CHAPTER 1 KNOWLEDGE : ITS FORMATION PROCESS AND SOURCES

Transcription

1 CHAPTER 1 KNOWLEDGE : ITS FORMATION PROCESS AND SOURCES

2 11 The concept of knowledge has occupied the minds of philosophers throughout the history of the discipline. No attempt has been made in this chapter to chronicle the debate nor even to refer to all the eminent writers on the topic. It is intended, however, to examine briefly the nature of knowledge; its sources and the physiological and psychological processes involved in its formation. 1.1 Nature of Knowledge: Collins Dictionary of the English Language"*defines knowledge as: 1. the facts, feeling and experiences known by a person or a group of people, 2. the state of knowing, ; 3. awareness, consciousness or familiarity gained by experience or learning, 4. evaluation or informed learning, 5. specific information about a subject. Out of these definitions, 3-5 throw good light and offer a useful starting point. The third and fourth definitions imply that knowledge is gained through the senses as a result \

3 12 of individual_and^social experiences and as such is subjective# The fifth definition offers the possibility of objective knowledge. This leads to a question whether information about a subject stored in a book or on a computer file is acually knowledge# or therefore# whether knowledge can exist without the human mind to know it# The answer to the question is that f knowledge is the product of the mind and as such until information has been processed by the human mind# it is not knowledge# Knowledge only becomes knowledge for an individual when he or she has processed it# The information recorded in a book is the codification of a writer's knowledge and data that might become knowledge for a reader, 2 Berger and Luckmann state that knowledge "is the certainity that phenomena are real and that they possess certain characteristics." In this definition the two words "certainity" and "real" pose following problems: 1# how the certainity was reached? 2# what reality means? Whether it includes only actual# almost tangible and objectified items or also conceptual statements. 3 By contrast Hirst suggests that the domain of knowledge is not the certainity of phenomena but 'true propositions or

4 13 I statements*. This definition of Hirst raises following problems: 1. Must knowledge always be true? 2. Is truth absolute or relative? 3. If the knower is certain but found to be wrong, did he actually possess knowledge? i 4 According to John Hospers "knowledge is expressed in propositions like *1 know that I am now reading a book*. 'I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4', and so on". Taking knowledge as propositional statement, the question arises what requirements must be met in order for one to assert truly that he knows the proposition or how one can separate the rightful claims to know from the mistaken ones. In this connection John Hospers have enumerated the following requirements: 1. Proposition must be true? 2. Hot only must proposition be trues we must believe that proposition is true; and 3. We must have evidence for proposition (reason to believe proposition) 5 Ayer lays down that "the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that something is the case are first

5 14 that one is said to know to be true, secondly that one be sure of it, and thirdly one should have the right to be sure." 1.2 Constituents of Knowledge: Another way to understand the nature of knowledge is to look into the constituents of propositions in which knowledge is expressed. For example a proposition like "Library is a growing organism" cannot be understood until and unless the meaning of the terms 'Library' and 'growing organism' is clear to us. Meaning becomes clear when we understand the concepts or ideas involving the terms 'Library* and 'growing organism'. It therefore leads us to infer that terms involve concepts and the constituents of knowledge are concepts or ideas. The next question arises as how do we acquire the concepts that we have 7 It was once thought that concepts are innate and wired into us. However, the theory of innate concepts is no longer held. The modern thinking is that concepts are acquired through experience. The main proponents of this view were three British philosophers* John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, These philosophers used the word 'ideas' instead of 'concepts'. They proponded that "All the ideas we have or ever shall have come from experiences (1) some through the "outer" senses, such as sight, hearing, and touch, and from

6 15 these all our concepts ilivolving the physical world are drawn/ and (2) some from the "il'iner" senses, such as experiences of pain and pleasure, feeljlngs of love and hate, pride and remorse, experience of thinking and willing- from these we get all the ideas about our inner life. All our concepts are derived from these two kinds of experience, Locke called the first 'ideas of sensation' and the second 'ideas of reflection, Hume's main thesis was that there can be no idea without sense impression. However, cannot we have ideas of lots of things of which we have never had any impression? This led Locke to distinguish between simple ideas and complex ideas, "We can imagine golden mountains and black roses without ever seeing them because, after all, we have seen the colours of gold and black in other things. The ideas of golden mountains and black roses are complex ideas / we simply take ideas we have already acquired through other experiences and put them together in our imagination in new combinations. The human mind can create all sorts of complex ideas from simple ideas v gleaned from experience; but the human mind cannot create a Wingle simple idea. The relation of simple to complex ideas is somewhat like the relation of atoms to molecules. Without atoms, cannot have molecules and atoms can be combined in different ways to form different molecules. Without simple ideas *Twe_7 cannot form complex ideas? but once have a number of simple ideas /""we^j? can combine then in our imagination

7 16 In-aJLl sorts of different ways to form the ideas of countless -=-^ 7 things that never existed_on-jland ~or sea." - " 1.3 Roads to Knowledges Yet another way to understand the 'nature of knowledge is to probe~d.njto~jthe- question what are the means by which we come to knowledge? or what are various roads to knowledge?» Q Scheffler highlights the three broad philosphical approaches to knowledge; rationalist, empiricist and pragmatic. Knowledge arrived at through principles of rationalism rests upon the process of pure reason. The mathematician for instance, requires no empirical evidence nor does he need quantitative data. Through the logical processes of reason he may probe from his initial premise until he reaches a conclusion provided the original premise was demonstrably true and the -logical process correct then the conclusions must be true knowledge., Empiricists approach i to knowledge depends upon empirical evidences. Here natural and social phenomena are explored by experience. Knowledge based upon empirical evidence may reflect an understanding of a past phenomena but may never logically be employed to predict a future one. t Pragmatism implies that knowledge is gained as a result of experimentation. The individual may reach a certain level of belief as a result of his observation of a phenomenon, but

8 17 the hypothesis has to be tested and tried. Experimentation, trial and error, are the experiences through which the validity of knowledge is examined* Eactr'bf'these approaches to knowledge is different. Each depends upon a correct use of the method of acquiring the data and processing it into knowledge. If the method is inadequate or the process incorrect then the resulting conclusions may be false knowledge. Hence the context in which knowledge is acquired is relevant to its expression. 9 John Hospers has enumerated the following roads to knowledge: Sense-experience Reason Authority -Intuition Revelation Faith Of all these, sense experience is the most obvious. But before sense-experience can become embodied in knowledge, it requires judgement. Sense experience itself is neither true

9 18 nor false. It is used to test the validity of a proposition which we want to judge to be true or false. As such sense experience forms the basis of a perceptual judgement, but alone is not enough to constitute that judgement. Reason is the ability to think. This ability is indispensable to having knowledge of any sorth, including knowledge acquired through sens e-percept ion. _ ense experience may provide-the raw material for our judgement but without reason we cannot f omul ate the judgement at all. Thus reason is a prerequisite for all knowledge. The most familiar kind of reasoning, which is often taken as the model for all reasoning, is deductive reasoning. In a deductive argument, the conclusion must logically follow from the premises: or in other words if the premises of the argument are true, the conclusion must be true. It means that if we want to know that a conclusion is true we have to be sure that the premises are true and the arguments,_valid. But all reasoning is not deductive. We also argue inductively i.e. from evidence to conclusion. However, the con c lusion s in-indue tive reasoning are not certain but only probable to one degree or another. Authority is accepting a statement by invoking an authority like "I know it Is true because Ranganathan has said so, and Ranganathan is an authority on the subject." "The statements we hear or read are nearly infinite in number, and many of them would require years of investigation before their truths

10 19 could be ascertained, on the^ather hand, life is short, and it is impossible to check the truth of every assertion we encounter. Consequently, we either take on authority the vast majority of the claims to truth that come our way, or suspend our judgement about them.however, the following are certain precautions to be observed: 1. The person whose words are taken as authority, must be a specialist in his field of knowledge. ^-2. - When the authorities are at variance with one another, it is better to suspend judgement for the time-being. 3. One should try to find out for himself whether the authority's statement is true by devoting time and trouble. "Thus no matter how reliable an authority may be, and no matter how often his statements have turned out to be true when cleared and checked, authority cannot be a primary source of knowledge". 1 r_^ - Intuition "is merely the label for a certain kind of experience, one that is not easily described, A conviction of, / certainity comes upon us suddenly like a light going on inside and instantly we are convinced that what comes to us in this flash is true. The experiences commonly spoken of as intuition

11 20 12 typically come all at~once, as^if^in a blinding flash." The question arises whether the claim of conflicting statements asserted on the basis of intuition should be taken to knowledge. The answer is that we must look beyond intuition to discover the truth of such statements. We could look to sense experience or reason. Revelation is claiming to knowledge by asserting a statement on the basis of revelation in a dream or a vision. However, such a statement cannot be taken as true until and unless its truth has been varified by other means. If the claims made are such that sense experience or reason could substantiate them, then only we can believe that the claims are true.» Faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence. However, people have been found claiming to knowledge on the basis of faith. As such faith cannot be taken as a source of knowledge if it cannot be verified by sense experience or reasoning. 1.4 Psychological and Physiological Processes Involved in Knowledge Formation: After discussing the roads to knowledge, let us now look into the nature of knowledge from the point of view of psychological

12 21 and physiological processes. There are a number of events in sequence leading to the formation of percepts, their association in various ways to foi^loncepts, the association of the latter in various ways to form the appreception mass and further polymerisation through fresh association of concepts 13 to produce ideas, Ranganathan has explained these events in following sequence: 1, Pure Percept: A meaningful impression, produced by any entity through a single primary sense and deposited in the memory. 2, Perception: ^HWHi l ' Reference of a percept to its entity correlate outside the mind, 3, Compound Percept: The impression deposited in memory, as a result of the association of two or more pure percepts formed simultaneously or in a quick succession. 4, Concept: The formation, deposited in memory, as a result of the association of percepts - pure as well as compound-already deposited in the memory, 'S\ J*i

13 c Apperception: The assimilation of newly received percepts and newly formed concepts with the concepts already present in the memory. 6. Apperception Mass: The concepts already present in memory to which newly received percepts and newly received concepts are to be assimilated. 7. Idea: The product of thinking, reflecting imagining etc got by the intellect by integrating with the ai<i of logic, a selection from the apperception mass, and/ or what is directly apprehended by intuition, and deposited in the memory. 8. Knowledge: I. The totality of the ideas conserved by the humans. Ranganathan*s diagram known as Brain Chamber, showing the formation of ideas, is presented in Figure 1.1.

14 1 1 t fsf > /?<- *i, ' * f - *i -* 4 V..» *v ( Figure 1.1 )

15 24 Broadly speaking these processes can be considered as Involving three stages: Sensation, perception and conceptualisation or concept formation. Sensation is the input of stimuli through the sense organs - for example, the sense of vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Perception is the organisation of the sensation into an experience. When the sensation is identified, it is known as perception and the things perceived are referred to as percepts*. Conceptuali-» sation requires repeated experiences of the simultaneous occurence of the same set of percepts. The process of concept formation involves two stages - discrimination and grouping and /*V\ t^ierie are further dependent on the ability to abstract and gen er alls e Perception and conceptualisation are interdependent processes. We cannot perceive something unless we have a concept of that thing, and we cannot form concepts of things unless we have the ability to perceive their constituents or properties. 14 Mortensen identifies the following factors which have been found to effect the processes of perception and conceptualisation; 1. Previous experience 2 Time : Concepts change with time because as time passes, the individual gains more and different experiences.

16 25 3, Preconception: Our perceptions tend to be affected by what~we-think-we ought to perceive, 4, Difference in logical thought: Differences in logical thought result in different concepts being developed from the percepts derived from the same object.» 5, Social-factors : Social factors affect our perception and thereby the process of concept formation, 1.5 Knowledge - a Definition: Let us now combine all these approaches on the nature of knowledge and reach a working definition for our purpose. {> An attempt at such a definition results in the following formulations x Knowledge is the totality of systematised and organised ideas produced as a result of sensory intellectual and intuitive experiences of individuals and conserved by human civilisation.

17 26 REFERENCES 1. Collins Dictionary of the English Language, 1979, p «Berger, P.Land Luckmann, T, Social Construction of Reality. Allen Lane, 1967, p Hirst, P.H. Knowledge and the Curriculum. Routledge '^ndpkegan~paul, 1974, p« Hosper, John. Introduction to philosophical analysis. ^-Indian reprint, Allied Publishers, 1986, p Ayer, A.J._Problems of Knowledge, Penguin, 1965, p Hosper, John, opcit. p Ibid, p Scheffler,_I.Conditions of Knowledge, University of JChicago Press, Hosper, John, opcit, !0. Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ranganathan, S.R.Prolegomena to Library Classification, Ed.3. Asia Publishing House, 1967, pp Mortensen, C.D. Communication t the study of human interaction. McGraw-Hill, 1972, Chap.7.