Knowledge theory {epistemology}| describes how people can know something. People can know things by association and by insight, as information becomes knowledge.
questions
How is something true? How can people detect errors? What are roles of opinion and speculation? What are the knowledge types? What is nature of cause and effect? Do intuitions exist? Do revelations exist? What emotions and feelings exist? What is consciousness?
How can people know that external objects exist if all they know is experience? How do external objects and body generate experience? Can experiences and physical world have no relation?
analysis: logic
Philosophical logic studies term definitions, references, predications, propositions, connectives, operators, and quantifiers. Philosophical logic studies truth, modality, argument, entailment, and inference. Epistemology tries to find necessary and sufficient conditions to establish statement truth. Epistemology is about difference between knowledge and belief.
categories
Knowledge has categories: aesthetical, architectural, circumventional, constructional, dynamical, geometrical, topological, and transportational. All categories are relative and changeable.
categories: event
Events describe object and part motions. Objects and parts can change or stay the same over time. Identical events can be at same time and place, with same object and part changes.
categories: objects
Objects have parts and properties. Physical objects, relations, and motions exist independently of human thought.
experience
Experience has sense qualities, perceptions, and ideas. People can have immediate perceptions and conscious sense qualities.
goals
Goals provide knowledge uses. Ultimate goals do not exist, because goals also serve other purposes. At high levels, goals are circular.
reality
People experience reality as outside body and mind. Physical energies, masses, momenta, positions, and times have quantization. Small energies, lengths, masses, and times are unmeasurable and undetectable.
sense organ
Brains know about sense organs and their controllers, as well as sensed objects and events.
animal
Animals can distinguish food from non-food. Animals can recognize predators. Animals can discriminate to categorize species. Animals can discriminate same-species individuals. Animals can discriminate gender. Insects, birds, rodents, and baboons can learn to discriminate neighbors from strangers.
meaning
Sentences, pictures, diagrams, and all linguistic and non-linguistic representations can derive meaning from mental intentions.
methods
Analogy aids understanding. Analysis divides systems, objects, or events to isolate subsystems or system parts, but universe has no simple or isolated systems. Fields, neutrinos, and radiation are everywhere, and even vacuum has activity. Previous learning gives meaning to current thoughts, actions, and language, using symbolic concepts and mechanical habits.
Analysis {linguistic analysis} can clarify statements and questions and find criteria and procedures for empirical-fact verification.
Things and events can be possible {possibility} in different ways and can be possible in some ways but not in others. If something is conceivable to reason, it is possible.
concept
Things and events can have no internal contradictions {conceptual possibility}.
epistemology
Empirical facts can allow things and events {epistemological possibility}.
logic
Perhaps, thing and event negation is contradictory {logical possibility}.
metaphysics
Perhaps, things and events do not contradict physical facts {metaphysical possibility}. Metaphysical possibility derives from metaphysical necessity.
nomology
Science laws can allow things and events {nomological possibility}.
physics
Imaginable situations can be consistent with physical laws {nomical possibility}.
proposition
Propositions can have possibility {problematic proposition}.
time
The past can allow things and events {temporal possibility}.
Things can have potential to happen or can be impossible {entelechy, epistemology}. Possibility is separate from whether something actually happened, will happen, or had to happen. Humans can distinguish what is merely possible and what is required.
World can affect mind {telic}.
Mind can affect world {thetic}.
Mental or physical phenomena can emerge from lower-level element and process relations and interactions {emergent property}|.
Object properties have values {realization, epistemology}. Color can be red. Different physical properties can realize the same mental properties {multiple realizability}.
Brains can note property instances {trope, property}.
Systems and events can have no laws and/or have complex laws and be unpredictable {chaos, epistemology}|.
In groups {imperfect community}, objects can be similar to each other, but group objects share no one property.
Situations {insoluble problem} can be paradoxes.
Parts relate to wholes, and vice versa {mereology}|, in specific ways. Wholes can be part sums or superpositions. Perhaps, wholes can transcend parts.
Two different sufficient causes can cause effects {overdetermination}.
Methods {process, epistemology} can obtain outputs from inputs. Descriptions can include designs.
Brain can store or detect representation using only one node (grandmother cell) or many nodes {distributed system, epistemology}. Single nodes use one pathway to connect to other nodes and can associate two representations. Single nodes have no parts, events, or information and make only top-level connections. Distributed systems require many connections. They can connect at many places and levels. They can include information about correlations and probabilities. In distributed system, mutually inhibitory nodes or subsystems represent objects, events, and information.
Systems and spaces can have few activated nodes {sparse representation}. Active nodes represent patterns or object features. No information is in inactive nodes. Active-node sets are patterns. Systems or spaces can have many activated nodes {dense representation}. Nodes and their connection pathways represent pattern features. Nodes and pathways have different weights and activities. Node weighted activities represent patterns.
Causes {causation} are necessary or sufficient.
types
Four cause types are material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause.
space and time
Cause is always necessary to effect, precedes effect, and is spatially and temporally adjacent to effect. Events at only one instant cannot define cause or effect.
explanation
Only current thought about past events reveals causal relations. Explanation first describes object structures and movements. Then it explains how object structures and movements caused or constrained current existence, behavior, or structure.
will
Will or intent can be indirect cause. However, direct causes are physical forces.
effects
Interactions cause effects. Effects typically have several causes.
Contributory causes {causal, causation} cause events. Similar causes in similar situations give similar results.
Generalization and causal reasoning can combine {causal generalization}. Antecedent is sufficient for consequent. Consequent is necessary for antecedent.
Events have causes from previous events, which had causes from previous events, ad infinitum {infinite regress}|. To stop infinite regress, beginning cause must be different from later causes.
Perhaps, causes must have more energy, matter, motion, or purpose than effects. Perhaps, because things move, something unmoved by anything else must start motion. If everything must have a cause, infinite regression leads to a starting or original cause {Prime Mover} {First Cause, epistemology}. Prime Mover must be in physical world but have no cause. Prime Mover must have more energy than later causes and events. However, motion does not have to start with motion, only with force. More than one prime mover can be possible.
If phenomena share only one event, event is a cause or effect {method of agreement} {agreement method}. If people know all possible causes, probable cause is the cause that always precedes effect. However, agreement method must test all cases.
If one event is in phenomenon but is not in not-phenomenon, then event is phenomenon cause, or is necessary to cause or effect {method of difference} {difference method}. If people know all possible causes, probable cause is cause whose removal causes not-phenomenon. However, because physical world is complex, one difference is hard to establish.
Agreement and difference methods can combine {joint method of agreement and difference} {agreement and difference method}. However, the joint method does not account for probabilities or strengths. Things can have more than one cause or have not yet known causes.
If first phenomenon varies in one way, and second phenomenon varies in the same or opposite way, first phenomenon is cause or effect, or relates to cause, of second phenomenon {concomitant variation method} {method of concomitant variation}. However, unobserved causes and effects are possible.
Removing or accounting for phenomena parts caused by known antecedent circumstances makes remaining phenomena caused by remaining circumstances {method of residues} {residues method} {subduction, causation}. However, known laws or experiments must confirm residues. Finding causes is hard, because physical world is complex.
Events correlated in space and time have shared causes that happen before events {common cause principle} {principle of the common cause}.
Immediately preceding events and motions {efficient cause}| directly cause effects.
Possibilities, goals, or purposes {final cause}| can begin effect events.
Forms, essences, or ideas {formal cause}| can shape effect events.
Matter physical forces {material cause}| directly cause effects.
Effects can require prior causes {necessary cause}|. If necessary cause is not present, effect is not present.
Causes {sufficient cause}| can cause effects all by themselves. If sufficient cause is present, effect is present.
Representations have meaning from concept schema {conceptual role theories} {functional theories}. However, such representations can be true or false.
For terms to have meaning, they must be measurable {operationalism, epistemology}|. Observations confer meaning.
Statements are meaningful if and only if observations can deny or confirm them {verificationism}|.
Propositions have definite meaning, and meaning differs from truth {warrantedly assertible}.
Statements are true or not {truth, epistemology}. Only propositions, not terms, can have truth. Statements can be factual, consistent, complete, and coherent.
subjects
Truth can be about mental representations, such as beliefs, sentences, and statements, or about propositions, about which statements are instances.
statements
True propositions are analytic or synthetic statements. Analytic propositions are true in themselves. Synthetic propositions are real-world or imaginary-world facts.
statements: meaning
Statement truth depends on statement meaning, not statement words.
statements: time
Statements implicitly include time, and statement truth depends on time.
logic
True knowledge does not lead to false lemmas.
language
Truth is relation between language expression and physical and social world. The physical and social world is independent of speakers. However, language expression depends on speaker concepts and understanding. Word sense and reference change over time, position, and context. Therefore, necessary truths and a priori truths cannot exist.
Predicates can be true at one time and not true later, though things in predicates have no real changes, because something else changed {Cambridge change}. Cambridge change is necessary for real change.
Statements can be consistent with all other facts {consistency}.
Statements can correspond with all facts {completeness}.
Statements can relate all facts logically {coherency} with no facts left out.
People can know some truths {a posteriori truth}| only after perceiving them.
Before perceiving, knowing, or experiencing, people can know some logic and mathematics truths {a priori truth}|. A priori statements are independent of experience, are necessary, are universal, or are about general laws that seem self-evident but are not provable.
test
A priori knowledge is untestable. Can people know anything by reasoning alone? Is any statement true in all cases? Perhaps, untrue assumptions underlie a priori statements.
reasoning
Reasoning can proceed from first principles or from self-analysis and introspection. First principles can use false assumptions and/or invalid tautologies. Personal biases can cause self-analysis and introspection to lead to statements true for only one person.
Subjects can know {knowledge}.
types
Knowledge can be skills, acquaintances, and propositions. Machines, animals, and people can know skills. Animals and people can know acquaintances. People can know propositions.
types: knowing
Knowledge can mean knowing all parts and relations. It can mean ability to express in words. It can mean ability to express in syllogisms or other logical forms and to know reason relations.
topics
Knowledge can be mental states that relate to external objects and events. Knowledge can self-relate and so be true in itself. Knowledge can be about abstract Forms, Ideas, essences, unchanging things, truth, true beliefs, or reasonable beliefs.
requirements
Knowledge can require truth, justification, and/or belief. Perhaps, subjects cannot know false propositions, because they do not exist. Subjects can justify or not justify beliefs. Subjects can believe or not believe propositions. To have knowledge, instead of just beliefs, requires concepts.
sources
Knowledge and belief sources are sense qualities, memories, reasoning, and introspections.
feeling
People know if they have knowledge, even if they do not remember facts. People know if they know meaning, even if they cannot make synonyms or define words. People know if they have seen or heard something before, even if they do not remember it. People know if they have found correct answer and feel that something is not right if they have close answers. People feel that they know something, even if they do not know relations or connections. People know contexts of things learned or experienced.
factors: subjectivity
Emotion, body, subjectivity, and personal experience can determine human knowledge.
factors: cultural background
All knowledge has social and cultural backgrounds. Knowledge depends on reference frames.
perception
People can perceive without knowing {thing-perception, knowledge} or can know perception facts {fact-perception, knowledge}. Percept can know sense qualities {proximal stimulus} and transform them to percepts {distal stimulus}. Experience correlates with physical quantities [BonJour, 1985].
perception: illusion
People cannot base knowledge on perception, because senses have illusions. All observers agree on illusory perceptions, but all are wrong.
memory
To verify facts about past, current experience must relate to past. Understanding the past requires evidence. Evidence about past times decrease over time.
Perhaps, first-person present-tense beliefs about consciousness contents are infallible {Cartesian intuition} [Dennett, 1991].
People learn from empirical observation {certainty} {certum}. However, people use mental models to interpret sensory experience.
If people know p and p entails q, then people know q {knowledge under entailment}. Knowledge closure can occur under entailment.
If people know p and know that p entails q, then people know q {knowledge under known entailment}. Knowledge closure can occur under known entailment.
Knowledge needs justification {justification, knowledge}. Justification is about probable beliefs. Justification does not allow chance truth. Beliefs must match relevant evidence and/or use valid methods. Justification cannot use incorrect reasoning/cognition and cannot use incorrect facts or ignore facts. Evidence and methods can be internal, such as introspections, mental states, or cognitive processes, or external, such as objective reliability tests.
Beliefs can have true evidence {evidentialism}, known by subjects. Evidence comes from perception, introspection, memory, and reasoning.
Reliable methods can justify beliefs {reliabilism}. Beliefs can have valid knowing methods used by subjects. Methods can be perception, introspection, memory, and reasoning. Reliable methods can be their own justification or require further knowledge. Sensory and perceptual beliefs co-vary with external world, based on perceptual abilities, and so can have justification.
Knowledge is not always justified true belief, because belief can be true and justified but not knowledge {Gettier problem} [1963: Edmund Gettier]. Justification applies to first object, but truth applies to second object. First object can mistakenly seem to be second object.
case
Justified and true beliefs {Gettier-case} are not sufficient for subjects to know propositions. People can believe true and justified probabilistic statements but not know statement instances. On movie sets, all but one house can be façades, and people not knowing this can look at the real house and state their belief that it is a house. This proposition is true but only by chance. If people do know almost all houses are facades, people state their belief that main house is also not a house.
Knowledge {metaknowledge} about knowledge aids memory and learning.
Knowledge {metempiric knowledge} can be outside or beyond experience or experiment.
Media can store declarative knowledge {objective knowledge}. If knowledge is only what people understand, there is no objective knowledge. Subjective knowledge differs from objective knowledge, so experience does not relate to objective knowledge.
Non-conscious knowledge {tacit knowledge} can produce behavior and mental states.
People can gain knowledge only by experience, perceptions, introspections, and certain memory types {knowledge by acquaintance}.
Knowledge can be communicable by language {knowledge by description}.
Knowledge {declarative knowledge} can be about propositions, facts, and concepts. Structural descriptions recognize. Functional descriptions connect structures and functions for action. Declarative knowledge can be for imagination, planning, and other cognitive functions. Perhaps, procedural memory and knowledge evolve to allow kinesthetic perceptions, vestibular, and touch perceptions. Perception becomes possible because brain evolves to detect, use, and remember procedure components or units.
Knowledge {procedural knowledge} can be about knowing how to do something.
Statements are true if they are consistent with, proved by, or prove, other complete and consistent statements {coherence theory} {coherentism}. Whole belief sets are the only knowledge. Beliefs belong to complete and consistent belief networks. Belief networks can reinforce beliefs by consistency, completeness, probability, or power. Beliefs can form complete, consistent, and integrated structures. However, completeness and coherence are not the same as truth. Propositions can form complete and consistent sets.
People cannot observe reality without disturbing it {complementarity, epistemology}|. Brain and mind are two aspects of reality, and people cannot know both at once. Mind is observer, and brain is actor. Observer and actor are the same. Physical law is about experience, not about external physical world and objects.
Acquiring, maintaining, and deleting beliefs can be by will {doxastic voluntarism}. People can will beliefs themselves, but only if beliefs are not actions.
Statements are true if and only they are facts about words associated with objects and events in physical world and so correspond to reality {correspondence theory of truth}. However, observations and experiments can have hidden assumptions, obscuring correspondence to reality.
All human knowledge involves interpretative, subjective, and relative analysis {post-modernism, epistemology}| {neo-pragmatism} {post-structuralism} {linguistic turn}.
Perhaps, hypotheses are true if consequences of believing lead to personal well-being, success, and satisfaction {pragmatism, epistemology}| {pragmaticism, epistemology}. The best theory test is what happens when using theory. True beliefs have good practical effects in thinking and acting. They help people, are profitable, correspond to actual events, or are expedient in most situations. Knowledge is adaptive. Propositions are true if they are useful. Self or world experience confirms knowledge.
problems
Usefulness is not the same as truth. People cannot know much about world or practical utility. Utility changes with time and place. Useful fictions are not true.
Perhaps, all statements are only beliefs or opinions, no statements are truths, and no truths are knowable, so people should have no beliefs {skepticism}| {doubt}. Nothing is certain, because knowledge is not absolute. Many consistent and complete alternative explanations are possible. People can only know appearances, not reality, and can be in error about appearances. People can never have knowledge, only beliefs. People must suspend judgment, tolerate other opinions, and avoid dogma.
types
People can be unable to distinguish true situations from false, so they can never have certain knowledge {knowledge skepticism}. People can be unable to defend strategies and criteria used for truth, resulting in no basis for belief {belief skepticism}.
Perhaps, names and words refer to human linguistic conventions and categories {nominalism}|, not to real things.
Perhaps, reality exists independently of perception {realism, metaphysics}|. Names and words refer to real things and categories.
Knowing statements are true or not true does not add knowledge but is only useful {deflationary theory of truth}.
Statements that statements are true are only for emphasis {redundancy theory of truth}.
True beliefs, and causes related to situations, can give knowledge {causal theory, knowledge}.
True beliefs, and their justifications, can give knowledge {justification theory}. However, justification theory is not sufficient for knowledge, because propositions can be illusions or logical-justification steps can be false, though conclusions are true.
Reliable methods of gaining true beliefs can give knowledge {reliability theory}.
Perhaps, people cannot know true nature of reality, objects, or events {agnosticism}|.
People cannot know actual physical things-in-themselves {noumena}.
Physical theories are only for calculations and do not have truths about physical world {instrumentalism, science}|. Science terms describe and predict but do not refer to physical objects, which people cannot know.
Belief meaning and contents are belief-network units {atomism, epistemology}, so beliefs can have many uses.
Belief meaning and contents relate to belief-network regions {molecularism}, so beliefs can have multiple uses with multiple theories.
Belief meaning and contents relate to whole belief-networks {holism}| {mental holism} {semantic holism}, so beliefs are unique and have one use.
Perhaps, knowledge or mental states depends on both internal and environmental events {externalism, epistemology}. This is anti-individualism. People think and speak based on how experts use words [Putnam, 1975] [Putnam, 1981] [Putnam, 1988] [Putnam, 1992].
Knowledge and mental states do not depend on environment, only on minds or brains {internalism, mind} {individualism, epistemology}.
Basic justified facts, beliefs, or mental abilities exist {foundationalism}, from which to deduce other beliefs. However, knowledge relies on concepts, and sense qualities rely on sensory experiences.
Mental states, even qualia, are always representations {intentionalism}.
Other people do not necessarily experience the same things as a person does {methodological solipsism}. Many methods and rules rely on this assumption. Only personal introspection and experimentation can give knowledge.
People inherit perception capacities or abilities {nativism, idealism}, rather than learning them.
Mind has innate fundamental concepts {rationalism, epistemology}|, which allow a priori knowledge and further knowledge.
Knowledge is only personal {subjectivism} {idealism}. For example, colors are visual mental states or properties. Brain opponent processes cause qualitative color similarities, with no correspondence to physical properties. Neural properties that explain qualitative relations among perceived colors can differ from perceived colors themselves. People do not necessarily experience such similarities, or they are not essential, so they differ from color itself. How do brains perceive mental qualitative visual properties as mind-independent object properties? Do mental qualitative properties or states have functions?
Sense data, secondary qualities, primary qualities, space-time universals, and natural laws can be part of absolute self and so be universal and objective, but may be only illusions.
Fundamental categories used to understand reality are not real objective features but are mental conceptual structures {Kantian idealism, epistemology} {transcendental idealism}| and make experience possible.
Perception involves intentions {transcendental phenomenology}.
Knowledge grows and changes continuously, to higher organization and complexity {evolutionary epistemology}. The best ideas survive. Humans hold knowledge using metaconcepts developed during evolution: logic, simplicity, mathematical relations, and curiosity. Metaconcepts helped people survive.
Brains are computers with fixed code, registers, and programs {instructionism, epistemology}.
Physical reality is describable by independent propositions, verified independently {logical atomism}. However, propositions about physical reality are not verifiable independently of fundamental propositions. Verification criteria must be consistent and complete, but this is not possible.
Mind is functions and works by responses that condition to stimuli to formulate propositions {logical behaviorism} {philosophical behaviorism}. Thinking and doing have different types and cannot compare. Mental states do not exist. Brain has only dispositions to move. Sense qualities are dispositions to behave or to act intelligently, not internal representations. Brain has no person or mentality {ghost in the machine} [Ryle].
Only observations and experiments can establish statement truth or falsity {logical positivism, realism}.
Mental things are in the physical world {naturalism, epistemology}|. Science can evaluate belief strategies and criteria to give knowledge.
Representations do not explain behavior. Knowledge of unconscious skilled actions can explain behavior {phenomenological critique of representationalism}.
Physical properties can realize mental properties {physicalism, epistemology}.
People can only know sense data {physical phenomenalism}, which is what they experience or describe about objects.
Knowledge is only about observable facts and relations {positivism}|.
Knowledge is passive perception {sensationalism, realism}.
Knowledge and society depend on social relations, subjective human activities, and human values {social constructionism}.
People construct internal reality from sense data and cannot know if that reality corresponds to physical world {structural realism}. Evolution has provided space, time, and color categories, which people need in human environments.
People reason inductively about what was, is, or will be true. People sample to find outcome frequencies. People have information or feelings about outcome values. Simple algorithms can determine probabilities and risks {Bayesian inference}. Statistical models {Bayesian approach} show how previous events change current or future event probabilities.
Complex systems can build from simpler elements {bootstrapping}|, with nothing from outside system. For each hypothesis, bootstrapping assumes all hypotheses but one are true and uses evidence to support that hypothesis.
Thinking and knowing methods {formal reasoning} can use deduction, induction, argument, and logic.
Commonsense rules, simplifications, guesses, and trial and error {heuristics}| can discover knowledge or solve problems. Heuristics apply in connectionist nets, neural networks, hidden Markov processes, indefinite integration, semantic networks with Finite State Machine operators and related variables, morphological analysis, focal-objects method, equations, rule induction, fuzzy systems, regression trees, case-based reasoning, declarative languages as opposed to functional languages, graphs, combinatorial geometry, data mining, machine learning, and natural-language understanding.
Repetitions, successions, and regular conjunctions can predict next steps {induction, epistemology}|. Induction indicates truth but does not prove. Induction {enumerative induction} can observe many similar cases to find categories that remain constant or have true predicates. Induction {eliminative induction} can observe many different cases to see categories that remain constant, keep predicates true, or remove untrue predicates.
Three laws {laws of thought} underlie thinking: identity, contradiction, and excluded middle. It is impossible to prove laws of thought true.
Something identical to true thing is true {law of identity}, or what is, is.
Nothing is both true and false {law of non-contradiction} {law of contradiction}, or nothing both is and is not.
Something is either true or false {law of the excluded middle}.
People can know facts about perceptions {fact-perception, epistemology}.
People can perceive without knowing {thing-perception, epistemology}.
People cannot distinguish hallucination and perception {argument from illusion, epistemology}, except later by comparison and memory.
Brains can know symbolic representations {phenomenon} {phenomena, epistemology} of physical or non-physical things. Phenomena include conscious and non-conscious mental states. Phenomena are perspectives on objects and events. Perspectives indicate object or event essence.
types
Phenomena are sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, feelings, and limb positions. They are daydreams, talks with self, recollections, and ideas. They are pains, tickles, hunger, thirst, anger, joy, hatred, embarrassment, lust, astonishment, pride, anxiety, regret, ironic detachment, rue, awe, and calm.
consciousness
Consciousness is experiencing phenomena and qualia, not objects themselves. Consciousness has no intentions or beliefs but just is or has phenomena. All humans appear to have same awareness and consciousness and go through same consciousness-development stages. Perhaps, animals have some consciousness, because they can analyze images to do things that people can do.
Sense information {sense-data} {sense-datum, epistemology} can be about physical objects. Brain processes sense-data to make ideas and categories. Brain can forget sense-data. Perhaps, inner, non-physical, unified images are available to consciousness. Sense-data do not necessarily represent reality.
Knowledge of appearances requires consciousness of appearance {sense-datum fallacy}.
Senses only know appearances {veil of perception}, not reality.
People unconsciously use assumptions, theories, and concepts {paradigm, perception}| {indexical term} about subjects or objects. Indexical terms can refer to other objects, depending on context, so context sets indexes. Properties can exist without paradigms, so paradigms cannot define properties. To specify paradigms requires specifying a property that makes the paradigm, because paradigms have more than one property, but this is circular reasoning.
Secondary qualities do not necessarily associate with objects {contingent attachment}.
Paradigms can refer to something, sometimes by pointing {ostension}.
Knowledge can come from experts, scholars, or powerful people {authority, knowledge}|, by reading, listening, or being apprentices.
Knowledge ultimately derives from sensory experience {empiricism, epistemology}|. Perceptions have elementary sensory images or units. Minds build concepts by abstracting common properties from perceptions. Complex ideas {image} are simple-idea combinations. Abstract ideas, such as mathematics or self, come from sensory ideas. Minds can compare, identify, use logic, and actively perform other mental activities.
Knowledge {insight, epistemology}| {intuition, epistemology} can be feelings based on general background, culture, past experience, and present context. Brains can suddenly perceive relations between two statements, stimuli, features, objects, or events, after experience with both objects. Insights are deductions from knowledge, rely on previous experiences with objects and events, and require ordering statements and steps into processes. Minds can perceive or conceive certain self-evident truths, abstract objects, space, or time, without using sensations or perceptions. People can decide without conscious thinking.
Knowledge {personal experience} can be personal perceptions and actions, obtained by travel, participation, and observation.
Knowledge {revelation, knowledge}| {faith, knowledge} can be belief in received knowledge, knowledge supposedly sent from god. People can feel insight into profound truth. Mental stress or relaxation can suppress mental activity and so inhibit questioning and doubting.
People can attest to their perceptions and self-observations {testimony, epistemology}|.
Knowledge {tradition, knowledge}| {custom} can be conformity with established culture behaviors and beliefs.
Ideas associate {associationism, epistemology} if they are near each other in time or space.
Ideas near each other in time or space associate {contiguity principle, epistemology}.
Causation is not symmetrical for things and properties {causation relation}. If x causes y, then y cannot cause x. If x causes y, x properties are rarely y properties.
Things can always be near, or happen simultaneously with, other things {companionship relation}. This prevents the first thing from having some properties.
Correlation is symmetrical for things but not properties {correlation relation}. If x correlates with y, then y correlates with x. If x and y correlate, x properties are rarely y properties.
Identity is symmetrical for things and properties {identity relation}. If x is identical to y, then y is identical to x. If x and y are identical, all x properties are y properties, and all y properties are x properties {Leibniz's law}.
Objects related by symmetry can be congruent except for one asymmetry {incongruence relation}, such as left-right pairs and clockwise-counterclockwise pairs.
Opposites {opposites relation} have a property that can have two values, share most relations and property values, and presuppose each other.
Relations {physical relation} can use different objects and still be the same relation. Physical relations do not affect physical objects.
Terms {characterizing term} can be about properties.
Terms {general term, word} can be about classes.
Terms {material term} can be about uncountable substances.
Terms {sortal term} can be counting nouns about same things.
Mental states are in oneself {de se}.
People have attitudes {desire} toward things.
Non-perceptual mental states {thought} assert something about world and are not just concepts or beliefs.
Thoughts assert something about world {assertoric}.
Thoughts must happen {occurrent}, not just be concepts or beliefs.
Statements {belief} {doxology} can have content about something. Basic beliefs come from infallible, indubitable, or incorrigible propositions or mental states, or they come from personal experience, perception, introspection, memory, or reasoning. Beliefs are propositions that people think are true. Belief existence does not infer content existence.
Pictures are like beliefs, because both relate to world but are not world. Sentences that describe pictures are like expressed beliefs.
Local beliefs justify beliefs {inference to the best explanation} {explanatory coherence}.
All beliefs depend on other beliefs that are valid and appropriate reasons for the belief to be true {positive understanding principle} {principle of positive understanding}.
Talking to oneself and retrieving knowledge {thinking, epistemology} can lead to further thoughts.
thinker
Thought processes seem to imply thinking things, selves, or persons.
process
Thoughts use previous-moment thoughts. Thoughts can arise spontaneously. Thought processes can use categories and meta-qualities. Thought includes self-model.
stages
First thinking stage is to perceive. Second stage is to process perceptions using logic, concepts, and propositions, to form new perceptions, judge existing patterns, and find causes and effects.
First thought stage describes objects and events. Next thought stage describes how objects and events work. Next thought stage explains why objects and events work that way or are that way. Next thought stage relates objects and events to nearby things. Next thought stage relates objects and events to distant things in space, time, or abstract spaces. Next thought stage predicts what objects and events will be or do. Next thought stage demonstrates how objects and events fit theory or principles. Next thought stage is theory construction.
thought
Thought includes all mentation and cognition, conscious and unconscious. Thoughts are mental states and events with content, which people use to know how to perceive and act. They are always changing, are continuous, and are about objects. Thoughts can think other thoughts, so thinkers are thought-systems. Only thoughts have intrinsic value. Human biology makes thought, perception, and relations to world similar, allowing understanding and communication.
thought: mental content
Content is objects, properties, and relations. Mental states and cognitive systems have symbols and representations about something else. Experienced features are intrinsic, non-intentional features that cause phenomena. People can introspect such features. Such features can be different even if representation or intentional content does not change. Such mental features relate to physical-object properties. Beliefs or desires change will, which causes actions.
thought: non-conceptual content
Content {non-conceptual content} can be about abilities and experiences.
thought: infinities
Infinity is uncountable and has parts that have as many terms as whole. People can conceive of all space. People can conceive of being outside space. People can conceive of all time. People can conceive of being outside time, with no past, present, or future.
thought: motions
Animals can know motion directions, speeds, and endpoints. Animals can distinguish living-thing and non-living-thing motions, to protect against predators. Some animals can tell if animals are looking and in what directions.
thought: number
Number is plurality of plurality of pluralities. It is for counting individual objects. It applies to nouns and verbs as countable things vs. continuous amounts {mass noun, number}. Primates have object and number concepts, which allow numerical reasoning.
thought: object functions
Animals have interest in object and event functions, with which they interact. Animals can know other-animal and inanimate-object behavior frequencies. Animals can know other-animal and inanimate-object reactions to actions.
thought: idea relations
Relations conjoin two predicates or are one proposition with two variables. Relations can be about things inside {internal relation} or things outside {external relation}. *Relations are pairs: origin-destination, action-actor, difference-cause, recipient-method, motive-obstacle, trajectory-instrument, object-vehicle, and time-place.
Objects and object parts are connected/disconnected, inside/outside, left/right, vertical/diagonal/horizontal, large/medium/small, and above/below, as well as related by relative distance.
thought: space and cause
Spatial reasoning is causal reasoning, because to explain cause requires space.
thought: communication
Animals use communication to get others into same mental state.
thought: expression
People do not express thoughts with no reports or intentions to report.
People have outward thoughts, what is said in public, and innermost thoughts, what is thought in private {doi takeo}. Their knowledge concepts differ.
Neural events can cause mental events {psychophysical law}.
People can think using hypotheses, evidence, and logic {theory formation theory} {theory theory, epistemology}. This thinking determines what third person says. Only humans imagine that others have mental states or intentions. First person is active, is agent, has goals, makes decisions, has intentions, and deliberates, whereas third person is passive and has only functional modules.
People can mentally model how world works {simulation theory, epistemology}.
People can think about situation facts from different viewpoints {situation theory}.
Syntactical processes simulate semantic relations {proof theory, semantics}.
Beliefs and desires are theoretical {thought-theory}.
People can use as few concepts as necessary to explain ideas {Ockham's razor} {Ockham razor} {Occam's razor}. The simplest theory that is valid is the preferred theory. The simplest theory requires the least information. Inductive reasoning can find a simple program to use, but it is impossible to prove that the program is minimal.
Nothing happens without adequate reasons or causes {sufficient reason principle}| {principle of sufficient reason}, though people cannot usually know reasons.
People can produce, and think about, new thoughts {productivity, language} {language productivity}.
People can misrepresent {disjunction problem} {problem of misrepresentation} {misrepresentation problem}.
States {doxastic state}| can be about beliefs and similar things. Mental-information states can be non-conscious {subdoxastic state, non-conscious} or have non-mental information {non-doxastic state}.
Physical things can use basic-science languages {linguistic physicalism}.
Semantic ideas, such as references, can be explainable by non-semantic ideas, such as correlation, causation, resemblance, structure, or teleology {naturalized semantics}.
People can refer to non-existent things and events {Plato's beard} {Plato beard}.
Words are in larger expressions or link expressions to make larger expressions {scope, expression} {expression scope}. Scopes can be noun phrases, complex sentences, or predicates. If sentences rearrange or make inferences, words often have ambiguous scope or change scope, causing fallacy {scope fallacy, philosophy}. Statement, subject, or predicate negation changes scope. Reference change changes scope.
Questioning others {Socratic method}| {elenchus method} {refutation method} {method of elenchus} {method of refutation} can obtain agreement on facts and definitions; find contradictions, fallacies, and incomplete ideas; end false beliefs; obtain understanding; and reach agreed conclusions.
Descriptions can use logical particles, connectives, and other logical constants {syncategorematum}.
People can imagine experiments {thought experiment}| to test physical theories. Thought experiments are complex, because mind has hidden variables and results are not directly verifiable. Computers and/or people can perform mental experiments, to see actual results, note pitfalls, and propose better experiments. Experiments can also have control groups, with which to compare results, to verify that no other variables affected experiment except intended variable.
Analysis {topic-neutral analysis} can state something is similar to something else, but state nothing about objects, events, states, or properties.
Thinking {verbal thinking} can be in words without talking to oneself.
Mental states can be about something else {representation, symbolic} {symbolic representation}. Representation is neither reflexive nor symmetric.
types
Representations are beliefs, hopes, fears, or ideas.
forms
Representations can be linguistic, non-linguistic, or other mental states. Representations can use gestures, sounds, marks, or natural phenomena.
interpretation
The same representation can be about several different objects or events, depending on interpretation. Different interpretations can make different representations. Representations do not necessarily resemble the represented. Representations are not necessarily about real external objects or concepts but about perceptions, experiences, history, or actions relative to external objects. Representations can represent concepts, as well as things.
Similarity representation does not imply representation similarity. Representation absence is not the same as absence representation. Representation presence is not the same as presence representation.
process
Representations are not just labeling and not just associations between arbitrary symbols and the represented. Outside rules or other agents do not assign representations. Representations use agent structure or configuration, with functions. Representations have meaning to agents, because structures or functions associate with agent history, memory, structures, and functions. Agents can use representations, such as goals or reasons.
process: information
Representations include only parts and relations necessary to act for survival and omit most information about objects and events. Principles include how objects construct. Representations build through multiple eye fixations and so involve memory. Representations have hierarchies, in which larger patterns inhibit smaller ones.
images
Representations store general shapes at low resolution and parts at higher resolution. Representations include features and feature probabilities. Surfaces can be ellipsoidal segments, so objects and events can be like generalized ellipsoids, whose equation is a*x^2 + b*x + c*y^2 + d*y + e*z^2 + f*z + g = 0. Networks need 10 to 100 units to represent all possible three-dimensional-object views. Representations can include viewer-centered and object-centered properties.
People can introspect about representation {higher-order thought theory, meta-representation} (HOT theory) and so make consciousness {meta-representation} (Rosenthal). However, why should consciousness require thinking about mental states? Is culture necessary to have higher-order thoughts?
Cognitive representations have intrinsic connections {systematicity argument}. Reasoning is systematic.
Representations have both causal factors and conceptual-role factors {two-factor theories}. However, why do the factors match?
True statements {fact} about reality are possible. Facts can be true or false, based on perceptions and explanations.
Names {name, epistemology} are singular, like proper nouns, or general, like common nouns.
Statements {synthetic statement}| can state empirical facts.
Facts or beliefs have negations {counterfactual}|. Beliefs can be true if negations are false {counterfactual theory}. The statement "If P happens, then Q happens" {causation, conditional} can invert to "If Q does not happen, then P does not happen" {counterfactual conditional}.
For all a and b, "a is true if and only if b" and "b is true if and only if a" are true {equivalence thesis}.
Proving statements false {falsification}| can gain knowledge.
Reasoning can use difficult sentence types, rhetorical argument tricks, or emotional tactics {sophism}|.
Logical inferences {valid inference} can have conclusions that are true in any interpretation in which premises are true. Valid inferences, and logic, depend on word references, not uses.
Two inductions can lead to the same cause, or two testimonies or experiments can state the same fact {consilience}|.
Statements and opposites can combine into higher-level statements {dialectic}|.
Explanations {explanation} describe how parts work, how parts interact, and how interactions combine to give system output from input. Explanations describe units that interact and interaction rules. Rules include goals and representations. Explanations involve reasons and methods to recognize or evaluate reasons. Explanations must leave something out.
use
Knowing how to use something is not the same as knowing how it works.
expression
Understanding requires actually saying or writing explanations.
types
Explanations include function from structure, means to ends, conclusion from premises, effect from causes, and body from support.
Interpreting {interpretation, word} {word interpretation} can assign semantic values to all statement words.
How mind acquires knowledge, and how people judge knowledge {judgment, epistemology}, are two different processes. Beliefs are concepts about whether perceptions are real.
If people know p, people know that they know p {KK-thesis}.
Causal explanations require general concepts {meta-account} about units and laws.
In rules, equivalent-thing substitution should preserve truth {salva veritate}. However, some situations do not substitute this way.
Statements can refer to themselves {self-reference, statement}. Self-reference causes some paradoxes.
Particulars {particular} are class examples or object properties. Experiences are only about particulars.
Mental constructs {universal, epistemology} depend on inductive inference from experiences of particulars.
quantifier
Statements can include "all...", "some...", or "at least one...".
predicates
Universal statements are actually predicates. They mean, "The objects exist, and, if there is such object, then..." Asserting existence requires subject. Asserting essence requires predicate. Only particular nouns can be statement subjects.
particulars
Universals, Ideas, or Forms are actually particulars. For example, beauty is not itself beautiful. Beauty is not pattern for beauty or the beautiful itself. Universals are relative, not absolute. They are object qualities.
Beliefs, desires, and perhaps thoughts are statements that contain propositions, mental ideas, or situations {intentionality}|. They point to something, imaginary or real, inside or outside self. Intentionality logically relates person and objects, events, and statements. People can pay attention to, track, speak about, and know about objects, events, and statements.
Intention relates represented and representer. Agents have beliefs or wants about representations.
language
Reference can happen only in languages. Reference to something else is the foundation for all languages. Different symbolic representations can use different languages.
mental states
Perhaps, all mental states and events are intentions. For example, hopes, fears, ideas, beliefs, desires, thoughts, perceptions, dreams, and hallucinations are about, or of, something else. Sentences, questions, poems, headlines, instructions, pictures, charts, films, symphonic tone poems, and computer programs are intentions.
mental states: non-intentional
Mental phenomena, such as pain and pleasure, can be only about themselves, not intentional. Conscious states can be non-representational. However, pains and itches can be about body locations, orgasms can be about body changes, and emotions and moods can be body states.
consciousness
Representations can be non-conscious. Before uttering or comprehending, sentences seemingly represent. Perhaps, they represent only after conscious understanding. Unconscious beliefs represent. Perhaps, they represent only by association with conscious beliefs. Cognitive processing uses unconscious representation. Controlling machines use representations. Lower animals and plants represent environmental properties.
Consciousness can be about representation type, for example, behavior that controls representations (Tye) (Dretske). Consciousness selects from behavior sets or ranges. However, unconscious processes control most behavior (Libet) (Goodale).
comparison to relations
Because they reference something else, beliefs and hopes differ from ordinary relations like nouns or spatial relations.
Intentional relations {intentional idiom} are referentially opaque relation subsets.
Messages {message, epistemology} explain intentionality using information-theory concepts.
If machines can perceive, think, and feel, people can study parts and motions but never know about perception, thinking, or feeling {argument from knowledge} {knowledge argument} [Leibniz, 1840].
color scientist
Mary lives in the future and knows everything about human vision structures and processes, including color perception, and visible light and surfaces, but she has never seen color because her environment has only blacks, grays, and whites, including her skin and clothes. When she first sees red roses, she learns something she did not know before, sensations [Jackson, 1977].
knowledge argument
Knowing all physical facts does not include personal experiences, therefore physicalism is not correct. Phenomena require knowledge of feelings and cannot be just functions [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986].
People can know all physical facts about other people but not know or feel their experiences, so experience has non-physical properties. Experience provides knowledge that people cannot obtain in other ways. However, people can learn more, physical or non-physical, about physical-facts parts. Perhaps, people actually do not learn more at all.
Mary knows all about color vision and physical colors, such as stimuli, responses, causes, effects, similarities, and differences, but has never experienced color. Complete physical information is only sentences about physical things, properties, and relations. However, complete physical information can mean sentences deduced from physical description about non-physical things, properties, or relations.
People can acquire physical knowledge without perception. Mary knows the colors things have. If she can see colored objects, she experiences colors whose names she knows. She then learns something more about color. At least she has acquired new information. Does she learn about subjective, phenomenal qualities, which differ from objective, physical qualities? She definitely learns something about experiences, because environment is new. Does she know conditions that result in experiences, which experiences have which qualities, and facts about experiences?
Does Mary learn phenomenological concepts, such as representing or thinking methods, and can now look at same facts in different ways? Does she learn new properties about world, physical or non-physical? She does not use memory. People can only remember experiences after they happen. She does not use recognition. People can only recognize phenomena after experiences happen. However, learning environment is new, so fact is new.
light
If Mary has cones, she will see colors from refractions and diffractions anyway.
imagination
Perhaps, Mary's cones have damage from no use. Perhaps, she can imagine colors but only knows imagined color, not real color. Perhaps, imagination requires different faculties than knowledge. Inability to imagine does not preclude color perception. Perhaps, Mary realizes that sense qualities are concepts but also then learns such associations. Perhaps, some physical facts have no statements, and some phenomena have no expressions, only experiences. Perhaps, she sees either arbitrary colors or colors associated with objects known to her.
summary
Fundamentally, Mary will be in a new situation, and interactions between body and environment are too complex for anyone to know completely beforehand, at same time, or in the future.
new color
Fred can see color that others cannot perceive. Other people cannot know what he sees, unless they can see it already, no matter how much they know about brain and color [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986].
People who first experience qualities learn only practical knowledge {know-how}, but not facts, and gain abilities like imagining, remembering, and recognition {ability hypothesis}, with all other knowledge learned obtainable in other ways [Jackson, 1977] [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986]. Mary at least knows what it is like to experience at instant she is experiencing, though she probably cannot use the exact knowledge later. She knows phenomenal quality associated with name, and experience seems like a new fact about a mental state [Jackson, 1977] [Jackson, 1982] [Jackson, 1986].
In the knowledge argument, does Mary learn only by acquaintance and does not learn propositions or abilities {acquaintance hypothesis}? To know phenomenal quality seemingly needs acquaintance, and acquaintance often changes beliefs [Conee, 1994].
Perhaps, when Mary sees red roses, she learns new concepts and thinking methods {imagination, Knowledge Argument}, separate from brain states that she had before.
Perhaps, when Mary sees red roses, she learns to re-create or re-enact brain states {re-enactment}, because she learns to imagine.
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0225