Understanding Reason, Knowledge, and Truth: A Philosophical Analysis

Understanding Reason, Knowledge, and Truth

Reason: Practical and Theoretical Rationality: Reason can be understood as the power and the act of explaining something. Theoretical reason is oriented toward the contemplation of the world, that is, to the knowledge of reality. Practical reason, according to Kant, guides action, leading us to a moral idea.

Philosophy and Theoretical Rationality

Philosophy uses theoretical knowledge about reality and truth with the greatest possible rigor. However, unraveling reality requires specifying how we truly know it.

Metaphysical Knowledge

Metaphysical knowledge aims to go beyond scientific explanations. For example, science might discover the human genome, but metaphysics asks if we can reduce ourselves to our genome.

What is Known: We Believe

Learning is an activity that aims to seize a state of affairs in a way that is compatible with others.

Levels of Knowledge

• Opinion: A state of knowledge where the subject takes something as true but lacks certainty.
• Belief: When someone is convinced that what they think is true but cannot justify it.
• Knowledge: To learn something is to account for it to others.

The Interests of Knowledge

• Theoretical Interest: To achieve perfect knowledge.
• Practical Interest: To discover what we do and what we can expect if we do well.
• Technical Interest: To dominate nature.
• Exploit Practical Interest: Oriented toward communication and understanding between beings capable of communicating, to free humans from domination and repression.

Possibility of Knowledge

• Dogmatism: Expresses the naive attitude of those who are sure to know, presuming the capacity of our cognitive faculties.
• Skepticism: Considers reliable knowledge unattainable.
• Subjective Knowledge and Relativism: Deny the possibility of achieving universal valid truths.
• Pragmatism: Identifies the true with the useful.
• Criticism: Represents the intermediate position between dogmatism and skepticism.
• Perspectivism: Proposed by José Ortega y Gasset, maintains that one can arrive at knowledge of reality by combining different perspectives.

Realism

Realism argues that reality, i.e., the object of knowledge, exists by itself, independent of the mind of the subject.

Idealism

Idealism, instead, emphasizes that reality exists independently of the subject who knows.

Origin of the Word Truth

• Greek: Aletheia, meaning "that which is hidden" and comes to mean "discovery."
• Latin: Veritas refers to accuracy and connects with what is said.
• Hebrew: Emunah expresses the truth in the sense of confidence.

The Objective Truth of Knowledge

The objective of knowledge is to get real results.

Criteria of Truth

• Authority: An assertion is accepted as true because it comes from someone who understands the matter.
• Tradition: Taken as true that which over time has been accepted as true.
• Correspondence: Correspondence between thought and reality—what we think is true if the check matches reality.
• Consistency: To check that there is no contradiction between the statements belonging to the same system.
• Utility: A statement will be true when it is beneficial and useful for us.
• Evidence: What is presented as indisputable is obvious as intuitively true.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the twentieth century, he distinguishes between the facts and the formal linguistic structure that expresses them.