Epistemology Review

Plato

• Allegory of the cave
  • Prisoners are chained in a cave
  • Unable to turn heads, can only face forward and look at the shadows on the walls
  • Behind them are people and behind those people is a fire
  • The prisoners learn what the captors teach them
  • That is their reality
  • A thing is held up and the captors have the prisoners repeat a word
  • One day, one prisoner escapes into the outside world
  • they find out the world is not as it seemed
    • there was light, things had colour, elephants weren’t so small and made noise
  • Like “living in your own little bubble”
• World of the forms
  • Everything around us just versions of a perfect thing that exists in the word of the forms
  • Everything that has ever existed on earth exists in the world of the forms
  • A world with all the the ideas people on earth would ever come up with
  • When you die, you go back to the world of the forms

Rationalism vs. Empiricism

• Rationalists Believe…
  • Senses are no to be trusted as they can often trick us
  • (Optical illusions)
  • Relying on logic to determine reality
  • We are born with innate ideas about things (intuition)
  • we do not need to experience them to know what they are
  • Plato and Descartes were rationalists
• Empiricists believe…
  • Our 5 senses are the only ways we can get information
  • we know nothing beyond the 5 senses
  • We are born a blank slate
  • Everything we know comes from sensory data
  • Locke was an empiricist

Descartes

I think therefore I am

• You are a thinking thing
  • You can’t be for sure that everything around you is real
  • Dreams can feel so real yet be only a fake dream
  • What he was certain of though, was that in order to think and know that you senses can be wrong, you have to be able to think
  • The one thing he knew was true was that we are thinking things

"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once”

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems

Putnam/Dennett

• Brain in a Vat
  • Everyone is living in a simulation
  • All brains are stored in vats that are part of the simulation
  • Bodies, things aren’t real. Just created so we think they are real
  • We can’t trust our senses in that case like Descartes said as our senses deceive us
• Dennett
  • How are we supposed to create a simulation for everyone in the world?
  • Brings up the point that we would have to calculate so many things to make you think you were moving your “phantom body”
  • So many unpredictable things people can do that they would have to think of
  • How can you store so much memory and info?
  • Descartes imagined his original demon to have limitless power which would solve the issue
• Putnam
  • An evil scientist who creates the brain in a vat or perhaps automatic machinery?
  • The world is a collective hallucination