Principa Cybernetica Web.
Author
F.
Heylighen,
Date
Sep 1993
Epistemology: |
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Let us start with the Greek philosophers. In Plato's view
knowledge is merely an awareness of absolute, universal Ideas
or Forms, existing independent of any subject trying to
apprehend to them. Though Aristotle puts more emphasis on
logical and empirical methods for gathering knowledge, he still
accepts the view that such knowledge is an apprehension of
necessary and universal principles. Following the Renaissance,
two main epistemological positions dominated philosophy:
empiricism, which sees knowledge as the product of sensory
perception, and rationalism which sees it as the
product of rational reflection.
The implementation of empiricism in the newly developed
experimental sciences led to a view of knowledge which is still
explicitly or implicity held by many people nowadays: the
reflection-correspondence theory. According to this view
knowledge results from a kind of mapping or reflection of
external objects, through our sensory organs, possibly aided by
different observation instruments, to our brain or mind. Though
knowledge has no a priori existence, like in Plato's conception,
but has to be developed by observation, it is still absolute, in
the sense that any piece of proposed knowledge is supposed to
either truly correspond to a part of external reality, or not.
In that view, we may in practice never reach complete or
absolute knowledge, but such knowledge is somehow conceivable as
a limit of ever more precise reflections of reality.
The next stage of development of epistemology may be called
pragmatic. Parts of it can be found in early twentieth
century approaches, such as logical positivism, conventionalism,
and the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics. This
philosophy still dominates most present work in cognitive
science and artificial intelligence. According to pragmatic
epistemology, knowledge consists of
models that
attempt to represent the environment in such a way as to
maximally simplify
problem-solving.
It is assumed that no model can ever hope to capture all
relevant information, and even if such a complete model would
exist, it would be too complicated to use in any practical way.
Therefore we must accept the parallel existence of different
models, even though they may seem contradictory.
| The pragmatic epistemology does
not give a clear answer to the question where
knowledge or models come from. There is an
implicit assumption that models are built from
parts of other models and empirical data on the
basis of
trial-and-error complemented with some
heuristics or intuition. A more radical point of
departure is offered by
constructivism. It assumes that all
knowledge is built up from scratch by the
subject of knowledge. There are no 'givens',
neither objective empirical data or facts, nor
inborn categories or cognitive structures. The
idea of a correspondence or reflection of
external reality is rejected. Because of this
lacking connection between models and the things
they represent, the danger with constructivism
is that it may lead to relativism, to the idea
that any model constructed by a subject is as
good as any other and that there is no way to
distinguish adequate or 'true' knowledge from
inadequate or 'false' knowledge.
We can distinguish two approaches trying to
avoid such an 'absolute relativism'. The first
may be called individual constructivism. It
assumes that an individual attempts to reach
 coherence
among the different pieces of knowledge.
Constructions that are inconsistent with the
bulk of other knowledge that the individual has
will tend to be rejected. Constructions that
succeed in integrating previously incoherent
pieces of knowledge will be maintained. The
second, to be called social constructivism, sees
consensus between different subjects as the
ultimate criterion to judge knowledge. 'Truth'
or 'reality' will be accorded only to those
constructions on which most people of a social
group agree. |
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