In the everyday life, people find it hard to believe that there is a world that exists outside what they already know. There is so much assumption that people make in the world concerning the objects that surround our environment. The knowledge about these objects emanate from different sources some come from impartation by third parties, some are from our own experiences while others are from logical inferences.
Experience for once is subject to perception, how we feel things, how the things sound, how the things smell and how our eyes perceive the stuff around us. Our understanding in regards to experience is subject to constructs of our bodies and these include fingers, eyes, ears, nose and the tongue. Therefore our senses greatly influence our understanding of the world around us. Descartes in his submission argues that senses are at times deceptive and that total trust to knowledge from the senses is misguiding. He thus employs systematic doubt going ahead to question every knowledge that he acquires from the senses. Descartes states that unless people come to the place of ignoring any sense or rejecting the memories of whatever it is one undergoes in the world then the knowledge of that person is false. In Descartes’ meditation, the principle argument is that until one comes to the realization of the place of the brain and utterances of the knowledge without considering the senses then all knowledge is false (Grimm, 2018).
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Locke however holds a contrary opinion stating that the brain is a void with no knowledge and can only be useful in terms of knowledge generation once one has some experience on a particular issue. In his ‘Human Understanding’ essay Locke argues that it is experience that furnishes the mind with knowledge and unless one experiences something then one cannot claim knowledge of the same (Bratton, 2014).
Kant in his submission on the matter of knowledge argues that experience is subject to perception and that perceptions are subjective in nature thus when we get knowledge through experience which is more of the senses and the memories of the same then we risk being subjective in gaining the same knowledge. We therefore need to come to the place of inferring the things that we experience and at the same time engaging our brains to process both experiences from our senses and the logic that underlies the knowledge. This then helps fight subjectivity and allows us to have unbiased approach to gaining knowledge where we can get different conceptions of the things around us.
Scientific knowledge on the other hand incorporates almost all the above arguments and tries to create sense in all of them by using them at one go. Science employs induction and simplicity of the arguments by creating hypothesis of the same and at the same time falsify by predicting based on a very wide community of scientists. The predictability and the falsification is subject to issues such as consistency, accuracy, the power to explain, the ability to connect the previous issues and the current ones and above all the rationalization of the entire knowledge body that the scientific experiment brings to the fore (Neta, 2013).
Therefore in all these the buck stops with the brain and the thought processes that it undertakes even as one experiences the world. Science relies on the brain to gain accuracy, experience of the senses rely on the brain to process the process the perceptions, and it is the same brain that contains the knowing mind.
References
Bratton, J. (2014). Capitalism and classical social theory, second edition. University of Toronto Press.
Grimm, S. R. (2018). Making sense of the world: New essays on the philosophy of understanding. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
Neta, R. (2013). Epistemology. London: Routledge.
