Reflections on the lecture & seminar on 'Knowledge'

The lecture was a bit hard to follow. Even though I understood more what Kant and Socrates are saying, I was still confused with the fact that I didn’t understand everything. During the seminar, we talked about the lecture in a slower tempo, thus (and because I’ve read, thought and heard of the ideas a couple of times by now) it made more sense. Still, I have a hard time to accept the fact that I don’t fully understand everything but I’ve started to somehow make peace with it. The quote below has helped a lot. :-)

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” - Socrates

My conclusion from the lecture and the seminar is a deepen understanding of a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. You can combine those with synthetic judgment and analytic judgment. Basically, I understand it as synthetic judgment (like a posteriori knowledge) is based upon experiences and analytic judgment (like a priori knowledge) is a form of “objective” perspective.

Kant asks the question: “how can we gain synthetic knowledge of the world a priori?”. This is really hard to comprehend and think of. I’ve experienced that rides on the subway and late at night to be good times to think of these abstract questions. During the seminar we asked ourselves if a newborn possessed the ability to see. I mean of course the baby see stuff unless its blind but does it understand what it sees? Someone did put it as the baby was laying a puzzle. At first it only has a couple of pieces but the more pieces it gains the more it understands, and the the more it “sees”.

I thought it was interesting to shift perspective and ask whether the baby could hear us or listen to us. To me, that is how I understand it. When I have enough pieces of the puzzle I listen and before that I can only hear. I think this is very interesting to reflect further on. When learning, for example, you can either get a shallow picture of the field or you can dive right into it. When you’re learning about how businesses are structured (I’m taking a course in marketing at the moment), you can either read about the theory first or you can pay a company a visit and see how they’re organized in reality. I interpret this as you need to both visit the firm but also learn about the theories of organisation structures in order to gain knowledge of business organisations. However, it is interesting to look at what is most efficient to do first. I think I would like to visit the company first and then read about the different theories and perhaps then again visit the company to gain knowledge.

This is also how I look at the philosophical stuff we’re learning at the moment. I need to read about it, reflect on it and talk about. I will never fully understand it but the more I think about the more interesting I find it.

Lastly, I would like to enlighten the differences between naturalism and scientism I’ve reflected on. We talked about why some people have more words for snow than others. Of course the environment plays a big role. The interesting part to me though was that there isn’t really only a scientific answer to the question. We talked about love too. Someone said it depends on the level of dopamine/serotonin in the brain and I accept that fact. However, that isn’t all. I think I understood that science isn’t everything. There must be some kind of magic in order for me to fall in love. I’m sure it isn’t just serotonin levels. To explain it in a somewhat  “engineery” way I would say that the equation has no solution or that the equation has an infinity of solutions.

I also reflected on how the senses play a role in all of this. During the seminar, we also talked about how blind people experiences the world. I was thinking that if you’re blind you compensate this by trying to “see” things with your other senses. Perhaps we (people with five senses) also try to “see” stuff only someone with a sixth sense can see? I don’t mean to get all dopey now. However, I was thinking that maybe it is the same with falling in love. Some people only have five ways of falling in love and some people have more “senses” and therefore can fall in love in more ways. I don’t think this can be explained with serotonin and dopamine, this is something else. You could call it magic or humbug, I don’t know, but my conclusion is that this “something” is needed to fully understand how come we fall in love or how come some people knows more words than others of how to identify snow.

My knowledge about the world is the world and I’ve learnt to see both facts but also forms in order to gain knowledge.