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Sumedha Gupta

KCCS123: PHP (F)

End-Term Response Paper

Professor Joel Gonsalves

12 February 2023

How Do We Know That We Know?

“The sun sets in the west,” “Trypophobia is the fear of repetitive patterns or clusters

of small holes,” and “E=mc^2” are all pieces of knowledge and are facts until proven

otherwise. However, how do we know the validity of these facts? What makes us believe that

these statements of knowledge are factual? Is it because our sensory experiences confirm

them, or are they, by reason, true? Philosophers have had several debates on how reliable

knowledge can be attained, and they have narrowed it down to two approaches: Rationalism

and Empiricism.

Rationalism is the view that knowledge can be acquired by depending solely on

reason and excludes the use of senses to obtain knowledge. This viewpoint holds that

reasoning is a crucial source of knowledge. However, empiricism is the school of thought

which holds that knowledge can only be acquired from sensory experience. According to

empiricism, actual knowledge is founded on our observations from our senses. These senses

tell us what is actually genuine rather than what our heads imagine things to be. To further

understand how these two approaches are used to attain factual and reliable knowledge, we

will attempt to understand Rene Descartes’s rationalistic approach and John Locke's and

George Berkeley’s empiricist approach.

As mentioned before, the two primary sources of all our knowledge are sense

perception (empiricism) and reason (rationalism). Rationalists assert that sense perception is

not the only way to learn about the universe. They firmly believe in a priori knowledge

independent of sense perception and necessarily true and undeniable. According to several

Indian philosophers, sense perception could often be imprecise and fallacious; hence, we

must rely on other sources of knowledge to know what is genuinely authentic. In accordance

with the philosophy of Shankara, an Indian philosopher, when we notice that hallucinations,

dreams, and other experiences give rise to inaccuracies that are conflicting with our sensory

experiences, we “sublate” them. Sublation is the process of rectifying an incorrect knowledge

of reality when it is opposed by another, more accurate understanding of reality. In simple

words, knowing the ultimate reality requires thinking such as studying, reasoning, and

meditation. Shankara’s philosophy is similar to Rene Descartes, who believed that thinking

and reasoning without the aid of senses lay the foundation and establish the truths about

reality. In order to show that sense experience is not the only valid standard of knowing, he

extracts himself from the sensory characteristics of a piece of wax and establishes a

rationalistic foundation for knowledge. Descartes first takes into account all the observable

characteristics of wax, including its size, colour, texture, shape, and scent. Then he makes the

observation that as the wax is brought nearer to a fire, all these characteristics alter. This

experiment aims at overcoming the appearance-reality gap because even though all the

sensory characteristics of the wax altered, the wax remained. Thus, he claims that our mind,

not our senses, is where our understanding of wax comes from. We would claim that the wax

no longer exists if it were derived from the sense, but it is still present. He claimed that clear

and definite concepts in our minds are the ones that offer us knowledge because our

perception can be tainted. When we understand something's nature or essence so clearly that

we can recognize it and separate it from other things, we clearly understand it. Hence,
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Descartes comes to the conclusion that knowledge is acquired by the intellect and not the

senses.

Contrary to this rationalistic belief is the empiricist belief. The Nyaya school of

thought philosophers in India were empiricists, believing that the only valid source of

knowledge is sense perception because, according to them, all other sources of knowledge

ultimately depended on sense perception. Confirming to the Nyaya thought, George Locke, a

western empiricist philosopher stated that the only actual justification the rationalists had for

their belief in innate knowledge was based on “universal consent,” which is that certain ideas

are present in everyone’s thoughts. Locke claimed that there are no ideas that all humans are

aware of because the mind is “tabula rasa,” meaning that the mind is a blank slate on which

experiences make their mark. Locke argued that physical objects outside of ourselves

produce our perceptions and are independent of our perceptions of them. He also claimed that

knowledge originated in sense experience and made a distinction between entities and how

they appear to us. He argued that primary or measurable qualities like weight, size, and shape

are “in” the object and hence, are mind-independent.

In contrast, secondary qualities like colour, taste, and sounds are not “in” the object

and, thus, are mind-dependent. The primary qualities have powers that create, in our mind,

the secondary qualities we perceive. Hence, he concludes that because our conceptions of

primary qualities truly match the fundamental characteristics of things in the outside world,

we are aware of how things are. George Berkley, another empiricist, accepted Locke’s views

on sensory experience but argued that we have no grounds for saying that there are “material”

objects outside us that our sensory perceptions copy. According to him, primary and

secondary qualities are sensations in us and are mind-dependent. He was a firm believer in
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solipsism, wherein he says that only “I” exist and everything else is a creation of “my”

subjective consciousness.

We know that there are several sources of obtaining valid knowledge. In Indian

epistemology, “pramana” means to obtain true knowledge, and “prameya” means the object

of true knowledge. Pramana is the way of truly knowing anything; hence, it provides us with

only accurate and factual knowledge. The external world influences our beliefs and, hence,

our knowledge. Our religious, political, and interpersonal beliefs are either formed by our

upbringing and experiences and/ or through the knowledge we read. However, we confirm

the knowledge of the external world in our minds by reasoning through it and engaging in

conversations with people of similar or different views. Hence, the method through which we

seek knowledge and validity to form our beliefs is pramana, and the knowledge we are

studying is prameya. Hence, true knowledge lies at the juncture of the distinction between the

actual object of knowledge and the perceived idea of that object. This is because true

knowledge is how things are and not how they can be shown.
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Works Cited

Raju, P. T. Indian Epistemology. Pg 311-320

Velasquez, Manuel. “Chapter 5, The Source of Knowledge, Sec 5.1, 5.2, 5.3,” in

Philosophy a Text with Readings. Clark Baxter, 2011. Pg 296-326