Module 1

What do we know? How do we know it? The nature and extent of our knowledge are fundamental issues in Philosophy and this theme raises questions concerning our right to the beliefs that we have, how we acquire them and whether we can take them to be knowledge.

Empiricism and Rationalism

Can reason and/or experience provide adequate basis for a systematic account of human knowledge? This section raises epistemological questions concerning sources and types of knowledge.

•  Rationalism. Reason as the source of our knowledge, as

justification for our beliefs and as the source of our conceptual apparatus. A priori knowledge.

•  Empiricism. Experience as the source of our knowledge of concepts and propositions, and the means by which we justify our beliefs. A posteriori knowledge.

•  The limitations of each: scepticism concerning the nature and extent of empirical and rational knowledge.

Knowledge and Justification

How can we justify our beliefs? What role does certainty have, measured against utility, probability, reasonableness, coherence and explanatory power in the justification of knowledge?

•  Believing-that and Knowing-that: evidence and degrees of justification.

•  Reliabilism, coherence and foundationalism as grounds of justification: the problem of an infinite regress.

•  The tripartite definition of knowledge: truth, belief and

justification. Problems in the application of this definition.

Knowledge and Scepticism

What is distinctive about philosophical doubt? What is the role of doubt in the search for knowledge?

•  The difference between ordinary doubt and philosophical doubt.

•  Scepticism concerning knowledge and belief. The extent of scepticism, whether global scepticism is possible.

•  Sceptical arguments concerning our perceptual knowledge: arguments from illusion, deception, dreaming.

Knowledge of the External World

Do we experience the external world directly? Or is our experience mediated? This section raises epistemological questions about theories of perception.

•  Realism: naive realism and representative realism. Whether our experience of the world is direct or mediated by subjective representations (sense-data) of the external world.

•  Idealism: that which is immediately perceived are ideas, which exist only in the mind.

•  Phenomenalism: whether physical object statements can be analysed in terms of statements describing sensory experience.

How do you know that you

are not a brain in a bottle?

Bishop Berkeley

Idealist

He pointed out that all we ever perceive are sense impressions and therefore the world might not exist when we are not observing it.

Fortunately, he said,  God watches it all the time.

Plato

Realist

Plato thought that the world we perceive is an illusion and that there was another reality beyond the one we normally see