Philo 101: Introduction to Philosophy

J. Smith
What is Epistemology?

Epistemology is a particular branch or part of philosophy concerned with asking questions about the nature of
knowledge. In epistemology we are interested in trying to work out what knowledge is, how we know things, and
whether or not as a result of possible answers to these questions it is possible to be sure or to be certain about what
we know. These are very important questions because all the things that we think of as true might be affected by the
answers. Some things that we think are certain and true might turn out to be false, some things we think are sure and
certain might end up being unsure and uncertain, so this part of Philosophy is clearly very important.

Whether or not we think that philosophy is just about questions not answers it is certainly the case that some
philosophers tried to work out arguments that provided definite and clear answers to the big questions. In the area of
Epistemology, philosophers like Plato in ancient Greece and Descartes in France tried to provide us with definite
answers about the nature of knowledge. We will be looking at some of the things these philosophers had to say.

Activity
List three things you know for certain.
Why do you think these are good examples of certain knowledge?
Can you think of an example of something that we previously thought was true but which we now know is false?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Plato

The Ancient Greek philosophers were interested in questions about the nature of things, about how the world came to
be and how it worked.

For many of them it seemed clear that the world around us is always changing and nothing stands still, so from that
they came up with the view that there could not be any certainty about things.

Some, like Plato did not agree and argued that we could not just rely upon how things looked on the surface, we had to
think, we had to reason about the world and that when we did we could identify things that did not change and
remained true.

However surely we know about the world through being able to see, hear, and feel, in other words we know about
things because of the senses. Is it not the case that the senses give us knowledge of the world about us? Plato was not
impressed by this idea. It is too easy for the senses to be misled, for us to get it wrong in some way.

For example if we put a pencil into a glass of water, it might look as if the pencil was bent when in fact we know its
straight. There are many other examples of problems of this kind, where the evidence based on the senses is just wrong
and we know its wrong. For this reason the senses, according to Plato are just not enough they do not provide us
with knowledge of the world, because they can give us false information.

Is knowledge then just about what we can work out in our minds? Is it just reason at work? After all, we know the
pencil does not bend when it goes into water and we know that just because of our ability to reason to work
things out. But our reason too can be wrong, so Plato was not satisfied by this argument either. Knowledge had to be
more than just the things told to us about the world by our senses, and more than just what we can work out by reason.

Activity
Give three examples things we can know through sense experience.
Give three examples of things we can discover by pure reason.