02/12/2024, 20:03 6 Theories of Knowledge and their Relevance | by Axel | Medium

6 Theories of Knowledge and their Relevance

TLDR: Some definitions, and a working response relaying personal decisions about
philosophical and scientific practice

Axel · Follow
8 min read · Sep 5, 2016

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I was asked to discuss these six theories of knowledge and present my thoughts on
them. I dislike most of them for one reason or another and would rather talk about
social and political philosophy because I find it much more useful…but I digress

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because these theories are interesting in certain contexts and relatively

fundamental.

(Logical) Positivism

Definition: Logical Positivism is the view that traditional metaphysical doctrine can
be rejected as meaningless because scientific knowledge is the only factual
knowledge.

Example: This would be rejecting the branch of philosophy that deals with the “first
principles of things,” including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity,
time, and space. So this might be rejecting Plato’s arguments about the ‘forms’ of
things and some of the more abstract parts of his allegory of the cave in favor of
scientific principles about the construction of matter like what we know about
atoms from physics and how matter is constructed.

Thinkers: Hans Hahn, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege

Relativism

Definition: Relativism constitutes the perception that truth, right and wrong,
standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are the products of changing
norms and cultural frameworks, and that their authority or relevance is confined to
the context that produced them.

Example: Relativism would be suggesting that there are no markers of ‘right’ and
‘wrong’, such that things like the ‘human rights’ that have been conceived of today
can’t be applied to eras in the past and that we can’t pass judgment on people
without considering them in the context of their eras. So trying to figure out
whether or not Pontius Pilate would be considered a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ person is
different across the norms of different eras is useless without putting him in his
cultural and historical context.

Thinkers: Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Bernard Crick, Sophists
(Ancient Greece)
Open in app

Ontological Realism
Search

Definition: The “ontological claim of realism” as put by the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosphy, is that there are no objective facts. The ontological realist concludes that
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there is nothing in the world fully answering to our moral concepts, and no facts or
properties that render moral judgment objectively true.

Example: This is the idea that there is no fact, not even anything that we can justify
our moral concepts of good and bad with — so an ontological realist would suggest
that we cannot define anything as objectively bad, even up to and including murder,
because we cannot make objective judgments about goodness and badness.

Thinkers: J.L. Mackie, Alston, W.

Post Modernism

Definition: postmodernism is typically defined by skepticism or distrust toward

grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality. It
asserts, similarly to relativism, that things like knowledge and truth the product of
unique systems and their sociopolitical era, and thus both contextual and
constructed.

Example: Postmodernism came about in the wake of the enlightenment and was a
sort of rigorous questioning of some of the grand assumptions made by the thinkers
that came before it. It took partly from the work of people like Nietzsche (in his
deconstruction of Christian morality) and applied this to other issues. Post
Modernism would suggest, for example, that we should question basic tenants of
social norms and modern thought — like the belief that it is morally wrong to be
unfaithful to a partner or the belief that anything is inherently morally questionable
in an objective way.

Thinkers: John-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derreida

Social Constructivism

Definition: Social constructivism maintains that human development and knowledge

is constructed through interaction with other humans. Social Constructivism applies
the more general philosophy of constructivism to the social in that it is essentially a
sociological theory of knowledge.

Example: This is the idea that we primarily create new knowledge or acquire
knowledge from interacting with other people rather than the natural world —
essentially that my knowledge of the fact that a thing might be painful or sad is not a
result of my observation of the natural but a product of social interaction and when
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I’ve seen others feel pain or sadness. This is because truth itself, for social
constructivists, is a product of the social.

Thinkers: Peter L. Berger, Lev Vygotsky, Thomas Luckmann

Scientific Realism

Definition: Scientific realism is defined by a favorable attitude towards theories and

models, recommending belief in both the observable and unobservable aspects of
the world described by the sciences. It means that theoretical claims and observed
research by themselves constitute knowledge.

Example: This is the idea that knowledge comes from experiments, so that data and
theoretical models are what constitute knowledge about the world — so that our
theory of evolution or the theory of relativity are things that are considered
knowledge would be a form of scientific realism.

Thinkers: Ernan McMullin, Richard Boyd

For more on any of these go here:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The SEP gratefully acknowledges founding support from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science…
plato.stanford.edu

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Brains.

Work Question: Explain which you are most and least favorable towards, and why.

I am least favorable towards Ontological Realism and Relativism. Though I don’t

think I align philosophically with any of these six doctrines completely, I am most
favorable towards parts of scientific realism and a less-extreme version of social
constructivism. I do not think we should ever divorce the philosophical entirely
from scientific thought and feel that it will be useful to form a collaborative
relationship between the two disciplines. I also believe that though much of
knowledge is to be gained by social interactions, this does not constitute the totality
of what should be considered knowledge.

I also think that there is the possibility of something beyond the currently
observable world, but that insofar as we can’t detect this, it isn’t particularly relevant
to our lived experiences. In this sense I feel scientific realism is relatively accurate
in its conception of what constitutes knowledge. In the long run, I am absolutely
most interested in pushing scientific research to have it answer deeper
philosophical questions about our existence and whether we even have the
capability to comprehend it through traditional science and research or other
means, but don’t feel that debates about knowledge are philosophically pertinent.
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To me it seems that there are many things that we can focus on when we talk about
‘knowing,’ but that some of these things are beyond usefulness at this exact moment
and that science and research ought to focus most on what it has the present
capability to understand and theorize about. To this point, I also feel scientific
realism is the most practical of these six theories. I also think that our capabilities of
perception, both scientific and non — might be better focused on political and social
philosophy, which do things like encompass creating a more widely-spread
understanding of what justice looks like, why it is important to live as part of a
broader community, how to understand the nuances of that community in order to
be a productive member of society, and other things that seem to me more relevant
to our existence as human beings than what it means to ‘know’ something. In my
mind, all we have is our perception of this world — we cannot know exactly what
consciousness or knowledge mean for other human beings or for other creatures
that might have perspectives or lives completely divergent from our own in a full
and complete way — so we should focus our study on that which is measurable and
impactful to our current frame of existence.

From my own perspective, I also inherently distrust anyone who believes that there
aren’t moral absolutes — and that these aren’t relatively easy to mark out at least to
some extent (they have been through human rights doctrine, etc. though some are
still debated) or have been marked out by in the past by those in the philosophical
community and continuum. This is why I am least favorable towards Ontological
Realism or Relativism (and Postmodernism to an extent).

However, I also am highly distrustful of the ‘older guard’ of absolute ideologies,

particularly any of those tied into religion or relying upon a god-figure to create
those absolutes (in this sense I do like postmodernism and what it took from
Nietzsche, but disagree with it in many other ways). In this sense I can identify with
relativism because I inherently agree with the idea that you can see how
conceptions of justice and morality have changed over time, but I do believe they
are things that can be/have been pinned down and defined in the absolute — so I
also disagree with relativism and postmodernism on that point.

To elaborate on my prior statements slightly, I do absolutely think that there is much

value in reading and learning the writings considered part of metaphysics, such as
the older philosophies that plumb the nature of ‘facts’ despite my feelings about
their relevance to modern philosophical debates. A fact to me is something that we
gain by observing and studying, much like in scientific realism, but I think that we
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must also use things aside from scientific tools to understand the world and that
pure philosophic inquiry is extremely valuable when it concerns certain topics. I
can agree with the assertions of relativism and ontological realism that “facts” are
essentially subjective in the sense that I do not think we can truly be ‘certain 100%’
about anything. There could easily be other parts of reality that we cannot observe
because our brains are limited not only to our own subjective perceptions but also to
the limitations of human beings as a species and what we are capable of perceiving
(though this ability of perception changes as science develops). In this sense (though
I will reiterate that I think that debating about what constitutes ‘knowledge’ feels
fraught and aimless in the modern era) these things are important for our study
precisely because they develop or articulate interesting ways of thinking about the
world and possibilities of what might exist beyond our capabilities to perceive with
human senses, even if their conclusions are not necessarily “correct” in a scientific
sense.

I also hold on to the idea that the perceivable reality in which we live is the most
important one because it is the only one we have. Until we can perceive others, I feel
like it is less productive and interesting to theorize about these unless in the realm
of science fiction, without using theories as goalposts to work towards. This by no
means is a condemnation of the philosophical or scientific practice as a whole, but I
feel there are some of these theorists on the list above who ignore(d) more pressing
issues in favor of those that matter little in a practical sense.

In this sense, I personally value and have chosen a more scientific and research-
oriented approach, but one that is grounded within the philosophical search for
meaning, which I think can be a helpful ‘goal-setting’ exercise or something that can
frame one’s research — and ultimately make it more meaningful.

Philosophy Science Psychology Knowledge Essay

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