A report on Knowledge

Los portadores de la antorcha (The Torch-Bearers) – Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington symbolizing the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next (Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain)

The parable of the blind men and the elephant suggests that people tend to project their partial experiences as the whole truth

Familiarity or awareness, of someone or something, such as facts , skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge), often contributing to understanding.

- Knowledge

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René Descartes, who is often credited as the father of modern philosophy, was often preoccupied with epistemological questions in his work.

Epistemology

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Bertrand Russell famously brought attention to the distinction between propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance.

An Euler diagram representing a version of the traditional definition of knowledge that is adapted to the Gettier problem. This problem gives us reason to think that not all justified true beliefs constitute knowledge.

The analytic–synthetic distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant.

David Hume, one of the most staunch defenders of empiricism.

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge.

Definitions of knowledge

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Definitions of knowledge try to determine the essential features of knowledge.

Truth

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Property of being in accord with fact or reality.

Walter Seymour Allward's Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Canada

'"What is Truth?" by Nikolai Ge, depicting John 18:38 in which Pilate asks Christ "What is truth?"

The role that truth plays in constituting knowledge.

Plato

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Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece.

Diogenes Laertius is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy.

Through his mother, Plato was related to Solon.

Plato in his academy, drawing after a painting by Swedish painter Carl Johan Wahlbom

A detail of Spinoza monument in Amsterdam.

The "windmill proof" of the Pythagorean theorem found in Euclid's Elements.

A Venn diagram illustrating the classical theory of knowledge.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri, with fragment of Plato's Republic

Bust excavated at the Villa of the Papyri, possibly of Dionysus, Plato or Poseidon.

The Death of Socrates (1787), by Jacques-Louis David

Plato's Allegory of the Cave by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna

Painting of a scene from Plato's Symposium (Anselm Feuerbach, 1873)

Volume 3, pp. 32–33, of the 1578 Stephanus edition of Plato, showing a passage of Timaeus with the Latin translation and notes of Jean de Serres

First page of the Euthyphro, from the Clarke Plato (Codex Oxoniensis Clarkianus 39), 895 AD. The text is Greek minuscule.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand. Plato holds his Timaeus and gestures to the heavens.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929).

Many have interpreted Plato as stating — even having been the first to write — that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view that informed future developments in epistemology.

Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon non-inferential justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises.

Science

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The first diagram of an evolutionary tree made by Charles Darwin in 1837

First global view of the ozone hole in 1983, using a space telescope

Radio light image of M87* black hole, made by the earth-spanning Event Horizon Telescope array in 2019

Supply and demand curve in economics, crossing over at the optimal equilibrium

A steam turbine with the case opened, such turbines produce most of the electricity used today

A diagram variant of scientific method represented as an ongoing process

Cover of the first issue of Nature, 4 November 1869

For Kuhn, the addition of epicycles in Ptolemaic astronomy was "normal science" within a paradigm, whereas the Copernican revolution was a paradigm shift.

Marie Curie was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes: Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.

Picture of scientists in 200th anniversary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1900

Medal of the Nobel Prize, one of the most well-known science awards

Budget of NASA as percentage of United States federal budget, peaking at 4.4% in 1966 and slowly decline since

Dinosaur exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Scientific method

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Precession of the perihelion – exaggerated in the case of Mercury, but observed in the case of S2's apsidal precession around Sagittarius A*

Einstein's prediction (1907): Light bends in a gravitational field

Model of DNA with David Deutsch, proponent of invariant scientific explanations (2009)

The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries).

Justification (epistemology)

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Property of belief that qualifies it as knowledge rather than mere opinion.

Epistemologists are concerned with various epistemic features of belief, which include the ideas of warrant (a proper justification for holding a belief), knowledge, rationality, and probability, among others.

Knowledge by acquaintance

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In philosophy, a distinction is often made between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

A brain in a vat that believes it is walking

Reality

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Sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary.

A correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent.