Week 1:
Introduction: Between Scepticism and Scientism
Scientism: Science is vastly superior to all other attempts at securing knowledge: its laws provide certainty
• Associated with modernism, rational-secular values and the use of reason.
• Slogan: Scientific method is the only method to obtain facts and the truth
• Science in scientism seen as:
- Crowning achievement of the human mind
- Vastly superior to all other attempts at securing knowledge
- Provider of certainty
• Modernism: Knowledge and truth can only be found by and in science
• Modernists believed we live in the age of certainty
• Science mirrors nature and out mind is a mirror of nature
• Defended rationality
Scepticism: Science does not give certainty, it is equal to other forms of knowledge, science is a faith. Truth
and knowledge can only be based on experience
• Critical thinking about science
• Our mind is a crooked mirror: the knowledge we possess is not a reflection of reality but a flawed
perspective
• Truth is experience and we remain uncertain
• Science is subjective and in interest of the powerful: more than one truth
• Associated with post-modernism, Nihilism, and Relativism
• Anything goes: expresses the notion of sceptics -> Science not ruling knowledge
• Example: “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven
knows anythings goes” : expresses the urgency of Sceptics to deconstruct old and ‘failed’ ideologies
according to the time and experience.
• Post-modernism:
- Associated with Scepticism
- Belief that science monopolies the truth
- Asserts that there is no proof in science
- Calls science an ideology or faith
• They argued that contemporary science is the product of failed ideologies from the Scientific Revolution
and the Enlightenment
Debate Between Scientism and Scepticism
• Stems from philosophical scepticism -> being critical about science within the boundaries of philosophy
• Among Philosophers: A family feud in which different opinions based on arguments that also vary in
stance according to currents
• In society: A relativistic, radical interpretation of philosophical skepticism has become like a raging fire
• Alternative facts, fake news, post-truth era, fact-free politics, political correctness, freedom and
conformism
• Example: discussion on climate change or safety of vaccines
‘Exploring Humans’: Curiosity defines human consciousness
Main Questions:
• What is the foundation of knowledge?
• • What is the foundation of science?
• What are valid research methods?
• What counts as the truth? What is real?
• What are the assumptions behind science?
• How does or should science proceed?
• Are there limits to scientific knowledge?
• What is the difference between pseudo-science, science, and non-science?
Reader Text 1:
Two Methods of Inquiry
1. Naive inquiry - ‘I have a theory’
• Theory = a speculation
,• Non-formalised, non-systematic and non-controlled form of collecting and summarising information into
naive theories
- What we do in daily life
- Pre-modern thinking: religious thinking, belief in a given truth
- Non-sophisticated ways of knowing: fixing belief
• Associated with biases, convictions, popular scepticism, myths
• Example: astrology, superstition, conspiracy theories etc.
2. Scientific Method - Truth is an objective reality ‘out there’
• Science shifts the locus of truth from individuals to groups, by establishing a set of mutually agreed upon
rules for establishing truth
- External permanency: something upon which our thinking has no effect: could affect every man
not just individuals
- Highly formalised, systematic and controlled inquiry
- Observations and reasoning and error prone (have external evidence)
- Scientific method + modern thinking
Requirements:
1. The use and selection of concepts/constructs (variables)
2. Linking concepts/constructs (variables) to propositions (hypotheses)
3. Testing theories with observable evidence
4. The definition of concepts (variables)
5. The publication of definitions and procedures
6. Control of alternative explanation
7. Unbiased selection of evidence
8. Reconciliation of theory and observation
Associations:
• Critical shift in perspective compared to naive inquiry
• Internal beliefs should be supported by external evidence
• Methodological rigor
• Laboratories and experiments are the symbol of scientific inquiry
• Example: empirical cycle, scientific journals
4 Methods of Knowing:
Method of Naive Inquiry
1) Method of tenacity: what is commonly known as true
2) Method of authority: high regarded persons speak the truth
3) Method of Reasonable man or A priori method: (market place of ideas) independent of all particular
experiences: ideas analysed based on their consistency
Method of science
4) Scientific method: such as empirical cycle or analytical empirical approach. Knowledge has to be
supported by evidence
Chapter 1: Rationalism and Empiricism in Antiquity (pg 19-39) What is knowledge?
1.2: Plato’s Rationalism
Rationalism: Maintains that true knowledge about reality drives from the proper use of our reasoning
capacities (intellect, reason or ratio) : we cannot arrive at knowledge only through the use of sensory
capacities
• Plato was Socrates’s pupil
• Intellectual Midwifery: assist others in order to give birth to true ideas (Socratic method)
• He believed sensory experiences lead to beliefs or opinions (doxa) while reasoning leads to knowledge
(episteme)
Metaphysics:
• Branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as
being, knowing, identity, time and space
• Epistemology: (how can we know?): The theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods,
validity, and scope, and the diasctintion between justified belief and opinion (how can knowledge about the
world whether it is imagined, physical, world of forms be gained?)
, • Ontology: (how the world is?): philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality
as well as the basic categories of being and their relations (investigating metaphysics) (is there a real
world, a physical world, an imagined world, world of forms?)
What is real and what is not?
Heraclites
• Convinced that change (flux) is at the hart of existence: nothing is everything becomes
• example: you cannot step into the same river twice because the river is no longer the same and nor are you
• Due to the changing nature of appearances he argued that no-one can attain knowledge
• Only those who are capable of grasping the fundamental law (Logos) behind appearances can be said to
arrive at knowledge
Parmenides
• Sense mislead humans into thinking that things are changing all the time
• Even if a tree is chopped down and turned into a chair it does not disappear but changes appearances
• According to him nothin ever changes therefore everything is nothing becomes
• Real existence means to be without change
• Knowledge pertains to a hidden order beyond the transient appearances
• The senses are deeply misleading guides to reality and we must rely on reason to discover the unchanging
truths about eternal reality
The debate between them is about appearance and reality Heraclites believes change is real and being
is not while for Parmenides the other way around being is real but change is not.
Protagoras
• Individual things are for me such as they appear to me and for you as they appear to you: truth is in the eye
of the beholder
Plato
• Believed the real world cannot be the changing world of appearances but a supernatural realm which
contains the eternal and perfect forms of almost everything.
• Two worlds: Plato believed there is a natural world of appearances (we live in it) and a supernatural realm
where universals exist (world of Forms)
• Example: A hand drawn triangle is an appearance or reflection of the perfect (universal) triangle that exists
in the world of Forms
• Followed Heraclites: everything changes and hence our knowledge will vary form moment to moment and
between observers.
• CONCLUSION: For knowledge we cannot appeal to the evidence of observation because of the perpetual
flux of natural reality, we must learn to see behind the world of appearances into the world of Forms of
which perception only allows shadowy glimpses otherwise we are prisoners in a cave
• Allegory of A Cave: A cave with prisoners and a fire inside it. The fire causes shadows to be projected on a
wall and the prisoners believe these shadows are real. Once they get released they see light (knowledge)
and real objects and not inferior copies projected in the cave.
• The operation of sense results in mere belief (doxa) not knowledge (episteme)
Plato’s Nativism: Doctrine that human beings possess innate (or inborn) ideas, we are born with them
• We are all born possessing knowledge that is lost but we may remember it if we use reason correctly (not
senses)
• Believed the immortal soul belongs to the World of Forms, the forms are therefore accessible through
reason (theory of reincarnation)
• Plato’s Meno: socrates tries to prove Plato’s view about learning by recollection -> anamnesis
• Show the slave could remember mathematical knowledge through proper use of reason
1.3: Aristotle’s Empiricism
Empiricism: Claims that not reason but sense experience is the ultimate source of knowledge: the senses are
a reliable indicator of what reality is like
• Aristotle believes that senses are reliable indicators of reality and that one should rely on empirical facts
(experiences) to get true knowledge
• He rejected Plato’s view of two worlds but there is only the world we see and live in
• Peripatetic Axiom:
• Derived from Aristotle's works by Thomas Aquinas
