Philo 108 2015-46053

Reflection Paper no. 2 : What is knowledge?

At the beginning of Aristotle’s work called Metaphysics he said that, “All men by nature desire to know”.
But what does it mean to know? This is one of the questions that is addressed by the field of epistemology, a
branch of Philosophy that is concerned with distinguishing justified belief from opinion. The term was derived from
the greek word episteme which means “knowledge” and the suffix ology which signifies the “doctrine or study of”.
So by combining these two terms it is apparent that the word epistemology means the doctrine or study ofit
knowledge. But what is knowledge? From what I learned in this class, knowledge is a justified true belief. It means
that a person must be (1) able to justify the claim, (2) the claim itself must be true and lastly (3) the person must
believe in it. In order for me to prove that what I believe is true, I need evidence and that evidence must be logical
and reasonable. However, for me personally I have problem with this definition of knowledge as it doesn’t consider
the circumstances in which one does not gain knowledge. I am more inclined to believe that their are certain cases
where such conditions are met only by chance. Upon delving if such a philosophical paper that supports my case
exists, I find Edmund Gettier’s work on epistemology. In his famous ‘Gettier cases’, it illustrated how such a
loophole for the JTB argument exists. For example, suppose that the clock on a room (which keeps accurate time
and is well maintained) suddenly stopped working at 9:45 pm last night, and has yet to be repaired. On my way to
my morning class, exactly twelve hours later, I happen to glance at the clock and form a claim that the time is 9:45
am. Such claim is true, of course, since the time is indeed 9:45. And my belief is justified, as I have no reason to
doubt that the clock is working, and I cannot be blamed for basing beliefs about the time on what the clock says.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that I do not know what time it is . After all, if I had walked past the clock a bit
earlier or a bit later, I would have ended up with a false belief rather than a true one. There are many of these cases
than can be used to discredit the universality of the JTB argument, but to keep it short I presented one in this paper
in order to show that such loopholes in the system exists.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is a question regarding how is knowledge obtained. From what I
learned in class, there are two major branches of philosophical epistemology. The first, which is called Rationalism
is a philosophical stance which holds that knowledge is not derived from experience, but rather is acquired by a
priori processes or is innate and intuitive in nature. In the Western tradition, it boasts a long and distinguished list
of followers, including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. However, the only one discussed in class was Descartes and
his 1641 work called Meditations of First Philosophy. From what I learned upon reading the text, in order to arrive
at knowledge, Descartes proposed that one always had to divide large philosophical problems into small
understanable sections by way incisive questions. This is what he called his ‘method of doubts’. An example of such
question is that “is there any one thing of which we can be absolutely certain about?” In tackling the problem this
way, he attempts to find the foundational belief from which we can all build our knowledge upon; an Archimedian
point from which all truths might come from. Specifically he does arrive at such thing in the 2 nd chapter of
Meditations of First Philosophy. In his know famous cogito argument, Descartes found out that the only thing that
he can’t doubt about is tha fact that he is thinking of doubting himself. For an evil demon to mislead him in all
these insidious ways, he must exist in order to be misled. There must be an "I" that can doubt. Such revelation
created a buzz among intellectuals not only during Descartes time but up to the later part of 20 th century. Hence it
also attracted a list of philosophers that went on to disprove his cogito argument. One such philosopher that came
to mind is the English philosopher Bertrand Russell in which he argued that that the Cogito contains two separate
premises: (1) There is a thought going on and (2) these thoughts are attached to something called ‘me’. Descartes,
from Russel’s point of view is only entitled to the former not the latter because “the word I is only grammatically
convenient, but does not describe a datum.”

To continue with the discussion I learned that second branch of philosophical epistemology is Empiricism.
Empiricism is also a philosophical stance which holds that knowledge is possible only through the role of
experience, especially experience based on perceptual observations by the five senses in the formation of ideas,
while discounting the notion of innate ideas which was advocated by the rationalists. In the Western tradition, it
also boasts a long and distinguished list of followers, including Locke, Berkeley and Hume.