Knowledge Is Power
Uploaded by ekfrancis on Sep 29, 2001
Knowledge can be defined as the fact or state of knowing. There are many different aspects of knowledge. Knowledge comes from many different places. There are great numbers of philosophers who have tried to describe where knowledge comes from. Also knowledge can be divided into different parts according to the way we receive knowledge. There are many things that related to the knowledge of something. The development of questions in philosophy about knowledge began back in the day of Plato. They are still around today. These questions are the hardest to answer. Also these questions are used to give background on a lot of philosophies. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. This theory asks three questions: what are the sources of knowledge? What is the nature of knowledge? And is our knowledge valid?
Knowledge is believed to come from four different sources. The sources each have their own way to look at the world. The appeal to authority is the first source of knowledge. We learn things about the past from the testimony of others. The experience of the person who gives you the testimony is the actual source. Although authority is used a lot as a source of knowledge, this is only a secondary source. Another source is the senses through empiricism. The realm of knowledge is given to us through all of our perceptions of something concrete. Whatever someone sees, hears, touches, smells, and tastes then is made into an idea that becomes a part of the knowledge that person can receive. The philosophy of pragmatism is similar to empiricism. The next source is rationalism. Rationalists say that thinking is a source of knowledge. They also say that the mind has the ability to discover truth by itself, or knowledge is obtained by comparing ideas with ideas. The things that the senses detect are just raw material of knowledge in rationalism. The last source is intuition, or the direct apprehension of knowledge that is not the result of conscious reasoning or of immediate sense perception. Intuition has four different ways that it is connected with being a source of knowledge. First George Santayana believed intuition was the awareness of the immediate data of consciousness. He said that intuition is in the knowledge of oneself and one’s own life. The second is that intuition is actually just a combination of one’s past experiences and thinking. It comes from subconscious...