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The philosopher Bertrand Russell in his work, “The Problems of Philosophy,” comes to some conclusions of the truth of objects in our world. Through questioning certain ideas and problems in our world, he breaks down what can know what really exists in the world and what does not.
Russell, an empiricist, believes that through our sensory perception of our environment. However, our own individual perception can be skewed, and therefore is susceptible to err. Russell gives an example of three people, one is color blind, one is sick, and one is inebriated sick, and one is inebriated, and ask them to describe the same chair, they will all give you slightly different answers. Then if you take that chair and put it behind a distorted plane of glass, or underwater, it will appear increasingly different. Therefore must be a difference between appearance and reality. If our perception can be so skewed, what can we actually conclude is real and what is not?
Russell uses a method of cross referencing our sensory data and our knowledge of certain realities in order to define what we can really know what exists. Russell uses the phrase “sense data to differentiate the difference between reality and appearance. Sense data is the information that our senses take in during an act of sensation, such as smelling or seeing. When you walk into a kitchen, you smell the food, see the color of the table tops, and feel the heat from the stove you intake different sense data of the kitchen. Sense data are the mental images and memories that we obtain from a particular object in the real physical world. As shown in the chair example, one object can have a multitude of sense data. Sense data are correlated to the objects they represent. Howev...
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...own to “There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald,” (On Denoting Mind 1905). This is an example of how his views of senses affect his view on knowledge, we cannot take the originally quote at face value of what it is, just like we cannot truly accept the fact that something is a couch and not a bed, we must break it down and use our logic of other things and infer a conclusion from this information. We need to make sure each individual facet of the statement is true before concluding the whole statement is true, or else we could be misled to believe something that is not true.
So, through Russell’s search of true knowledge we can infer certain truths and ideas from our senses. With the data received from our senses we can use our facets of knowledge to come to conclusions about an object.
The simple optical illusions used by Ariely show us just how easily our senses can lead our judgments to be distorted. The first illusion was an animation of Shepard’s Tables; an example of size-constancy expansion first published by Roger Shepard as “Turning the Tables”. We know the two tables are the same length but yet why does one table appear to be longer than the other? In this case it is because the angles suggest depth and perspective and the brain wrongly believes one table is longer and while the other in shorter. It is interesting that despite us knowing that the tables are in fact the same length, we still perceive them to be different lengths; despite us knowing the truth, we could not get our minds to see reality as it really is. In the second example, Ariely shows the ...
This paper will be covering what knowledge essentially is, the opinions and theories of J.L. Austin, Descartes, and Stroud, and how each compare to one another. Figuring out what knowledge is and how to assess it has been a discussion philosophers have been scratching their heads about for as long as philosophy has been around. These three philosophers try and describe and persuade others to look at knowledge in a different light; that light might be how a statement claiming knowledge is phrased, whether we know anything at all for we may be dreaming, or maybe you’re just a brain in a vat and don’t know anything about what you perceive the external world to be.
Gibson (1979) developed an ecological approach to the study of visual perception, which is a new and radical approach to the whole field of psychology that humans perceive their environment directly without mediation by cognitive process or by mental entities. According to his assertion of direct perception, there is enough information in our environment to make sense of the world (Gibson, 1977). Gibson (1979) said “direct perception is an activity of getting information from ambient array of light” (p. 147), and further called this a process of information pickup. That is, there is no need for mental processing since every object and event in the world have inherent meanings that are detected and exploited by humans. So his perception is based on information, not on sensations, which is in contrast with the conventional perspective of perception.
Aristotle elaborates further that what we might name our power of knowing is not in reference to actual begins, until it truly comprehends. This view is different of the early philosophers, who said that the power of knowing must include all things if it can know all things. But if it knew everything, then it would be an eternal intellect, and not just a possible intellect. Along the same lines he said that of the senses, if they were fundamentally composed of the things they observe, their observations would not assume any external practical things.(4)
So that there can be falsehood a relation must involve someone judging or believing. Russell uses Othello as an example in this relation "Desdemona 's love for Cassio" this does not truly exist, what does exist is the relation of Othello 's mind with the objects in the belief which are Desdemona, loving, Cassio and Othello, this is a relation of four terms. Belief is the relation that Othello has to all of these terms, his act of believing unites all of these terms into a complex whole. Belief is what relates the objects or "constituents" Cassio, Desdemona and loving together with the judge or object Othello. There is also a direction or order in which the objects are placed this is acknowledge by "Cassio loves Desdemona" being a different statement then "Desdemona loves Cassio." Within the statement "Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio," It is not loving which forms the complex but how the object relates to the subjects that creates the complex unity in this case it is Othello 's act of believing that cements the relation between the subject and objects. This leads Russell to the conclusion that beliefs are true when correspond to an associated complex and false they aren 't. This is the nature of truth. The constituents are put in an order that are united by a relation which in the case of Othello is "Loving" which are also the objects of the belief. This complex unity is referred to as the " fact corresponding to the belief" meaning that statements are true when and if there are existing corresponding
Wittgenstein, Ludwig; G. E. M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (eds. and trans.). Philosophical Investigations. 4th edition, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
The problem I hope to expose in this paper is the lack of evidence in The Argument from Analogy for Other Minds supporting that A, a thought or feeling, is the only cause of B. Russell believes that there are other minds because he can see actions in others that are analogous to his own without thinking about them. He believes that all actions are caused by thoughts, but what happens when we have a reaction resulting as an action of something forced upon one’s self? Such as when a doctor hits your patellar tendon with a reflex hammer to test your knee-jerk reflex. Russell does not answer this question. He is only “highly probable” that we are to know other minds exist through his A is the cause of B postulate.
How do we know what we know? Ideas reside in the minds of intelligent beings, but a clear perception of where these ideas come from is often the point of debate. It is with this in mind that René Descartes set forth on the daunting task to determine where clear and distinct ideas come from. A particular passage written in Meditations on First Philosophy known as the wax passage shall be examined. Descartes' thought process shall be followed, and the central point of his argument discussed.
In his essay “Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision” David Lewis demonstrates through a vignette called “The Censor” why a suitable pattern of counterfactual dependence is required to for a subject to experience ‘genuine sight’. A subject’s experience of a scene has counterfactual dependence if, and only if, the subject is capable of distinguishing the scene from possible alternative scenes. If the scene were different, the subject would have a different experience. Thus, the subject’s particular experience is dependant on the particular scene being for the eyes. If the subject would be unable to distinguish the scene from possible alternative scenes, then according to Lewis, even if all other requirements for genuine sight are fulfilled (such as a standard casual process, rich
...mewhat dogmatic view. Paley has much stronger support for his specific views than Russell does when it comes to the design argument.
...mean to discover truth through accepting all particulars as true. Fernando Savater's idea of finding objective truth through a field of truths is an excellent example of how an individual is able to discover truth. Since perception is limited to the individual, one could say that the only possible way of finding a universal truth is though accepting a field of truths. An individual must accept all perceptive and subjective truths as truthful in their individual reality. Therefore, one could say that universal truth as we acknowledge it, is no more that the acceptance of an intersubjective frame of mind, the acceptance of all perceptions as indifferent in form. Since a person can change their opinion on a topic, it is impossible to conjure every person's perspective on that topic, consequentially making it impossible to find truth when perception is never constant.
This essay is written to introduce the Russell’s Theory on Definite Description. The main content of this essay including: the definition of definite description, the puzzles concerning definite description, Russell’s Theory on Definite Description, how this theory solves the puzzles, Strawson’s objection to this theory, my evaluation on the convincingness of Strawson’s objection and my evaluation on the convincingness of Russell’s Theory of Definite Description.
Sense perception is the process in which the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, perceive an external stimulus of the knowledge about the outside world. Our senses act as an important source of knowledge about the world but instead of passively reflecting reality, it actively structures it. As such, understanding the world through sense perception is an active process that requires our brain to categorize and interpret what it is we are sensing. Yet, can the knowledge acquired through our senses be entirely trusted, relied and depended upon? There are certain factors that may interfere with how we perceive the world with our senses. Thus, sense perception, as a way of knowing, is selective and subjected to
Philosophy covers a wide range of fundamental problems where it branches out to areas such as language, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, or epistemology – the theory of knowledge. For years, philosophers have analyzed and questions what knowledge is, its value, sources, structure, and whether we know anything at all. Epistemology questions what knowledge is and how we as humans can acquire it – which involves much debate. Though our understanding of knowledge is ambiguous, we do know that knowledge is justified, true belief.
Thus, in our search to understand that which is intangible, we come to realize that the definitions that we seek are further than meets the eye. For although many may say they understand what is and is not real, they often rely on a surface level of understanding. Yet when the curious seek out a deeper grasp of the words real, surreal, and reality, many would discover that they are, in fact, unsolvable. Thus we will never know the ultimate truth, we only can get closer and closer to