Saturday, September 29, 2007

…α…knowledge…Ω….


The philosophy of pragmatism and feminism provide valuable insight for understanding concept of knowledge. Each of these philosophies has its own unique vision that adds its imperative part to the overall heritage of philosophical thoughts. With this reflection in mind my theory about knowledge synthesizes all efforts already made. I favor the holistic approach for getting knowledge rather than narrow it to one major factor that solely supplies us with necessary cognitive understanding.
Therefore, knowledge is an ability to collect data from various sources through senses, reason and subjective and objective perception. Sensual experiences are crucial in terms of survival. Senses play major role in acquiring knowledge because human are biological organisms with a living body that perceive reality through hearing, tasting, smelling, touching and seeing. Those capabilities helped humans survive, differentiate objects, and create stable condition to live. Reason and operation of our mind help us think logically, make analysis and relate simple operation or object into more complex images or ideas. Our knowledge also depends on our subjective perspective, our self created by our specificity to react or feel in certain way. Moreover our predisposition and sensitivity to prioritize some values determines our knowledge. Objective perception involves cultural and social background as well as gender that shapes our way of seeing things through this objective “lenses”.
There are different types of knowledge such as theoretical/scientific knowledge that characterizes various laws from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics. Other types include social or communication knowledge and practical/situational knowledge.
However knowledge is not something detached. It is an activity of our experiences that involved our body, mind and spirit and is constantly restructured based on the situational context of our lives.
Therefore knowledge of each individual is shaped by internal and external factors that collide with each other, fuse within and interrelate to one another. This complex function makes our reality full of ideas, colors and sounds that are unique to our own nature and existence....

1 comment:

Professor Roger said...

This sounds like a syncretic approach, where you wantto appropriate bits from a bunch of different theories. That might be an attractive approach to knowledge.