Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (After Seminar)

At the beginning, when I started to read the first text it was really difficult to get the main idea of the authors. I’m not used to read about philosophy but when I finally started to get the ideas and to interpret the text, my interest in this subject increase. As I was getting deeply on the texts, further questions appeared on my mind and I started to see different concepts in different ways. As an engineer I have always thought in term of science and never had though in the different perception of knowledge. The first week of this courses we focused in two reading, one of them is the book created by Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) and the second reading was the dialog between Socrates and Teaetethus. To me Kant’s reading was more difficult to understand than the dialog. However after reading for another times the texts, searching on the web and the Lecture and Seminar the ideas become clearer.

It is important to know under what social context, Kant wrote the book “Critique of pure Reason”, it was when the industrial revolution started. For Kant until that moment, both rationalistic and empiricism had failed when raising an explanation of knowledge and its scientific validity, and the fundamental mistake in both of them is and I quote Kant “Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects…”, Kant tried to change this approach making that the objects conform our cognition. Kant based his ideas in Copernican Revolution, when in astronomy field was accepted that it was not the Sun moving around the Earth but rather Earth moves around the Sun.

The Main question that Kant pretend to answer with his book, is how is possible synthetic a priori knowledge? Like a mentioned above, he solved the question basing his ideas on Copernican Revolution. In order to understand Kant’s perspective we should understand analytic and synthetic judgements. Analytics judgements are those that do not need investigate or to find information to validate the veracity of the judgement (a priori knowledge). On the other hand in Synthetic Judgements, we cannot validate the veracity of the judgement, we need to search for information in order to become in a valid argument. With these two concepts in mind, Kant evaluates the possibility to have a new kind of knowledge, one that has synthetic and a priori approaches.

With this new perspective, the subject (including its dynamism and principles) is going to be the main explanation and justification of knowledge. In that sense the subject need to have some knowledge from its experience (empiric approach) however the information given by experience have to be organized and synthetize with some principles.

         Understanding Kant’s approach of knowledge helped me to understand in the dialogue between Socrates and Teaetethus. In this text it is argued that that “we do not see and hear with the eyes and the ears, but through the eyes and the ears”. In my interpretation, ayes and ears are only tools to transmit what we perceive into our minds. They also explain knowledge as perception. If we limit ourselves to see with our eyes we are not going to be able to observe the “big picture” of the world and get to know the real meaning of knowledge. This point of view it makes clearer when in the seminar Johan Erikson said that we should see it like the film “The Matrix”, where you can decide if keep living in the world as you know or start to questioning how true is the knowledge you have about the world.