Epistemology: How do we know that we know something - Essay Example

As a result, philosophy for the justification and verification of knowledge rests on: the product of sensory perception and the product of rational reflection (Heylighen, 1993). Knowledge, from a rationalist’s point of view, is what can be deduced from principles that are undoubted to be true. These principles are not learned through experience; rather, they are implicit to the very meaning of reasoning. Rationalists believe that sense experience cannot provide the certainty that our claim of knowing something is true.

That we have to rely on reason to determine whether our opinions or beliefs are true and thus could be considered knowledge or knowing something. Empiricism on the other hand views knowledge as learnt ideas and concepts through a walk in an everyday world. According to an empirical view, knowledge is attained as a result of reflection of external objects around us through our sensory organs to our brain.Plato is a rationalist; he is one of the philosophers that raised rationalism. He views knowledge in a rationalistic view.

Sense experience fails to provide us a certainty whether what we believe is true or not. He believes that the information we get on relying on sense experience is clearly and constantly changing and depending only on the decisions we made during the exposure on the time of the sensory perception that some empiricists say that is the basis of determining knowledge and thus unreliable and can only be corrected on the dependability on principles and facts that do not change., principles that we can consider reliable for it is what it is.

These undoubted principles of plain and absolute truth is the bases of thinking and giving reasons, so if one can show that the opinion or belief he has is based on these undoubted principles of plain and absolute truth, then this opinion of his, by the use of reasons from undoubted principles of plain and absolute truth, is identified as more than an opinion and is true, and thus, we can call it knowledge. On the other hand, Aristotle viewed knowledge as perceiving objects around