NATURE OF

KNOWLEDGE
REPORTERS:
KATE ASHELY DENIEGA
ALJON AGUINALDO
What we'll discuss
3 MAJOR STAGES IN THE
APPREHENSION OF A KNOWLEDGE
BECOMES POSSIBLE
SENTENCES AND STATEMENTS
TYPES OF STATEMENTS
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
 The 3 Major Stages
There are, actually, three major stages in the
apprehension of a concept before knowledge
becomes possible.
These are the;
-PERCEPTION
-ABSTRACTION
-JUDGEMENT

Perception:
This is the first stage, which involves an activity
that does not make us different from animals.
Animals also perceive their surroundings, including
the thing around them.
PERCEIVE means;
become aware or conscious of (something); come
to realize or understand.
Perception:
-There are two types of perception: the EXTERNAL
and INTERNAL
EXTERNAL PERCEPTION- happens when we perceive things
using our five senses. The result of the process of external
perception is called percept.
INTERNAL PERCEPTION- happens when you use your
imagination. The product of this process is an image or a
phantasm.
Example
Abstraction:
This process was described by Charles Coppens S.J.
as a simple apprehension or conception: "simple
apprehension is the act of perceiving the object
intellectually, without affirming or denying
anything concerning it. To apprehend is to take
hold of the thing as if with the hand; an
apprehension, as an act of the mind, is an
intellectual grasping of an object."
Abstraction:
It is the second stage that distinguishes us from the animals.
It involves the use of the intellect where we grasp what is the
universal among the different particulars that we have observed
from the perception.
The result of this process of abstraction or simple
apprehension or conception are called concepts.
Concepts are said to be the building blocks of knowledge. You
have the blocks, but you need to put the blocks together for
knowledge to be possible.
Example
Judgement:
This is the 3rd stage in order to complete the act of
the mind. This is where we are going to make a
knowledge claim because we are going to take at
least two concepts and put them together in order
to make a statement or a proposition that could
either be true or false about the world.
• The result of this process is a statement or
proposition. It completes the act of the mind for
knowledge to become possible.
Example
 3 Major Stages

PERCEPTION ABSTRACTION JUDGEMENT

It is the ability to hear or It is the quality of It is about taking two
see or to become aware dealing with the ideas concepts and then
of something through rather than the event putting them
the senses itself together
Sentences and Statement
• The concepts that we put together are
expressed using sentences.
• Sentences have no truth value. They are
merely uttered as the verbal means of
communicating or expressing commands,
questions, emotions like surprise or pleasure,
and wishes.
 Types of Statement
•Philosophers came up with two meaningful
types of statements which could be traced on the
empiricist tradition of David Hume. This could be
found I Hume's article, "skeptical doubts
concerning the operations of the understanding."

The two types of statements

are known as:

- Analytic statements

-Empirical statements

 Analytic Statement:
• The truth or falsity of the knowledge claim being made by an analytic statement
could be found within the statement itself.
For example:
'A bachelor is an unmarried male of marriageable age.'
• Definitions and their derivatives, like 'no bachelor has a mother-in-law' are
considered as tautologous statement whose truths are contained within itself.
• Furthermore, the denial of an analytic statement would lead to absurdity
and contradiction.
• Analytic statements are also known or defined as: truths of language, truths of
reason, or formal statements.
TAUTOLOGY means;
the saying of the same thing twice over in different words.
 Empirical Statements:
• The truth or falsity depend on the state of affairs being claimed and not
on the definitions or tautologous statements.
• The truth or falsity being claimed by an
empirical statement rests on its correspondence with facts or with the
current state of affairs being used.
• For example, the statement 'the sky is blue' is an empirical statement
whose truth depends on the additional information or claim being made.
• The denial of an empirical statement would not
lead to absurdity and contradiction. The denial of the statement 'the
kitten is not on the mat' will not be absurd or contradictory because of
the state of affairs being used
 Types of Statement:
ANALYTIC EMPIRICAL
a statement the truth value of describe what is in the
which is determined by the social world, without
meanings of its terms evaluating it.
eg :Frozen water is ice,
Bachelors are unmarried men,
Two halves make up a whole.
 Types of Knowledge
From the distinction established by Hume, a group of social
sciences and mathematics would adopt his idea. This would lead
to the traditional distinction of two general types of knowledge
as formal and empirical knowledge. This demarcation has
become the basis for the distinction of the disciplines in the
sciences as the formal sciences of mathematics, logic, geometry,
etc. and the empirical sciences of biology, chemistry, physics, the
social sciences, and others.
Formal Knowledge
corresponds to knowledge in the formal sciences whose main
concern is the validation of their knowledge claims within the
formal system in their respective disciplines. This could be
logical, mathematical, linguistic or any formal system whose
method of validation depends entirely on the particular
system being used.
they are not dependent on the accumulation of
empirical data but they are concerned with the
structure or validity of their sciences within the
formal deductive framework that governs them.
 Empirical Knowledge:
• It takes emphasis and makes use of the data or the content from
experience and its correspondence with the state of affairs to
establish the truth or falsity of their claims.
• Empirical knowledge is working within the assumption that it
is always probable that experience could prove you wrong later
on.
• In empirical sciences, the reliability of information depends on their
correspondence with the state of affairs, it is not a matter of coherence within a
given system. They use the method of induction to arrive at their conclusion.
In induction, the grounds or premises support the conclusion only with the
probability and not with legal certainty.
 Two types of knowlwdge
EMPIRICAL
Initial knowledge about
something or
FORMAL knowledge from our
Authorized common experiences
knowledge
Thank You
for listening!