[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Two things, Dave,

Peirce had actually 4 ways of knowing.  Stubbornness, Authority, Reasonableness, Experience, which he tries to treat with equal respect, but his heart is obviously with the last.  (The Fixation of Belief).  You make me wonder about the relation tween Peirce and that Vedic text.  


But this begs the most fundamental question raised by your post.  What is knowledge, other than belief, and what is belief other than that upon which we are prepared to act?  There is one member of our group who, very much in the spirit of William James's altered states, wants to work on aura's  He has a tentative belief in aura's.  When through experiment and analysis he renders that belief "firm", does he then have knowledge.  Already he believes in the possibility of aura's.  We know that this is the case because of the effort he is willing to expend in their demonstration.  Does he have knowledge of the existence of auras?  Does he already know that aura's exist?

I think problems with the very idea of knowledge lie at the core of this discussion, and we need some sort of working understanding of what we mean by it, if we are to precede. 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Tuesday, March 3, 2020 1:48 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Epistemology, loosely speaking, is the “theory of knowing.” What can we know; how do we know we know it; the difference between knowing that, knowing how, and knowing about; and, issues of the “truth” of what we know and/or justifications for thinking we know anything?

An associated issue concerns how we come to acquire knowledge. Two means of acquisition are commonly proposed: a priori (independent of experience) and a posteriori (by experience).

A Vedic text, Tattirtiya Aranyaka (900-600 BCE), lists four sources of knowledge, roughly translated as: tradition/scripture, perception, authority, and reasoning/inference. Of these the fourth and second seem to map onto a priori and a posteriori.

Scholasticism — exemplars include Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas — was concerned with integrating three of the Vedic sources of knowledge: tradition/scripture (Christian theology), authority (Aristotle and Plato), and reasoning/inference.

Modern epistemology (and Peirce) seems to be concerned with two of the sources: tradition/scripture (peer reviewed science journals) and reasoning/inference.

Claims to "know" something, in a naive sense of know, like "I know that I am," "I know that I am in love," "I had the most interesting experience at FriAM just now," mystical visions, kinesthetic “muscle memory,” chi imbalance, and, of course, hallucinogen induced altered states of consciousness.

Is it possible to construct a theory of knowledge that could extend to, incorporate, a wider range of experience and especially mystical and psychedelic experience? If it was possible, would it be of value? If possible and of value, what parameters could be set to limn the resulting philosophy?

davew

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