VENDILLO, Narcy Lyn T.

MS Accountancy

What is knowledge?

Whenever I hear knowledge, Ernie Baron pops up out of nowhere and utters “Kung walang knowledge,
walang power!” Being someone who spent her childhood in front of the television during the era when Ernie Baron,
the Walking Encyclopedia of the Philippines is known in every household; his tagline lingered on my mind.
Knowledge is power. We often equate knowledge with intelligence. Being knowledgeable at something makes
someone automatically smart. However, in the reading the crucial problem is not who’s smart or not but what the
source of knowledge is.

As laid down in the article, the central problem of epistemology is to decide how we can acquire
knowledge. It has been between sparring camps battling over some major concerns. Among the major battles the one
that has been lasting over the years is the fundamentals of all our knowledge. What is the ultimate source of human
knowledge? This battle is being fought out by Rationalists and Empiricists.

Rationalists claim that there is innate knowledge and true belief is accessible only through reason. Plato, a
rationalist and others following him have defined knowledge as justified true belief. This side of the coin assumes
that we do not need to look beyond ourselves to form a justified true belief about the world. Meanwhile, Empiricists
have continuously claimed that experience is the foundation for all our knowledge. Empiricists maintain that the
human senses contribute all our information about the world. They further claim that devoid of this raw data, the
human mind would have no knowledge at all. Empiricism upholds that unaided sense experience is the source of all
our beliefs and all our knowledge. It’s a no-brainer to realize how empiricism has been able to gain many
philosophers to its side. It is interestingly hard to pinpoint a belief that you have, without having to come across it
even once. For me, it nothing but expected, to consider that the senses are the ultimate source and definitive
foundation of belief. However, not all truth-seekers were persuaded that the senses do all the work alone when it
comes to bring into being one person’s belief. Humans seem to own some beliefs that cannot be derived from sense
experience, or demonstrated from any perception that we have.

In the end, the rationalist-empiricist debate concerns our spot in the world; our position as rational beings,
rational professionals. To what extent do our abilities to reason and experience support our efforts to recognize and
understand our situation? In the end whatever side of the coin we support, Mang Ernie Baron will still pop out of
nowhere and remind us that “Kung walang knowledge, walang power!” Humans are very powerful with all the
knowledge that can have. It is upon humans to put this knowledge into good use.