Philosophy - knowledge - Essay Example

The primary question is regarding the acquisition of knowledge: Is knowledge something that one acquires, or something that one merely recollects Socrates (Plato, "Meno" 365-372) lays down the argument that it is the latter. He does that by asking simple questions alone, which lead to a person's discovery of the solution completely by himself. The fact that Socrates does not inform the person about the correct answer to a question shows that knowledge is not acquired, but rather recollected. We can argue, however, that it is not the knowledge of things that is inherent in any human being, but the faculty of identification (in this case, deductive logic) which is inherent.

This term, "faculty of identification" is nothing but the perceptive system used to analyze knowledge. One uses the sense organs to understand the knowledge of "taste", and one uses logic to understand the knowledge of a geometric proof. This is another key point in determining the limitations of knowledge. Let us take a simple example to illustrate. The knowledge of the presence of a tiger nearby, by observing its fresh footprints, is vital to a forest dweller. Here one can observe the knowledge acquisition process stepwise.

Firstly, the sense perceptions are translated based on previous sensory experience and registered as the knowledge of the footprints. . ledge of the tiger being near the person exist within the person before If it did exist within the person himself, it should not depend uniquely on his presence there. There must be a way possible for him to just reach down within himself, so to speak, and draw out the knowledge, while doing something totally unrelated. This is not possible with the faculties of identification which we have allowed him to have: sense perception and logic of the simplest correlative kind.

This example of a physical event, when extended to the mental realm, holds just as true. Knowledge depends on the questions asked, explicitly or implicitly.The second crucial fact is the dependence of knowledge on the faculty of identification. If in the same example, our friend, the forest dweller had no capacity for inductive logic, though possessing sharp senses, or if he was blind in the first place, the knowledge of the tiger's presence does not come into existence. In other words, knowledge is not something that belongs inherently in the circumstance, but also on the individual experiencing the circumstance.

This is brought out clearly in Socrates' allegory of the cave (Plato, "Republic" 370-375). In it, the individual who has seen the world outside the cave and then looks at the events occurring inside, obtains knowledge of a different kind than those who have always lived in that cave. The events are the same, but the faculties of identification are totally different.To put it in a nutshell, knowledge is created by the active application of a faculty of identification upon a passive circumstance.

When we analyze the question of knowledge being true belief with this background, we can understand its limitations better.The idea that justified true belief is responsible for knowledge is