I would say it is. It is a simple yet powerful argument. Empiricism asserts that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. But if this is true, then there is at least one thing that can be known without sense experience, namely that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. Therefore the claim that all knowledge is derived from sense experience, if true, becomes false. Here's Bertrand Russell's take on it: "I will observe, however, that empiricism, as a theory of knowledge, is self-refuting. For, however it may be formulated, it must involve some general proposition about the dependence of knowledge upon experience; and any such proposition, if true, must have as a consequence that [it] itself cannot be known. While therefore, empiricism may be true, it cannot, if true, be known to be so. This, however, is a large problem."---- Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), 1969 Pelican ed., pp. 156-157 https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/04/bertrand-russell-empiricism-is-self-refuting.html#:~:text=I will observe, however, that,it] itself cannot be known.
It's not self-refuting but it has the limitation that it can't justify itself. But, so what? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's just word play...
The biggest threat arguably comes not from rationalism's demand to tie-up loose ends, but from what falls out of empiricism-inspired practices like science. Experience is correlated to one of its own contents: the brain. And from that (and experimentation) stems the inference that the brain causes it. Thereby, experience would not be the epistemological foundation and a completely reliable source of knowledge, but a mediating representation biased and/or limited by the prior-in-rank structure and guiding organization of the skull organ (and bodily processes in general). In addition, the "meaning" of experiential contents is not brutely evident. Items and events of sensation must be identified and interpreted (understood) which relies on learning, conception creation, and storage in memory (more prior-in-rank or "invisible" systems involved). This could be got around by declaring that experiences -- both external (environment) and internal (personal thoughts) -- are like a self-contained movie of phenomenal changes that merely behaves as if there is an outer (physical) world regulating it (including the brain). Just as a cartoon animation can be well-governed without its implied universe truly extending beyond the framed dimensions of the screen. But the end result of that, of course, is solipsism-related theories or some salvation from such like Leibniz's universally coordinated monads. Neither of which is popular in this day and age (or have ever been). _
I haven't thought long and hard about this, but I think that I would go with Russell in saying that while empiricism might not be self-contradictory in and of itself, this line of argument does seem to suggest that empiricism can't consistently be known to be true. Which would leave empiricists in an uncomfortable place. And I'm generally speaking an empiricist myself. Though I'm very aware of problem cases like mathematics and the principles of logic. If scientific empiricism isn't something that we can know, then what is it? I might be inclined to describe it as a heuristic as opposed to a matter of knowledge or a flat-out necessary rule. It might just be a pretentious and perhaps misleading way of stating the question "How do you know?" Our familiar go-to answers are "It was seen" or "It was heard". We appeal at least indirectly to our own or somebody else's senses. If we want to claim knowledge that wasn't obtained through anyone's senses, and if we want to convince doubters, we will need to provide some plausible (to them) account of how the supposed knowledge was acquired. That doesn't commit us to claiming that 'non-sensory' knowledge is non-sense, which as Russell argued would seem to be a self-refuting claim (that didn't stop the more outspoken and polemical of the 'logical positivists' from making just that claim though), but it does seem to place the "burden of proof", actually the burden of being persuasive, on the one making the claim.
How can the proposition that "all knowledge is derived from experience" be logically derived from experience?
It can't. The proposition is unverifiable, but it also unfalsifiable. However, to claim it as knowledge is to prove that claim wrong - i.e. it is self-refuting as knowledge, not as a proposition. I.e. if we want to consider it knowledge, then it is knowledge that is not itself derived from experience, i.e. knowledge that doesn't satisfy its own criteria for being knowledge. It thus disproves itself as knowledge. Thus one can at best say that empiricism is not itself knowledge. But it is a proposition. That's my take on it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Does not a proposition that is true count as knowledge--- knowledge of something that is the case? Is not all knowledge the justified true belief in a true proposition? ?Ex. Proposition: "The sun is shining in Portland Oregon." The proposition is true and justifiable and I believe it, therefore it is knowledge. "The traditional "definition of propositional knowledge," emerging from Plato's Meno and Theaetetus, proposes that such knowledge—knowledge that something is the case—has three essential components. These components are identified by the view that knowledge is justified true belief. Knowledge, according to the traditional definition, is belief of a special kind, belief that satisfies two necessary conditions: (1) the truth of what is believed and (2) the justification of what is believed. While offering various accounts of the belief condition, the truth condition, and the justification condition for knowledge, many philosophers have held that those three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for propositional knowledge."--- https://www.encyclopedia.com/humani...s-and-maps/propositional-knowledge-definition
No. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You link to what knowledge is widely understood to be, but this initial question doesn't follow from that... A proposition is simply a declaration that is either true or false. We don't need to know which, only that it is either true (T) or false (F), and not both (which would be a paradox). (A proposition is often referred to as a truth-bearer.) Knowledge is commonly understood, as you offer, as a true proposition that is believed, and where the belief is justified. Now, there are many ideas of what constitutes justification with regard considering something as knowledge, but let's put that to one side for a moment. So, from the above it should be understood that a proposition, even if true, can not itself be knowledge. Knowledge requires belief of a true proposition. If noone believes a particular true proposition then no one will have that knowledge. And there are an infinite possible propositions, both true and false. So... A true proposition is something that corresponds to a fact about reality. Knowledge is a subset of true propositions. It is that subset that one has a justified belief of/in. Hope that helps? That's the widely understood base criteria for knowledge, yes. Some disagree (which is only to be expected in matters of philosophy), but the main direction of travel seems to be with regard what the justification should be (see Gettier et al).
Much of what passes for knowledge lacks the kind of rigorous justification that would make it such. Take all the things we learned from high school and college. Even though we consider most all of that knowledge, is it really such if we never really properly justified our belief in it? Is "because that is what teachers and books said" sufficient justification? It may be for the expedient purpose of our education and degree. But there seems to be a shakiness about what we consider our knowledge. Never has that been more true in this age of the Internet, where information is so often shared and accepted without even being confirmed.
There are a number of theories of justification within epistemology, from foundationalism, evidentialism, to infallibilism, etc. Then there's skepticism which says that knowledge is impossible - or at least that we can't know whether we know or not. But, again, being philosophy, there's no agreement, with some such as Alston - who, ironically, helped develop the theory known as reformed epistemology - arguing that there is no single idea of what justification is or should be, that all the various theories are just placing different emphases on the whole notion, rather than necessarily excluding others. As to us thinking we "know" because our teachers said so, this could count as justification. Do we believe it? Yes. Is it true? Yes. Do we have a justification for that belief? Yes. Thus, at least per the basic criteria of the Justified True Belief it would be knowledge that we hold. If we want to insist upon, say, evidentialism as the arbiter of whether we are justified, then we would only know if we had evidence for the belief. But then is the fact that the teacher told us considered "evidence"? Or do we have to experience the claim first hand (i.e. the only acceptable evidence is sensory experience?)? Maybe we want to rely on reliabilism - where a belief is justified if it is the conclusion of a reliable process... e.g. trust in what our teacher tells us. It's a messy place, and anyone who tries to tell you that there is only one acceptable means of justification, even moreso if they try to tell you that they know what that one means is, is merely demonstrating their ignorance of the issue. That's not to say there aren't criticisms with many/all of the theories, or that there aren't "justifications" that one might intuitively see as not actually being so (e.g. we see a mirage in the desert and think it's water, so head there. When we get there it turns out there is actually water, but it being there has nothing to do with the mirage we saw. Did we know that there was water there? After all, we had a belief, it was justified by the mirage, and it was true!) Gettier is probably the most famous modern philosopher regarding such problems with this basic interpretation, although some of the issues he raise date back almost as long as we began asking what knowledge actually is. The Wiki page about Gettier's "problems" is worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
I disagree that this justifies belief. If simply being told by teachers and textbooks were enough to justify belief as real knowledge, then all those students who attended college in 1820 were learning knowledge just as students are today. But we know that back then many of the propositions and theories upheld as true simply weren't. Phlogistons? Creationism? Vitalism? Phrenology? Really? So uncritical acceptance of those propositions and theories cannot and never can justify belief as knowledge. And even if the propositions and theories are true, as we seem to assume about education today, the justification for belief in them is simply lacking. Indeed, it might even be impossible, because who can confirm all the theories of science and the facts of history with a firsthand perceptual verification of the physical evidence for such. Nobody, This leaves us in a precariously skeptical position about what passes for knowledge nowadays. How much do we really and truly KNOW about anything? If empiricism is the foundation of all knowledge about the physical world, as science seems to assume, we are without any justification for nearly all the beliefs forming that knowledge.
You're missing the vital ingredient of the belief needing to be TRUE. I.e. if the proposition is not true then it is not knowledge, even if believed to be true. So all those people who were told untrue things in the past may have thought they had knowledge, but they didn't. Now, as to whether just being told by teachers is sufficient justification, you are as free as anyone else to hold your own view, which range from "any" to there being none that would ever be sufficient. If what your teacher told you had never been wrong in the past, would that their subsequent say-so on a matter be justification? Empiricism, for example, is the philosophy that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. The justification must therefore be based on what one has experienced. And this therefore refutes itself as knowledge, as for it to be knowledge it would need to be based on justification other than what empiricism allows. Don't get the wrong idea, though. I also disagree that just being told something, even by someone who has never been wrong before, would be sufficient justification for knowledge. But it is not a black and white issue, no matter how strong one's view of it might be. Infallibilism, for example, is the idea that the justification for knowledge can't be wrong. But then there's the theory of fallibilism, which is the idea that knowledge is compatible with possibly being wrong, that everything we claim to know could still be wrong, no matter how strong our justification, and that for knowledge to retain a useful meaning it must allow for the possibility of being wrong, something an infallibilist would consider absurd. That would be your opinion, and not knowledge. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This may depend upon how strong an empiricist one is. One may consider empiricism to be how we mostly get our knowledge but without excluding other means, e.g. allowing it to be passed on through rationalism. The stricter one is, the more one limits what we would be allowed to refer to as knowledge that we hold, all the way to skepticism where we have none... Sure. But in the context of this thread, so what? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! All you're actually saying is that we can't (per empiricism) claim to know things unless we experience them first hand. That doesn't answer whether empiricism is self-refuting, or even any better/worse than other philosophies. What philosophy we adopt, or are tolerant of, may simply depend on how functional we want the word "knowledge" to be.
“Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory. Only when we forget what we were taught do we start to have real knowledge.” —Henry David Thoreau
I think science itself ran aground with the assumption of a pure empiricism-- that all knowledge is based on sensory experience. There came a point, with physics in particular, when it was asserting propositions about the world that were about objects and processes that could not be observed with the senses. So instead of relying solely on empirical a posteriori knowledge of the world, it had recourse to rely on rational a priori knowledge of the world as well. Kant himself, in his analysis of the very possibility of a priori propositions as knowledge, praised this turn of science towards mathematics to prove the propositions and theories it was making. "The examples of mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefited. Their success should incline us, at least by way of experience, to imitate their procedure, so far as the analogy which, as a species of rational knowledge, they bear to metaphysics may permit (Kant 22)".--- https://www.csueastbay.edu/philosophy/reflections/2010/contents/mark-selz.html So after Kant we have come to understand knowledge of the world as not only a posteriori or empirical in nature, but also a priori or rational in nature. His discovery of a rational intuitively-based form of knowledge gave him hope that metaphysics might acquire knowledge in a way analogous to how science and mathematics does. Whether he actually achieved such is a matter of debate. "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption ended in failure..... ...We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given (Kant 22)."
