LOUIS P. POJMAN’S EPISTEMOLOGY

LOUIS P. POJMAN’S EPISTEMOLOGY

Louis Paul Pojman (April 22, 1935-October 15, 2005) was an American philosopher and professor, whose name is most recognized as the author of over a hundred philosophy texts and anthologies which he himself read at more than sixty universities around the world and which continue to be used widely for educational purposes. Dr. Pojman was known for work in applied ethics and philosophy of religion.

According to Louis Paul Pojman, the Theory of Knowledge – Epistemology (from the Greek, “The science of knowing”) – inquires into the nature of knowledge and justification of belief. Many philosophers believe that this inquiry is central to philosophy: if philosophy is the quest for truth and wisdom, then we need to know how to find the truth and justify our beliefs. We need to know how to distinguish truth from falsify and justified from unwarranted beliefs.

The field of epistemology concerns several classical issues:

1.      What is knowledge? That is, what are the essential characteristics of this concept?

2.      Can we know anything at all? Or are we doomed to ignorance about the most important subject in life?

3.      How do we obtain knowledge – by using our senses, or our intellect, or both?

Let us examine each of these questions.

What is knowledge? The claim you know something is the claim that you possess a truth. If you claim to know that “10 X 10 = 100,” you implicitly claim that the statement “10 X 10 = 100” is true. It would be misusing language to make statements like “I know that 10 X 10 = 13, but it is false,” because knowledge claims about grasping the truth. Of course, we may be wrong about our knowledge claims.  The drunk claims to “know” that the elephants are pink elephants in the room, the child claims to “know” that Santa Claus exists and two witnesses may claim contradictory “knowledge” in describing an accident. We often falsely that we know. Sometimes the evidence on which we base a knowledge claims are contradicted by others, as when two people of different religious faith each claims the only true religion, or when one person claims with certainty that abortion is morally wrong and the other person claims with equal certainty that it is morally permissible.

Knowledge involves possessing the truth, but includes more than having a true belief. Imagine that I am holding up four cards so that I can see their faces but you can see only their backs. I ask to guess what types of cards I am holding. You feel a hunch (that is, have a weak belief) that I am holding up four aces and correctly announce, “You are holding up four aces in your hands.” Although we both possess the truth, I have something you don’t – an adequate justification for my belief that the knower has as adequate justification for claiming truth.

Some further questions are as follows: How much justification is enough to transform a mere true belief into a state of knowledge? Must we be certain about a belief before it counts as knowledge?  Is some knowledge self-evident, so that we do not need further evidence for our claim to know (such as the claim to know that we have free will)?

This path leads us to our second major question:  Can we know anything at all? Or are we doomed to ignorance about the most important subject in life? What do we really know? Could it be that we really know nothing at all? The theory that we do not have any knowledge at all is called skepticism. We cannot be completely certain that any of our beliefs are true. Radical skepticism goes even further, claiming that we cannot even be certain of the belief that we cannot be completely certain that any of our beliefs are true. In other words we are even unable to know that we cannot have knowledge.

Skepticism does not deny that we should act from the best evidence available, but it insists that we can never be sure that our truth claims are correct. For all we know, the universe and everything in it could have been created ten minutes ago, and all our apparent memories created with it. Or the universe and everything in it may have doubled in size last night while we were sleeping. How could we check this? Would it help to use a rule to measure our height, to see if we had doubled in size?

Further the Louis P. Pojman asks, do you know that you are not the only person who exists? May be everyone else is a robot programmed to speak and smile and write exams. Can you prove that other people have consciousness? Have you ever felt their consciousness, their pain, or their sense of the color green? In fact how do you know that you’re not dreaming right now? All that you are experiencing is part of a dreams were really minidreams within your maxidream. How can you prove that you are not dreaming? Or, perhaps you are a brain suspended in a tub full of a chemical solution in a scientist’s laboratory and wired to a computer that is feeding you simulated experiences. If you are under the control of an ingenious scientist, you would never discover it, for he/she has arranged that you will only be able to compare your beliefs to the simulated experiences. Your tub is your destiny!

Can you defeat the skeptic? This is what the French rationalist Descartes, Tries to do. He has realized that much of what he took for knowledge has turned out to be false or unsupported by clear evidence, and he wonders whether all his beliefs were unjustified. So he tries to suspend belief about all his claims to knowledge, in order to built a firm foundation and thereon a strong house of knowledge.

Now we turn to our third question: How do we obtain knowledge? Through using our senses, or intellect, or both? The two classis theories on how we acquire knowledge are called rationalism and empiricism. Both theories use reason in acquiring knowledge, but rationalist believe that reason is sufficient to discover truth, whereas empiricists hold that all knowledge originates through sense perception.

Plato distinguishes two approaches to knowledge: sense perception and reason. Sense perception cannot be adequate for grasping the truth because its objects change and decay. All one gets in this way are beliefs about particular objects. Knowledge, however, goes beyond the particular and grasps universal ideas or forms. Plato thought that all knowledge was a priori knowledge one has independently of sense experience through the five senses. Empirical beliefs, according to Plato, are not knowledge, but simply unstable appearances.

John Locke, systematically attacked the notions of innate ideas and a priori knowledge, he claims that knowledge must be derived from sense experience. He writes, “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an at most endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded.” In sort he claims that the core qualities of what we know are caused by the world itself, although some qualities are the product of the way our perceptual mechanisms are affected by the world.

There is no material world, says Berkeley, only ideas in minds. Physical objects are simply mental events. “The table I write on exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed – meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually perceives it.” All physical objects are mental phenomena that would cease to exist if they were not perceived.

David Hume, rejecting Berkeley’s idealism and in its place accepted a modified skepticism. Hume recognizes the problem of having knowledge of the real world. Like Locke, he believes that all that we can be reduced to (1) sense experience and (2) reflection of that experience. He makes distinction between “matter-of-fact” knowledge and “relations of ideas” knowledge.

Through the above arguments, Louis P. Pojman has identified two important questions, as from the part of rationalist and empiricist, answers to the questions:

1. How do we acquire ideas?

Rationalism: Some ideas are innate, know a prior, or independent of experience.

Empiricism: all ideas are acquired from experience. No nonanalytic propositions are known a priori.

2. How is knowledge organized in the mind?

Rationalism: The mind introduces new principles of order into experience drawn from its own nature.

Empiricism: The mind arranges and stores materials that are given in experience.

Reference

Pojman, Louis P. Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.