Thursday, February 12, 2009

KNOWledge...how can you have it without KNOWING something?

Okay, so in a sort of post-class reflection I would like to admit that I am still a little unsure about this new idea of what knowledge is. Of course, I never really bought want Lynch was asserting in our earlier discussions but I couldn't help to accept a little of what he claimed about truth and its relation to knowlege. How can we say that we have knowlege without being correct, or without ever knowing for sure what we think we know. Okay, so I understand that I am talking myself in circles a little bit, but there needs to be some foundational basis of something before we can say that we have knowlege, right? I think that otherwise people are just smart. As for the bird and TV example we used today in class, how can a child assert from the information he is given that a TV is alive just like a bird is alive, because they speak. Is this knowledge? or is the child just smart or an excellent critical thinker? What is the difference? Thought process isn't knowlege, thats just being smart. That was my major question about class today.
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  1. AnonymousFebruary 13, 2009 at 6:16 AM

    Couple of things.....what of what Lynch said have you not bought?

    The point of the tv being alive example isn't that the child had knowledge BUT that avoidance of error isn't the most important thing. If we take knowledge to be certainty and the avoidance of error the primary reason for knowledge than this young man didn't have growing knowledge of what makes things alive simply because he had an erroneous belief.

    False beliefs are not the end of the world and much of what we put forward as knowledge (curves on graphs) are, in fact, in some sense of the word, false, but we still take to be knowledge because of what they're doing.

    Part of Elgin's strategy is to ask why is knowledge important and is certain truth a non-negotiable part of this.

    Make more sense?

    The rest of her book will, I'm fairly confident, help you to better understand these first parts.

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