Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science pre reading

This week we have read text from both Kant and Plato. Both texts discuss what cognition is and how we should relate it to the real world. Kant starts off in recent thoughts about what cognition is as he says ” Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects” and makes the statement that it ”have come to nothing”. He continues and says that we should experiment with the opposite thought­” that objects must conform to our cognition”. Which means that our knowledge in a way shapes the object. Something that gives us new opportunities to experiment and think of the world. Firs­­t of all it actually makes it freer to speculate about metaphysics, the science beyond the senses. Which opens up for complex theories without real evidence other than what is already known. This can be seen as a weakness of the science but it also give us another opportunity to through experiments challenge these theories and in that way both prove and discard them. 

In the text by Plato he shares a dialog mainly between Socrates, Theaetetus and Theodorus. They discuss what knowledge is and some definitions of it. I focus mainly on the definition that ”knowledge is perception”. Socrates argues that we do not see and hear ”with” our eyes and ears but” through” them. And I agree with him. Because to argue that we see with the eyes is something that means that our impressions from sight only depends on what we actually see. But our impressions are deeply dependent on the associations and thoughts the sight impression awake inside of us. In other words our previous experiences. The impressions we get from our senses get processed by the “mind” which results in that only the impressions from the senses isn’t of objective character but of subjective when it is depends on the individual. 

What Socrates says is that our experience has an impact on what we both see and hears. This is something that in a way is what we call ”empiricism”, which is the view that concepts originate from experience.  Even if he in the argument mentioned does not go further than that we process our sensory impressions before we get an overall impression from it. 

To summary our cognition is dependent on each individual which further means that it doesn’t exist without our perception, which is subjective. This makes Kant’s argument about to let our cognition conform the objects more sensible when it actually says that cognition do not exist without knowledge. As Kant points out early in his preface to the first edition of Critique of pure reason that there is no doubt that our cognition starts with our experience. A thought I had on this topic is if our experience always plays in our favor, if it can’t be an obstacle for us to see the real truth of things in our world. Because our associations which can make us to judge things and also gives us the feeling that we might know things that aren’t true. Which can result in that our perceiving might not be the same as the objective knowledge of objects. But it is impossible for us to get any knowledge about the world without applying our own experience when perceiving the world, which results in that this kind of objective knowledge is impossible for us to achieve.