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Can a man's knowledge go beyond his experience?

Can a man's knowledge go beyond his experience?

Orlando
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Posted 01/17/08 - 04:17 AM: Subject: Can a man's knowledge go beyond his experience?	#1
Here's my answer to this question. Would you kindly correct my mistakes? Thanks a lot. I think that every rational human being is able to acquire knowledge that transcends his pure experience with the aid of reason, although the ultimate source or “raw material” of all factual knowledge is one’s experience. First and foremost it is obvious that pure experience unguided by reason makes no sense to a person; it is our reason that imposes a kind of grid on reality, thus making space and time significant to us and casts our experience into a web of causality. Now if we assume that all the knowledge of a man is confined within his own experience, it equals assuming that he is only a passive receptor of random, uninterpreted stimuli, because once that person starts interpreting and processing the sensory input, he is not merely experiencing what comes to him but also trying to produce something new. We may be shocked to find that according to the first assumption most of our axiomatized knowledge can no longer hold. For example, the law of excluded middle in logic cannot be directly derived from any kind of experience. Although one may argue that since a person cannot move forward and backward at the same time, this law can be known through practical experience, he actually only illustrates that it is a substantial contingent fact, while the generalization of this idea lies outside the domain of pure experience. Neither can complicated mathematical theorems that ultimately stem from a set of axioms be experienced directly in daily life; even the approach that would create an illusion of experiencing them requires the logical reduction of these theorems into their basic forms, whereafter you can imagine as if your experience tells you the shortest distance between two points is the length of a line segment etc. So now it has become very clear that the assumption we made in the first place is false if the cornerstone of logic and the whole system of mathematical knowledge are to have any value to us. Our mind is far more complicated than a piece of blank slate on which the hand of Nature randomly scribbles; our experience must be guided by reason to make sense of the reality. Therefore if any factual knowledge is to be acquired (let alone the tautological, which finds no factual representation in this world e.g. the statement “all that exists, exists”), it must transcend the limit of one’s pure experience.
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself. The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes. _Soren Kierkegaard

sqeecoo
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Posted 01/17/08 - 04:46 PM:	#2
Orlando wrote: Our mind is far more complicated than a piece of blank slate on which the hand of Nature randomly scribbles; our experience must be guided by reason to make sense of the reality. Therefore if any factual knowledge is to be acquired (let alone the tautological, which finds no factual representation in this world e.g. the statement “all that exists, exists”), it must transcend the limit of one’s pure experience. Agreed! We have all kinds of innate assumptions, as well as those we learn from others without experiencing stuff ourselves. We make sense of the world, not build on "pure" observations (there is no such thing). This is not very problematic, the blank slate theory is no longer very popular.

Epicurus
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Posted 01/21/08 - 09:20 AM:	#3
sqeecoo wrote: Agreed! We have all kinds of innate assumptions, as well as those we learn from others without experiencing stuff ourselves. Is not "innate assumption" an oxymoron? My understanding of "innate" is that it refers to knowledge that one was born with, though since interrogation of the new born is tricky it might be more reliable to use the concept of a priori truths. On the other hand an "assumption" I had supposed to be a hypothesis that one adopted to facilitate the development of a rationale where evidence (perhaps empirically derived from experience) was lacking. We may need both in order to acquire knowledge but that doesn't make them the same thing.

sqeecoo
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Posted 01/21/08 - 11:30 AM:	#4
An a priori truth might be the concept of time and space, but I'd call all the stuff that controls feeding, play, language-learning, social integration, fighting/running abilities etc. innate assumptions. We can call them anything you like, but they are not necessary truths like time and space, nor are they knowledge in the sense of justified true belief.

Epicurus
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Posted 01/22/08 - 06:46 AM:	#5
It would be more usual to call them instincts would it not? I don't think we should coin terms of doubtful linguistic accuracy where adequate terms exist already. As to whether time and space are necessary truths: of themselves they are not truths, let alone necessary truths. These are just names that need to be embodied in some proposition before a truth value can be assessed. Thus "Time is linear" is a proposition that may or may not be true but "time" on its own has no truth value. As to whether knowledge is justified true belief: this is pretty close to the definiton rejected by Socrates in the final pages of Theaetetus. Could a false belief ever be justified? On the other hand it is not difficult to construct circumstances in which a belief is both true and justified yet not knowledge because the justification is not the grounds of its truthfulness.

sqeecoo
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Posted 01/22/08 - 09:24 AM:	#6
Epicurus wrote: It would be more usual to call them instincts would it not? I don't think we should coin terms of doubtful linguistic accuracy where adequate terms exist already. As to whether time and space are necessary truths: of themselves they are not truths, let alone necessary truths. These are just names that need to be embodied in some proposition before a truth value can be assessed. Thus "Time is linear" is a proposition that may or may not be true but "time" on its own has no truth value. As to whether knowledge is justified true belief: this is pretty close to the definiton rejected by Socrates in the final pages of Theaetetus. Could a false belief ever be justified? On the other hand it is not difficult to construct circumstances in which a belief is both true and justified yet not knowledge because the justification is not the grounds of its truthfulness. Well, what the word "assumption" indicates that they can be put into language, but aren't at that stage. For instance, "time exists" "events have a cause", "mother" as a concept, etc. is stuff I'd call an "unconscious or inborn assumption", that has not been put into words, but can be. These things can be true or false. For stuff that can't be verbalized at all, instinct is a better word (but I am not sure what can't be verbalized at all). I'd call "time" an "inborn concept", not an instinct. Maybe "instinctive concept". But this is not very important, as long as we understand each other Regarding knowledge, that is the standard philosophical definition of knowledge. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge) You are completely right to say there are problems with it. I for one don't think we can have knowledge of that kind, or any justification what so ever - I am a skeptic. But that's another matter

Epicurus
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Posted 01/23/08 - 05:10 AM:	#7
If you are willing to accept the advice of an ancient, it would be to avoid stating what you would call things until you have examined the standard vocabulary and found it all wanting. "Inborn" has most of the problems of "Innate" without being so delightfully vague. "Events have a cause" took quite a pounding from David Hume. "Time exists" is worth a book on its own. Best wishes.

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