Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology

Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology both challenge the view of knowledge as a detached, intellectual activity. Do you think they are right? How do you think we should think about knowledge? Now that we have concluded the section on epistemology, write about what kind of thing you think knowledge is. I will say that they are right. I believe that we should think about knowledge more than a detached, intellectual activity. For me knowledge is what you receive from experience, communication. It is skills acquired by a person through experience and education, it is theoretical and practical understanding of matters worth knowing, the sum of what is known. After reading the section about epistemology i can add to the statements mentioned above that we also can think about knowledge as a truth or belief. If you have a belief about something, then you have knowledge about it. Or to believe that the sky is blue is to think the proposition "The sky is blue", is true.

Empiricism's claim

What do you make of empiricism's claim that all of our knowledge is based on the use of our senses? What areas of knowledge do you think support this theory? Are there any types of knowledge (mathematical knowledge, for example?) that you think are a problem for this theory? Well, at some point i agree with this claim. Our senses provide certain portion of information about the outside world. The eye, the ear, the nose, the skin all have vast numbers of receptor cells, hundreds of millions in total, each providing at least one bit of information. We get knowledge through society. People are all around, we interact with others all the time. Every interaction is a learning situation, whether positive in nature (loving) or negative (hating). The senses are the sources for our knowledge. But this is just the fundamental level. We can't have knowledge only based on our senses. I believe, this claim could be applied to natural science, history.

Methodological Skepticism

Descartes believed that anything that can be doubted should be doubted. He wanted to develop a method to determine if something is actually true. This is called Methodological Skepticism.
A good example would be a dream. When someone is dreaming, they often do not believe they are dreaming. All of their senses tell them that what they perceive is real. But because it is not, Descartes claimed that even the senses themselves could not always perceive the truth. He concluded that one cannot rely on the senses.
The foundation of this method was "to be doubted in everything". His method has extraordinary meaning. It was only a condition to create "rules" that could guarantee the achievement of knowledge with high power of probability.
I don't think that nowadays most of us follow his method. For instance, whatever we watch and find out from TV news, we believe in that without even trying to explore it, if it is really truth?? People beleive in everything that others say. If one group of people say that Earth is a sphere, everybody else will think so.

Allegory of the Cave

"The Allegory of the Cave" tells us about people who are chained to the wall of a cave and they have nothing to look at but shadows on the wall. This is all that they know and have never been out of the cave. The main point of the Allegory of the Cave is to give an example of the way that we all live. That's why Socrates suggests that, without philosophical education, we are all like the prisoners in the cave. Philosophical knowledge help us to see and understand reality, to think deeper and not to believe that what we see in front of us is reality. Most people live in a world of relative ignorance. And we are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better.
I don't really know if Socrates is right or wrong being so pessimistic about life without philosophy. I can say for sure that philosophy was an essential part of his life.

Week 0

First of all, in this course i would like to find out all meanings of this field, its objectives, ideas.
The other goal in this class is to learn the areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, religion, mind; to find the answers for general questions: What is the nature of reality? What is the soul? Do we have free will? Does God exist? What is existence?