"There can be no real separation between questions of substance and questions of meaning" (Quine).
"The theory of knowledge is the psychology of philosophy" (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 4.1121).
"A curious feature of the ontological problem is its simplicity" (Quine).
The Duality Ontology - Epistemology
Ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies what exists, being.
Epistemology is another branch of philosophy that studies what knowledge is, its limits, what kinds of things we can know and how we know them. Epistemology is the dominant branch in philosophy.
According to these definitions, ontology and epistemology are opposite or dual philosophical disciplines, the two poles of the same thing, one external (ontology) and the other internal (epistemology).
The Greek vocabulary has 5 terms referring to the subject of knowledge:
Gnosis. It is the acquisition of knowledge in cognitive processes.
Praxis. It is the acquisition of knowledge through practice (doing and acting).
Doxa. It is mere opinion, vulgar or ordinary knowledge, superficial, not subjected to critical reflection.
Epistemein −literally, "to stand upon"− is deep, reflective knowledge elaborated with rigor.
Episteme. It means knowledge or science. Hence the term "epistemology" (which is derived from episteme) is identified with science or theory of knowledge.
In mysticism, the term "gnosis" means transcendental or spiritual knowledge. Sometimes epistemology is also called "gnoseology".
The problematic of epistemology and the relation ontology-epistemology
Epistemology is a controversial branch of philosophy because knowledge −a fundamental philosophical concept− resists definition and explanation. The questions that arise are:
What exactly is knowledge, and is it possible to define it?
How is knowledge produced or originated?
What is the relation between ontology and epistemology, or between external and internal world, or between physical reality and knowledge?
Is the structure of external reality (physical world) the same as that of internal reality (mental world)?
Is there an a priori knowledge (prior to all experience), a transcendental or pure knowledge, independent of our perceptions?
Is it possible to know reality by reflection alone, without experience of the external world?
What role does experience play in the acquisition of knowledge?
Do we discover reality or do we invent (construct) it? That is, is there an objective reality or is everything subjective?
What role does language play in knowledge?
What is the structure of knowledge?
Are there universal mental structures involved in all knowledge?
Are there different kinds of knowledge?
Are there levels of complexity in knowledge?
What is the relation of ontology/epistemology to consciousness and truth?
Is knowledge equal to information?
Is there a universal language capable of representing all kinds of knowledge?
Is there a set of primitive concepts from which to build or derive the other concepts?
The unifying philosophical currents
We are particularly interested in the unifying philosophical currents on the subject of reality. There are 4 main trends:
Realism. Reality is material, physical. There is an objective world independent of our perceptions, theories and interpretations.
Idealism. Reality is mental. Everything must be interpreted from the point of view of the mind, which is a superior point of view to the physical. Idealism takes various forms. The most prominent forms of idealism are those of Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl.
Mind and matter are distinct but both have the same structure. Ontology is the same as epistemology.
Everything is consciousness, which manifests itself in the different levels of creation, from mind to matter.
The different conceptions of epistemology and of the ontology-epistemology relationship
There are numerous conceptions of knowledge. We select the following:
For Plato, knowledge is "justified true belief" or "belief justified as truth" (it appears in the Theaetetus). The episteme is something universal that is true by necessity and that corresponds to the entities of the higher world of ideas.
Plato connected metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics corresponds to the real world of ideas. Epistemology corresponds to the knowledge of that higher metaphysical reality through noesis (from the Greek, "intuition" or "penetration"), which is the supreme form of human intelligence. When being and thinking coincide, it is possible to access the truth and have certain knowledge.
For Aristotle, the episteme is the result of logical reasoning.
For Parmenides there is identity between thinking and being.
For Confucius, the acquisition of knowledge (or learning) is linked to practice: "What I hear, I forget; what I see, I remember; what I do, I learn".
According to Descartes, we know that we think, therefore thought must exist. Thinking (a process of knowledge) and existing (being) are two poles of the same thing.
For Berkeley, mind is the only reality that exists. There are no objects apart from the mind. The only things that exist are mental things, ideas and also the souls that perceive them. What is immediately known is only the appearance of things, the superficial aspect, not what they really are. What is real are the mental identities, the ideas. The appearances of things may be different from different points of view, but there is something profound that does not change, which are the ideas.
According to Berkeley, perceptibility is the being of things. It is impossible for things to exist outside of the minds that perceive them. All things are sensations or collections of ideas that exist only in our minds as they are perceived. They only truly exist in the mind of our creator, God. "To be is to perceive." Objects depend for their existence on human minds perceiving them. If a tree is not perceived, the tree still exists because it is perceived by God.
According to Borges [2011] Berkeley equates cognition and being.
For Kant, there are a priori, innate, pre-established categories of thought with which we perceive, interpret and construct the world at the mental level. All humans share the same mediating principles of reality: mental categories. The structure of the mind is what determines knowledge.
We cannot know reality itself (the noomenon). We can only approach it through categories. There is a higher reality, a noumenal world, "of things in themselves," but this world is inaccessible to humans. Knowledge stops at categories.
Perception is an interaction between the inner and the outer. Although thought is subjective (we experience the noomenon in different ways), there is something objective, for we share the same predetermined mechanisms (the categories) that process observations.
Kant revolutionized the understanding of reality by placing the mind at the center, just as Copernicus revolutionized our understanding of the universe by placing the Sun, not the Earth, at its center. Instead of approaching knowledge as something that configures our mind by observing the external world, he approached it the other way around: how mental objects are constructed from the external objects perceived through our innate, a priori existing mental structures (the categories). We perceive the world through these mental categories. The categories are independent of each other.
Hegel is the great unifier: there is an absolute identity between thinking and being, between concept and reality, between subject (knower) and object (the known), between external and internal world, between ontology and epistemology. All things that exist are aspects of Being, spirit, absolute or totality, which is the only and authentic reality. The true is the whole. Hegel's philosophy is called "absolute idealism".
Kant's categories are epistemological, they refer only to the mental world. Hegel's are both ontological and epistemological. They are "ways of being" correlated with "ways of thinking." They are absolute categories, they refer to reality in its totality: to phenomena (the superficial) and to noumens (the deep, the essence of things), there being absolute identity between the categories of subject (the knower) and object (the known). Being or spirit is the supreme category.
The supreme underlying principle behind the categories, the motor of the concept, is "contradiction". Every concept (thesis) is dialectical, for it contains within itself its contradiction (antithesis). Both concepts are overcome by the synthesis of both concepts. The synthesis becomes in turn a new thesis, which implies its antithesis and which ends in a new synthesis. And so on and so forth, in an ascending dialectical process of increasing comprehension and culminating in absolute comprehension.
Since reality is dialectical, the method of knowledge must also be dialectical. With this method it is possible to reach the totality, the absolute, where each particular reality is a "moment" of the whole. The categories, i.e., the forms of being and the forms of thinking, are moments of the absolute.
Husserl advocated "phenomenology" (a word that comes from the Greek and literally means "appearance"). Husserl's phenomenological method is a philosophical analysis of the essence of consciousness, which has two aspects: 1) noesis, the state of consciousness; 2) noema, the content, the knowledge.
The mind has a higher status than the physical world, for it can think of objects that do not exist. From this it follows that reality must be associated with the mental world, and what is beyond the reach of the mind must be left aside, put "in brackets". The foundations of knowledge must be based exclusively on the mind, its mechanisms and its content.
Phenomenology is the foundation of all science and of all knowledge. For this reason it can be called "first philosophy", which has as its object the study of the phenomenology of the spirit, of consciousness and not of any external object.
Husserl hoped to establish with his system a solid foundation for all branches of knowledge and thus solve all philosophical problems. Following Descartes, he said that one had to philosophize from scratch, without any assumptions (including the existence of an external world).
For Jean Piaget, the acquisition of knowledge must combine gnosis and praxis.
For Heinz von Foerster, epistemology is the theory of knowledge acquisition, knowledge that we acquire through action. Knowledge is inseparable from action. Knowledge is the computation of descriptions of a reality. Every description is supported by other descriptions that are also computations. There is no objectivity because it is the act of observing that affects the observed object. He suggests modifying Korzybski's famous phrase "The map is not the territory" by "The map is the territory".
Gregory Bateson proposes to consider epistemology as a branch of science combined with a branch of philosophy. As a science it studies how organisms know, think and decide. As philosophy, it studies the limits of the processes of knowing, thinking and deciding. From this point of view, epistemology focuses on the properties of the observer (or knowing subject) rather than on the properties of the objects of knowledge. Mind and nature are linked: there is a common pattern that connects them.
According to Humberto Maturana, there is no objective reality (independent of the observer), nor objective perceptions, nor objective thought (this type of thought he qualifies as "transcendental"). No human being has privileged access to reality and truth. "Scientific explanations do not explain the independent world, they explain the experiences of the observer." Reality is an "explanatory argument": we create the world with our language. It is impossible to distinguish between perception and illusion, between true and false. Epistemology is not a problem of philosophy, but of biology because knowing occurs in a living being. All knowing is doing, all doing is knowing. In living systems, knowing and doing are the same thing.
For Wittgenstein, knowledge is constructed with language. Knowledge is language that names and describes. Language and the world have the same structure. Language connects ontology and epistemology or the boundary between the two is diluted. Language expresses facts, the phenomenal, the superficial. "The world is the totality of facts, not of things" (Tractatus 1.1). Language cannot express itself, nor can it express the deep nature of the world.
Gestalt psychology uses a holistic approach to understand the processes of perception and cognition. One does not perceive parts but "totalities" (gestalten). Perception is more an active than a passive process. The observer determines a priori what he perceives, according to the "glasses" through which he filters or contemplates reality.
For Carnap there must be a set of fundamental concepts from which all other concepts are derived. To construct a concept on the basis of other concepts is to indicate its "constructional definition".
Carnap played a dominant role in the Vienna Circle, which espoused logical positivism (or empiricism): truth (knowledge) must be based on experience and must be verifiable. All knowledge must be scientific. The classical problems of philosophy are meaningless because they cannot be experienced or verified. In his work "The Logical Structure of the World" (1928) he tries to explain that statements about the physical world can be reduced to statements based on perception. In his work "Logical Syntax of Language" (1934) he interprets philosophical problems as questions about the choice of a universal language for all scientific disciplines.
For Quine (Willard Van Orman Quine) the key question of epistemology is: How is our knowledge of the external world possible? According to Quine, the theory of knowledge must move from being a branch of philosophy to being a chapter of empirical psychology. This is what he calls "the naturalization of epistemology." This blurs the boundaries between science and philosophy. Science advances on what used to be considered philosophical problems. Philosophy is not a discipline first and prior to science. Therefore, he denies Wittgenstein's thesis: "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences (The word 'philosophy' must mean something above or below, but not beside, the natural sciences" (Tractatus 4.111).
Warren McCulloch [1964] speaks of "experimental epistemology," a methodological turn (of a constructive type) based on robotics as a practical application of the different theories of knowledge.
Robots are cognitive artifacts in themselves, and we can speak of "artificial cognition". McCulloch was inspired by the first autonomous robot built (1948): William Grey Walter's famous artificial turtle (Machina Speculatrix), capable of exhibiting complex behavior from simple internal mechanisms and its interaction with the environment. Grey Walter wanted to demonstrate that the secret of complex behavior lay in the connections between a small number of "brain cells", and that the secret of brain functioning lay in the connections.
According to physicist Anton Zeilinger, information and reality are two sides of the same coin, although information is more important than reality.
MENTAL, the Union of Ontology and Epistemology
The new Copernican revolution of consciousness
With MENTAL, the new center, the absolute center, is neither the internal world (the mind) nor the external world (the physical world), but a deeper level, which are the primary archetypes, the archetypes of consciousness, which are also philosophical categories and the primitive universal semantics of language. From these categories we internally construct the world. From this higher perspective, philosophical and scientific problems are solved, simplified or clarified.
Knowledge and primary archetypes
Reality is unknowable, but we can access the primary archetypes, which connect the internal (subjective) world with the external (objective) world, the unmanifest and the manifest. These primary archetypes are the foundation of our perception and our knowledge.
Knowledge is constructed from primary archetypes, which are general forms or patterns without content, upon which specific contents are assigned to form concepts and ideas. Since primary archetypes are intuitive, knowledge is linked to intuition. Knowledge arises from fundamental intuitions. This is basically Plato's thought.
Husserl's noesis and noema can be associated, respectively, with the primary archetypes and the concrete manifestations of those archetypes, which is the content of knowledge. The primary archetypes are the foundation of the unity of knowledge sought by Husserl.
There is an objective reality common to all human beings and to nature, which unites the internal and the external. True reality resides in the primary archetypes, the generative source of all that exists, both physical and mental.
With the model of the primary archetypes, science and philosophy converge, for they are based on the same principles.
Nature seems to follow the principle of Ockham's razor ("the simplest theory is the one most likely to be true"). Nature uses the simplest models, the ones with the most consciousness, the deepest, the most compact, the ones that use the least resources. Simplicity, truth and consciousness converge.
Kant, Hegel and Husserl
For Kant the categories are independent of each other. In MENTAL they are also independent; they are like dimensions, but they are related in language, which is universal.
Hegel spoke of all things in reality being aspects of the spirit or absolute. In MENTAL we speak of manifestations of the archetypes of consciousness, the primary archetypes.
For Hegel, the categories are dialectical. In MENTAL, the categories are structured as pairs of opposites or duals. And their synthesis lies in the language that connects and combines the categories.
For Hegel, truth, authentic reality, is the whole. In MENTAL, the real is the deep, represented by the primary archetypes, from which the superficial emanates.
In Hegel the dialectical process is ascending. In MENTAL the process is descending: from the universal (unmanifest) to the particular (manifest). The concept of opposite is of a superficial type. Therefore, an ascending scale of concepts, their opposites and their syntheses makes no sense. The opposites appear in the primary archetypes. Not every concept has its opposite, but it always has the complementary, what it is not. The underlying principle is not contradiction, but duality. What Hegel calls "moments" are really manifestations of the primary archetypes.
The mind-nature union
There is a union between ontology and epistemology, between mind and nature, between the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective. This unity comes from the fact that mind and nature share the same primary abstract archetypes: nature, at a deep level, is abstract, and our mind also functions with the same deep abstractions of nature. These abstract archetypes are the universal semantic primitives of MENTAL.
By joining these two opposite concepts (ontology and epistemology) we are reflecting the mechanism of consciousness, where the categories of external reality and the categories of knowledge (internal reality) coincide.
If nature has been able to model and build sophisticated structures, we are also able to do so because we share with nature the same primary mechanisms.
Man can understand the primary mechanisms of nature because he already has them implemented in his mind. And these mechanisms are interrelated in a universal language.
The map-territory link
Our observations of reality are limited by the senses. We filter reality and obtain a subjective view, an incomplete map. At the superficial level, when the map reflects only certain aspects of reality, Korzybski's famous phrase "The map is not the territory" applies. But when the map reflects the depth of reality, its structure, this phrase must be replaced by "The map is the territory", as Heinz von Foerster said. Both are the same thing, because in this case the map captures the essence (the being) of reality, which is reality itself.
The union of opposites
Kant was the first to unite the objective and the subjective. The mediating factor is his famous philosophical categories. He considered the objective to be conditioned by the subjective. The model of primary archetypes is more universal and simpler: objective world and subjective world share the same primary archetypes, which are also philosophical categories and which are the universal semantic primitives of MENTAL.
These categories, not only unite the opposites of subjective and objective, but unite in general the characteristics of the two basic modes of consciousness linked to the cerebral hemispheres: the left hemisphere (analytical, rational, reductionist, objective, etc.) and the right hemisphere (synthetic, intuitive, holistic, subjective, etc.). MENTAL unites gnosis and praxis.
Intersubjectivity and interobjectivity
Thanks to common primary archetypes, different subjects share the same mental model. Intersubjectivity (or trans-subjectivity) is produced. The mental model is invariant, it is always the same, regardless of its multiple implementations or manifestations in objects.
Given the identity between ontology and epistemology, there is also interobjectivity (or trans-objectivity) of internal representations of the external world.
Return to natural philosophy
From Aristotle until the appearance of Descartes, philosophy and science were not separated. With Descartes appeared the mind-body dualism and the separation of subject and object. Later, with Newton, with the rise of modernity, science became empirical, objective knowledge of the material world, and philosophy was established as "metaphysics" in the literal sense, i.e., "beyond physics." However, Newton's famous work "Philosophiaae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" referred to natural philosophy. Newton was not a "scientist" as we understand it today, starting because this term was first used in 1833 by William Whewell during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
With MENTAL we return to natural philosophy, to the spirit of Heraclitus, uniting the two poles that should never have been separated: the objective and the subjective, the internal and the external, for both are the same thing. This is possible because things are contemplated from a profound point of view, of maximum abstraction.
This makes possible a natural science based on primary archetypes. In short, a natural philosophy where boundaries are diluted: structures or models are naturally interpreted in terms of primary archetypes.
Addenda
The theory of justification
The theory of justification is a part of the theory of knowledge that deals with the support or endorsement possessed by a belief, whether formal or informal. From Plato's definition of knowledge as "justified true belief", it is generally considered that having a justification is a prerequisite for a belief to constitute legitimate knowledge, that is, to be considered valid. Justifications are: the foundation, the explanation, the demonstration, the reason, the guarantee, the endorsement, etc.
Gettier's problem
Knowledge is a fundamental philosophical concept, but it resists definition and explanation. It was always thought that this concept was something self-evident and did not need a definition, and if defined it had to be very simple. In 1963, philosopher Edmund Gettier [1963] published a short (three-page) article entitled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" −which became one of the most famous in contemporary analytic philosophy− Gettier questions Plato's concept of "justified true belief," refuting the identification of justified true belief with knowledge.
Philosophers, stimulated by Gettier's article, found that the definition of knowledge is neither self-evident nor simple. Since then, many definitions of knowledge have been proposed, but all of them are not sufficiently solid, since they are vulnerable to counterexamples. The question of what knowledge is is called the Gettier problem.
Indeed, knowledge cannot be explained, just as consciousness, truth, and meaning cannot be explained. Knowledge is something internal by nature and explaining it (taking it out externally) makes no sense because it would lose its nature and would be somewhat paradoxical (that it is internal and external at the same time). Knowledge is closely linked to consciousness. The only solution is to turn to the primary archetypes, which connect the internal world with the external.
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