인식론의 이해 지식의 본질과 한계

### 인식론의 이해 지식의 본질과 한계
* 📚 오늘날과 같이 정보가 풍부한 세상에서 진실과 거짓을 분별하는 것은 지식의 본질, 기원, 범위를 탐구하는 철학의 한 분야인 인식론의 초점인 **지식에 대한 중요한 질문**을 제기합니다.
* 🤔 인식론은 지식의 본질, 즉 지식이 무엇인지, 아는 것과 모르는 것을 어떻게 구분하는지, 그리고 지식의 습득 방법과 그 한계를 포함하여 우리가 알 수 있는 것의 범위라는 **두 가지 주요 영역**으로 질문을 분류합니다.
* 💡 지식은 인지적 성공으로 정의되며, **경험적 지식, 절차적 지식, 명제적 지식**을 포함하며, 철학자들은 주로 세계에 대한 사실적 주장을 포함하는 **명제적 지식**에 초점을 맞추고 있습니다.
* 🧠 지식을 정당화된 참된 믿음(JTB)으로 보는 전통적인 관점은 철학자 에드몬드 게티에에 의해 도전받았는데, 그는 **참된 믿음은 운에 의해 발생할 수 있다**는 시나리오를 제시하며 진정한 지식을 위해서는 **정당화가 중요**하다는 점을 지적했습니다.
* 🔍 정당화는 신자의 마음 속 요인에 의존하는 내재론과 지각과 같은 외부 요인을 고려하는 외재론으로 이해할 수 있는데, 대표적인 외재론 이론 중 하나는 **지식이 신뢰할 수 있는 신념 형성 과정에서 발생**한다는 신뢰성론입니다.
* 🏗 정당화 이론에는 **신념이 거미줄처럼 서로를 지지한다는 일관성 이론**과 **특정 신념이 다른 신념의 기반**이 된다는 기초주의가 있으며, 두 이론 모두 **회귀 문제와 인식론적 회의론** 등의 도전에 직면해 있습니다.
* 🌀 데카르트 회의론과 흄 회의론과 같은 유명한 회의주의 이론은 우리 인식의 한계와 확실성을 확립하는 데 따르는 어려움을 강조하며, **회의주의가 완화되고 베이지안 인식론과 같은 현대적 접근 방식이 신념의 정도를 포용**하는 것으로 이어졌습니다.
* 🌌 궁극적으로 인식론의 추구는 인류의 존재와 진리의 본질을 이해하려는 인류의 탐구를 드러내며, **불확실한 세계를 탐색할 때 지식에 대한 지속적인 탐구**가 중요하다는 점을 강조합니다.

인식론은 지식의 본질, 기원, 한계를 탐구하여 우리가 진정으로 알고 있는 것의 복잡성을 드러냅니다.

Today, we live in a world where we can access more information than ever before. But how do you know what is true and what’s not? How do you know that you even know something? For that matter, what even is knowledge? These are questions concerning Epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge that forms the very foundation of human understanding. Epistemology is the study of the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge and epistemic justification. In this video, I’ll do my best to clearly and easily introduce the subject and cover significant developments and concepts from past to present-day theory. Make sure to pay attention because, after all, without understanding knowledge and what it is, how can you coherently argue for and know for sure what it is you believe is true? The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos.” “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge,” while “logos” can be translated as “argument.”

or “reason.” All the questions and tasks of epistemology can be sorted into two main categories which we’ll cover in-depth. #1. Determining the nature of knowledge. What is it? How do we distinguish between someone who knows something and someone who fails to know something? #2. Determining the extent of what we can know. How do we acquire knowledge, and are there limits to what can be known? So, what is knowledge? Knowledge, simply put, is a type of cognitive success. More specifically, it’s a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, which may include objects (called acquaintance knowledge or ‘knowing by acquaintance’), skills (called procedural knowledge or ‘knowing-how), and facts (called propositional knowledge or ‘knowing-that’). Philosophers mainly focus on propositional knowledge as it deals with facts about the world such as ‘He knows that Seattle is in California’, ‘Cats are mammals,’

or ‘2+2=71’. (A proposition can be, of course, true or false.) Possible ways we may gain knowledge include our perception, introspection, memory, the testimony of someone else, and reason. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant detailed in his work A Critique of Pure Reason that knowledge can be categorized as ‘a priori’ or ‘a posteriori’. A priori knowledge means knowledge prior to any experience using only reason, i.e., I know that all bachelors are unmarried. A posteriori is knowledge posterior to, or following, sense experiences in addition to reason. For example, I know that the snow is white. Philosophers called empiricists believe that all knowledge is ultimately grounded upon experience, while philosophers called rationalists believe all knowledge is ultimately grounded upon reason. Since we’re mainly concerned with propositional knowledge, the scope is so broad that we need a general characterization of knowledge we can apply to any situation.

Traditional epistemologists generally agree that propositional knowledge has three core parts: belief, truth, and justification. The first main ingredient, if you will, of knowledge is belief, an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. For example, to accept the truth of the proposition “the sky is blue,” one must first believe that the sky is blue. If one has no beliefs about a particular matter, one cannot have knowledge about it. Next, is truth, or the idea that one’s beliefs are in accordance with reality or objective facts. To acquire true knowledge is to increase one’s true beliefs and decrease false beliefs. If one can’t acquire truths at all, then one has no knowledge. However, not all true beliefs constitute knowledge. For example, the philosopher Duncan Pritchard argued we could have simply had epistemic luck. Take this example. Imagine John believes he has a fatal illness because he’s a hypochondriac.

and can’t help but believe such things. However, it turns out that upon going to a doctor, he’s informed he does have a fatal illness. He was right, but it was simply a matter of luck. So, knowledge needs a third element, justification or why one has good reason for holding their beliefs. Only true beliefs arrived at in the right way can be considered real knowledge. Therefore, many philosophers up until the 20th century believed that justified true belief, or JTB, as a fully accurate description of the nature of knowledge. Unfortunately, that came tumbling down when philosopher Edmond Gettier in his influential 1963 paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? argued that luck still played a role in knowledge despite one having JTB. Here’s an example of what’s now called a ‘Gettier case’ that seemly shows JTB is not true knowledge: Suppose a normally well-working clock on-campus stopped working at 11:59 pm last night and

is frozen. Twelve hours later, as I’m on my way to class, I glance at the clock and form the belief that it’s 11:59. My belief is true since the time is indeed 11:59, and my belief is justified. There’s never been any reason to doubt the clock is not working, and I cannot be blamed for basing beliefs about the time on what the clock says. However, it seems evident that I do not know that the time is 11:59. If I walked past the clock earlier in the day, I would have ended up with a false belief rather than a true one since the clock is frozen. To solve Gettier’s issues, we need to understand what justification is, specifically its nature and structure. So, let’s dive into that now. One of the most important aspects of deciding the nature of justification is to consider if it should depend on factors solely in one’s mind or consider external factors.

Internalism is the belief that justification depends solely on factors internal to the believer’s mind. Internalism is contrasted with externalism, which states factors outside of just psychological ones, such as perception, can be conditions of justification. The most significant externalist theory of justification is called reliabilism, put forth by philosopher Alvin Goldman in the 1960s. According to reliabilism, a true belief counts as knowledge only if a reliable belief-forming process produces it. This may include standard perceptual processes, remembering, good reasoning, and introspection. So if we have 20/20 vision that seems to line up with others' reports, that’s a good belief-forming process. However, philosopher Keith Lehrer provides this example which seems to upend reliability and externalism called Mr. Truetemp that goes along the lines of this: A man named Mr. Truetemp had a device called a tempucomp implanted into his brain during

surgery, which he was unaware of. This device accurately reads the temperature and causes a spontaneous belief about the temperature. Mr. Truetemp now has many true beliefs about temperature but doesn’t know their source or why he has them. His belief-forming process is reliable, but his beliefs are unjustified. The argument shows just because a process is reliable doesn’t mean it’s enough to justify beliefs formed during that process. But, what about internalism? If justification depends just on factors in one’s mind, this raises the question of how these factors and knowledge are structured? The two main theories of justification are called coherentism and foundationalism. Coherentism is the theory that justification is a relation of mutual support among many beliefs. Think of coherentism as a spider web where each belief is a section of the web, and its strength of staying intact depends on the strength of the surrounding areas in the web. The problem with coherentism is that a system of facts can be coherent, like facts about

a secret wizard underworld that fit together but be wrong. Coherentism is based on circular logic. Foundationalism, on the other hand, states that certain beliefs can be based on other beliefs. Think of a skyscraper where one belief is based on another below it. An example of foundationalism is Aristotle deducing that Socrates is mortal. There’s a logical real that states all humans are mortal. Socrates is a human and humans are mortal. Therefore, Socrates must be mortal. However, there is skepticism and issues with foundationalism, too. In fact, much of epistemological study throughout the centuries has been just to address epistemological skepticism solely. Epistemological skepticism is the view that we cannot know anything, or at least that we do not know as much as we think we do. Skepticism about the extent of what we can know is not a new idea, but began during the

Hellenistic period. Pyrrhonism associated with the philosopher Pyrrho involves skepticism that states we can’t know anything, including if we can know anything, and Academic skepticism dating from around 266 BC associated by Carneades that states that the only thing we know is that we know nothing. A significant argument against foundationalism and, in fact, the ability to provide a complete logical foundation for human knowledge as a whole is called the Regress Problem, also known as Agrippa’s Trilemma, attributed to the ancient Pyrrhonist skeptic Agrippa. The argument essentially states that any proposition supported by a belief can be endlessly (infinitely) questioned, resulting in an infinite regress of beliefs. John Pollock states the argument as such: ... to justify a belief, one must appeal to a further justified belief. This means that one of two things can be the case. Either there are some beliefs that we can be justified

for holding, without being able to justify them on the basis of any other belief, or else for each justified belief there is an infinite regress of (potential) justification [the nebula theory]. On this theory, there is no rock bottom of justification. Justification just meanders in and out through our network of beliefs, stopping nowhere. So, in the case of Socrates being mortal, one could ask what makes one human? We’d have to find another belief like all born from females are human. But then that leads to another question; how do we know all born from humans are human? And so on ad infinitum. Epistemological skepticism isn't just about just asking why for every premise. It also involves full detailed arguments to support its own premises. I’ll cover two notable skeptical theories. The first being Cartesian skepticism which philosopher Rene Descarte outlined in the first of his Meditations. The argument states that our perceptions are often inaccurate;

for example, we sometimes mistake being in a dream for real life. What if, hypothetically, an evil demon is tricking us into believing we’re in the accurate world when things are far different. The modern version of this is that we are perhaps a brain in a vat fed data that makes it seem we have hands, legs, and live in reality. Of course, the scenario is far-fetched but illustrates that our senses can tell us how things appear, but not how they are. Descartes attempted to refute his original argument but with his famous “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am” statement. However, the philosopher David Hume showed with Humean Skepticism how if one were to show a way to trust our perceptions clearly, it still wouldn’t be enough to defeat epistemological skepticism. First is the issue of numerical vs. qualitative identity. For the most part, we all think the external world is stable, and we believe various things

we see persist throughout the day. If there’s a tree in my yard I see each day, I assume it’s still there if I’m not looking at it. This can be outlined as the following: I have had two sense-experiences of a tree: one this morning and one in the evening. The two sense-experiences were (more or less) identical. Therefore, it is likely that the objects that caused them are identical. Therefore, a single object – the tree – has been in my yard all day. However, Hume thinks arguments like this one suffer from an equivocation fallacy, an informal fallacy resulting from using a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument. Mainly the first use of the word identical refers to qualitative identity while the second is numerical identity. When we say that the objects that caused the two sense experiences are identical, we mean that there is one object, rather than two, that is responsible for both of them, which

renders the argument fallacious. This problem goes deeper than that. Not only is there no reason to believe objects we observe can persist day-to-day, but we have no reason to assume similar objects like other trees will persist either. We can outline the argument like this… The tree has always persisted in the past. Nature is roughly uniform across time and space and thus the future will be roughly like the past. (We might call this second statement the principle of the uniformity of nature or PUN.) Therefore, that tree will persist into the future. However, because this is an inductive argument, Hume states that we need to provide some additional proof that PUN is true. This is referred to as the ‘problem of induction.’ So we might make this argument to show PUN is true: PUN has always been true in the past. Nature is roughly uniform across time and space (and thus the future will be roughly like the past).

Therefore, PUN will be true in the future. However, this argument’s second premise is just PUN restated. Thus, it’s circular, meaning we haven’t solved the problem of induction, and thus skepticism about knowledge remains. At this point, you’re probably wondering if humanity has made any progress in knowing anything since the original Hellenistic skeptics. Could it really be that we truly know nothing despite centuries of writing, thinking, and arguing? Hume did offer a way out of the woods of global epistemological skepticism with the idea of mitigated skepticism. Mitigated skepticism admits that we will never know anything for 100% certainty, but perhaps we can have partial knowledge of things while still remaining open-minded and skeptical. One of the most promising responses today to global epistemological skepticism is called Bayesian Epistemology, which uses this idea of partial knowledge. Based on Thomas Bayes' work in probability theory, instead of having fixed beliefs about

propositions. With Bayesian Epistemology, we are constantly updating our beliefs as probabilities depending on evidence and context. In Bayesian Epistemology, belief is seen as a continuous phenomenon of degrees called credences. Credences we already have about reality before we begin to gather new evidence or information are what’s referred to as priors. Knowledge then is a combination of new information that updates our credences plus our already established priors. Yes, the idea of knowing something 100% is fully impossible, but we can have degrees of belief, some greater than others. We can know some things less reliably than others to form a framework of reality and truth. Of course, Bayesian Epistemology has its critics and skepticism, but this is perhaps the most promising theory that helps us understand what truth and real knowledge are as of recording this video. In conclusion, the study of epistemology is long from over and is both a blessing and a curse to humanity. We’re the only species that strives to understand our place in the

universe, why we’re here, and what our purpose is, if there’s one at all. Cognition has helped us come to dominate the planet but may also lead to the end of us if we don't continue to pursue and try to understand truth and knowledge. If you found any part of this video helpful, please like it and share it with others. Also, subscribe for more videos like it.

Epistemology in Philosophy Simply Explained (Past to Present Day Theory)

Thinking Deeply with Ben 

인식론의 이해: 지식에 대한 연구

인식론은 지식의 본질, 기원, 범위를 탐구하는 철학의 한 분야입니다.

지식이란 무엇인지, 어떻게 지식을 습득하는지, 그리고 그 한계는 무엇인지에 대한 주요 질문을 다룹니다.

지식은 경험적, 절차적, 명제적 유형으로 분류되며, 철학자들은 주로 세계에 대한 사실을 다루는 명제적 지식에 초점을 맞추고 있습니다.

명제적 지식은 믿음, 진실, 정당화의 세 가지 주요 부분으로 구성됩니다.

신념은 진술의 진실을 받아들이는 것이고, 진실은 신념을 현실과 일치시키는 것입니다.

정당화는 신념을 유지하는 타당한 이유를 제공하며, 철학자 에드몬드 게티어의 연구에서 운의 역할을 강조하여 그 타당성에 이의를 제기하기 전까지 역사적으로 정당화된 참 믿음(JTB) 이라는 개념이 지식의 정의로 여겨져 왔습니다.

정당화의 내재주의와 외재주의

내재주의는 정당화가 신자의 마음속 요인에만 의존한다고 주장하는 반면, 외재주의는 지각과 같은 외부 요인도 포함한다고 주장합니다.

앨빈 골드먼의 외재주의 이론인 신뢰성주의는 신뢰할 수 있는 신념 형성 과정을 거쳐야만 진정한 신념이 지식이라고 주장합니다.

내재주의는 신념 간의 상호 지지를 강조하는 일관성주의와 신념의 근거를 다른 신념에 두는 근거주의로 나뉘며, 둘 다 참된 지식을 제공하는 효과에 대한 비판과 회의론에 직면해 있습니다.

헬레니즘 시대의 인식론적 회의주의

피르호와 관련된 피론주의와 카르네아데스와 관련된 학문적 회의주의는 모두 아무것도 알 수 없음을 강조합니다.

회귀 문제 또는 아그리파의 트릴레마는 신념의 무한 퇴행을 주장하며 지식에 대한 완전한 논리적 토대의 가능성에 도전합니다.

주목할 만한 회의주의 이론으로는 지각의 정확성에 의문을 제기하는 데카르트 회의주의와 지각을 신뢰하는 명확한 방법조차 인식론적 의심을 제거하지 못한다고 주장하는 흄의 회의주의가 있습니다.

객체 지속성과 귀납에 대한 흄의 논증

흄은 마당에 있는 나무처럼 물체의 지속성에 대한 우리의 가정이 질적 동일성과 수치적 동일성 사이의 모호성 오류로 인해 결함이 있다고 주장합니다.

그는 미래의 지속성을 예측하는 근거로 자연의 균일성 원리(PUN)에 이의를 제기하며 이 주장의 순환성을 강조합니다.

흄의 완화된 회의론은 우리가 100% 확실성을 가질 수는 없지만 부분적인 지식을 가질 수 있고 열린 마음을 유지할 수 있음을 시사하며, 베이지안 인식론은 전 세계적인 인식론적 회의론에 대한 현대적 대응을 제공합니다.

베이지안 인식론은 증거와 맥락에 따라 신념을 확률로 업데이트하는 것으로, 신념의 정도를 나타내는 신뢰도를 포함합니다.

선행은 새로운 정보를 수집하기 전에 현실에 대해 이미 확립된 신념이며, 지식은 이러한 선행과 새로운 증거를 결합하여 형성됩니다.

이 이론에는 비판적인 시각도 있지만, 우주에서 우리의 위치를 이해하려는 인간의 탐구를 강조하면서 진리와 지식을 이해하는 데 유망한 프레임워크를 제공합니다.