and new line of questioning means that we have no way to prove that we have any direct contact with the world. We can know about things, but we can't know the thing itself. Think about it. How do you know that what you perceive--what's going on in your mind--has any correlation at all to the real world around you? How do you know that there even is a real world around you? Can you prove it? Think of being in one of those big 360 degree theaters that's like a sphere around you. You see things on the screens and it sure looks real, but how do you know that the world outside of the sphere corresponds to what you're seeing?

And this is the question that all of modern philosophy tried to answer. Postmodernism has kind of given up on trying to prove that we can have any kind of meaningful knowledge of objective reality, mainly because modern philosophers tried too hard to prove that we could have absolute knowledge of objective reality and in the end couldn't prove a thing.

I had some more typed out here. I still have about 20 pages of notes that I haven't told you about. I decided that I should probably leave it at this and let those of you who may want to know more ask me or look it up yourselves and those of you who didn't want to know anything won't have to worry about reading any more boringness. I hope I told you something you didn't know. I hope I didn't screw any of that stuff up as I regurgitated it onto this blog. Thanks for listening.

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In other news, I've got all of my stuff moved back down to Conway now. So, my apartment is pretty empty of all of my things. They are now all down underneath our house waiting for me to sort through them. I'll make a list of things that I'll be getting rid of and post it on the blog so that if you guys see anything you want you can give me an email and you can probably get whatever it is for free.