There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

I think the OP is essentially corerect. For what it’s worth, here is how I would say it.

Knowledge is information organized for a purpose. Knowledge in the form of genes is generally for the purpose of creating mechanisms that perform various functions in living things.

Thought is a function of certain mechanisms in the brain. A single thought is an interpretation of a specific signal by a specific mechanism. Some signals are instinctive, like sensory signals for colors, objects, faces. You could call such experiences first-order thoughts. The OP would call these genetic, as they are enabled by the genes which created the various mechanisms involved. But there are also mechanisms which allow us to combine incoming signals to create new concepts, and then these new concepts can be available to the interpreting mechanism to change how it interprets incoming signals. These new concepts when so arranged would be acquired, or second-order, knowledge.

Given the above, I think it is arguable, if not safe, to say that most “thoughts”, i.e., interpretations of signals, involve sensory signals, as opposed to those signals being interpreted via second-order knowledge.

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Burning ghost
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Burning ghost »

James -

No, it’s wrong. The use of the term “knowledge” is misleading. Plus the adherence to nature or nurture dichotomy is outdated. DNA is neither only part of the environment or part of the organism. It is a simplistic to view DNA as nature only.
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Consul
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Consul »

JamesOfSeattle wrote: February 6th, 2019, 12:23 amI don’t feel strongly about this, but an argument can be made that water is wet. The connotation of something being wet is that is has a liquid sticking to it, and if you touched it, you would become wet because the liquid would stick to you. In that sense a puddle of water is wet. Contrast that with say, a puddle of mercury.
But making wet is still different from being wet.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Consul »

cavacava wrote: February 6th, 2019, 12:15 amIsn't 'wet' a lot like 'red', if you have not experienced it for whatever reason, you don't really know what it is like to be wet or to see red.
If "red" doesn't refer to some physically describable spectrum of wavelengths of light but to phenomenal redness (red-as-experienced), then you cannot really know what that is unless you've had subjective red-impressions yourself. But since "wet" simply means "covered or soaked with water", you needn't have touched any wet things in order to be able to know what wetness is.
Or is there a difference between "physical wetness" (= being covered or soaked with water) and "phenomenal wetness" (feeling wet) that corresponds to the difference between "physical red" and "phenomenal red"? If "phenomenal wetness" refers to the kind of tactile sensation you have when you touch something wet, then, of course, you cannot really know what that is unless you've had tactile sensations of this kind.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Consul »

"Wetness is a complex of pressure and temperature. It is possible, under experimental conditions, to evoke the perception of wetness from perfectly dry things, — flour, lycopodium powder, cotton wool, discs of metal; and it is possible, on the other hand, to wet the skin with water and to evoke the perception of a dry pressure or a dry temperature. Not the moistening of the skin, but the fitting distribution of pressure and temperature sensations, gives rise to the perception of wetness. Other modes of distribution of the same sensations produce the perception of dryness."

(Titchener, Edward B. A Text-Book of Psychology. New York: Macmillan, 1911. p. 172)

If nonwet things can feel wet, then phenomenal wetness is dissociable from physical wetness. But if "wetness is a complex of pressure and temperature", it's not a basic tactile sensation.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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meaningful_products
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by meaningful_products »

Consul wrote: February 6th, 2019, 10:50 am "Wetness is a complex of pressure and temperature. It is possible, under experimental conditions, to evoke the perception of wetness from perfectly dry things, — flour, lycopodium powder, cotton wool, discs of metal; and it is possible, on the other hand, to wet the skin with water and to evoke the perception of a dry pressure or a dry temperature. Not the moistening of the skin, but the fitting distribution of pressure and temperature sensations, gives rise to the perception of wetness. Other modes of distribution of the same sensations produce the perception of dryness."

(Titchener, Edward B. A Text-Book of Psychology. New York: Macmillan, 1911. p. 172)

If nonwet things can feel wet, then phenomenal wetness is dissociable from physical wetness. But if "wetness is a complex of pressure and temperature", it's not a basic tactile sensation.
Most, if not all, impressions are complex. For instance, every time you perceive the color green, its always a little bit different in your vision. Even if you look at the same green object two or more times consecutively, the subatomic particles have already moved so you never see the same thing.
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by cavacava »

Consul wrote: February 6th, 2019, 10:23 am
cavacava wrote: February 6th, 2019, 12:15 amIsn't 'wet' a lot like 'red', if you have not experienced it for whatever reason, you don't really know what it is like to be wet or to see red.
If "red" doesn't refer to some physically describable spectrum of wavelengths of light but to phenomenal redness (red-as-experienced), then you cannot really know what that is unless you've had subjective red-impressions yourself. But since "wet" simply means "covered or soaked with water", you needn't have touched any wet things in order to be able to know what wetness is.
Or is there a difference between "physical wetness" (= being covered or soaked with water) and "phenomenal wetness" (feeling wet) that corresponds to the difference between "physical red" and "phenomenal red"? If "phenomenal wetness" refers to the kind of tactile sensation you have when you touch something wet, then, of course, you cannot really know what that is unless you've had tactile sensations of this kind.
Perhaps then the differences in knowledge are traceable to the differences in the manner in which things are known, like by way of the Scientific versus Manifest Image.
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Consul »

Wmhoerr wrote: February 1st, 2019, 2:37 pmThe hunger desire comes before birth.
No animal desires to be hungry.
Wmhoerr wrote: February 1st, 2019, 2:37 pmA baby that cries KNOWS that it is hungry. It does not need to learn it. The baby has knowledge that came befofe birth.
A baby knows what it's like to be/feel hungry, i.e. to have certain (unpleasant) stomach sensations; but this doesn't mean that it knows that it's hungry in the sense of being reflectively aware of its hunger.
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Belindi »

Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/know ... indescrip/
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Bluemist »

Wmhoerr wrote: January 31st, 2019, 1:26 am For me there appears to be two different types of knowledge.
The “nature” verses “nurture” debate will probably never end. Similar words used in past discussions for “nature” could include: innate, inborn, instinct, á priori, and id. The nature part is taken as that with which we are born. As the carrier of information from one generation to the next is the genes, then it seems that the nature part can only be the genetic part.
Say someone says “I am hungry”. Hormones from the neural network around the stomach are sent to the brain. This idea starts in the stomach and ends in the brain. The person knows genetically s/he is hungry. ...
On top of this comes cultural knowledge (the “nurture” part); that which we learn during our lifetime. We can control hunger, envy, and hate with cultural knowledge. (A society makes you limit some behaviors through laws). Genetic knowledge comes before birth, cultural knowledge after birth. Genetic and cultural ideas interact in the mind with this interaction called thought and the direction of the interaction called the will.

I would like to suggest that ... most of our thoughts are genetic.
Hi Wmhoerr,

I thank you for bringing up a philosophically significant topic. What makes it philosophically significant is that Plato agreed with you
that a discussion of various types of knowledge is crucial.

Plato made the possibility of knowledge other than his own preference the debate in more than a dozen of his dialogues. [And,] As we should all recognize, even if begrudgingly, post-Plato philosophy consists entirely of footnotes to Plato and the back-and-forth discussion of these footnotes.

I'll just add to that, that post-Platonic philosophy follows the Eleatic fallacy of setting up false dichotomies of everything talked about so that we may then [falsely] conclude that either one or the other opposite must be 'true'. This was fine for Plato because in ancient Greece he had no other logic to work with. But even Plato strayed in the case of the philosophy of mind to three choices in the Republic. Analogously, distinct divisions of the psyche in Freudian psychology are more than coincidentally similar to Plato's.
If you don't believe in telekinesis then raise your right hand :wink:
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by wordandtruth »

I decided not to participate in discussions on this forum unless I become more able to do this unless I am accepted or I have more time unless I read more and become aware of the kind of thinking or dialogue requested here. Please excuse my intrusion here as a new member, if you feel like wastin your time.
Yet I decided to share only for now some of my very short time thinking - I mean not to elaborate - done for a free online course a while ago. it is related to the idea of two kinds of knowledge and I was supposed to write about Socrates and Kierkegaard, that's why it looks like this.

Socrates' maieutic is obviously sustained by his conviction that a part of human knowledge is hidden and innate. Aporia means the real question, that one which can illuminate the unconscious and make the inner seed germinate. I am referring to other nativist thinkers like Noam Chomsky, with his innate predispositions theory. Or to the psychoanalysis theory and so on. Usually, the brain does not ask a question by itself, unless it is exposed to a state of cognitive dissonance (a concept developed by Leon Festinger; a state of puzzlement similar to the concept of aporia). This cognitive dissonance is triggered by the environment, by a conflict between one's conscious beliefs or knowledge and a new perspective. The question needs an answer, just like the contradiction creates a reconsideration of previous answers. Aporia is the puzzlement. When a question is not solved by an answer, it enters the unconscious structures which contain innate knowledge predispositions, being a fertile ground for successive answers. It does not mean necessarily that it acts all of a sudden in a discursive way, but, following the newly acquired data, in a shorter or longer time it creates other connections, until the solution emerges, so as the consistency of personal beliefs or knowledge is obtained. Or, if the answer does not come into light, the question can lead to the change of behaviors. Like this, Socratic aporia - exemplified in Plato’s aporetic dialogues - can be a factor of change in one's beliefs, conduct, or even the trigger for knowledge achievements, by its seminal role of liberating and engaging inner structures or predispositions of knowledge. Like this, a piece of new knowledge or a new attitude towards reality is brought to life. My explanation is that it is a kind of individuation of knowledge or self-actualization of understanding.

I believe in the gradual development of one's inner cognitive functioning. The person's convictions are shattered by any kind of "aporia" situation and the ego cannot build for the moment another layer of defenses in order to overcome the lack of consistency or coherence in one's knowledge. The person's system of knowledge is like an onion with many layers superposed concentrically around the germinative core inside it. I use this metaphor of the onion because I need to stress the fact that knowledge is gradual, from the innermost part progressing towards the externalization and conscientiousness of truths and backward. It is the combination of inductive (empirical) thinking, from the exterior to the interior, followed by the opposite brain process - the deductive thinking and the acquisition of new theories when the collected data makes this possible. Effectively these processes are overlapping. This is the way I understand the phenomenology of the spirit. The whole corpus of knowledge of one civilization builds a kind of growing onion or fortress of thought or spiritual foundation, around which other cultural acquisitions are built in layers, without demolishing the inner walls. Or like a church being built over the ruins of older churches. The same applies to the human individuation of knowledge. The process of gradual understanding of the world, with its aha moments, travels through one's organized and structured neuro-psychological foundation, building new bridges inside his brain and thus between his psyche and the world, as you pointed. The individual changes his way to relate to events. But in order to organize further, to dig further into knowledge, one needs data from the environment and some kind of innate categories or abyssal frameworks or simply innate abilities permitting the unseen computation of knowledge facts. Through this long term process, the unconscious mind always acts in order to reestablish the logic of the system, until the conscious mind eventually finds the truth - the solution to the aporia state of mind. The aporia situation prepares the mind for future acquisitions and reinforces the willingness to acquire new data, through a selective process. The individual becomes open-minded preferentially for the facts that relate to the solution for the aporia state of mind.

This is the way I see the acquisition of knowledge or the debate nature versus nurture.
By putting your mind to work and pushing you to find the answers inside yourself. Briefly - a book is like a mirror - you read it and you create bridges from here to there in your own mind. Those things happen unconsciously, you are not fully aware of your mental functioning. You read about Arezzo ancient pottery somewhere by chance - and you go out to the supermarket and you find Arezzo tomatoes for sale for the first time, then you buy sunflower seeds once in a lifetime and you come home, you rest for a while and your book of poetry opens by chance exactly at the “ode to the seeds” poem. Things like this seem paranormal or supernatural to the less educated people. They can become paranoid and say - Oops, someone stole my thoughts! It is not true. This is normal functioning and it happened to me endless times, day after day. It is because the human brain has strong connectivity properties with other brains and other systems in this world. We are not isolated stars. We live within the universe, the brain can adapt and is organized and autonomous to some degree, even if everything is connected as a whole, with our body too. I wrote above about the imprint in this world of our mental functioning. And self-control is possible, even though we are influenced and we influence others. I was not conscious of this when I was young and most of the people don’t pay attention to this.

But knowledge means for most of us - the capability of doing something. There are plenty of know-how books. As for the understanding - there are humanities and philosophy. After 30 years of age, things begin to show their meaning to us, because in the backstage of our brains something worked on and on and rehearsed on and on until the play is over and can be enacted.
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Burning ghost »

Wordandtruth -

I am a little confused. In the other post you made you seem dismissive of psychology and psychoanalysis yet here basically outline your thoughts very clearly and distunctly in psychological terms? Did I misread something?
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by wordandtruth »

Some psychological terms appeared before the birth of psychology as a science. They can easily be replaced with synonyms or synonymical phrases. If I use them, this does not mean that I approve psychological theories rather than anthropological points of view for example. I am sorry that I cannot use more of the philosophical notions, but I will try to improve this. Unfortunately, although I was driven towards philology and philosophy, I had to study psychology when I was young, because of many reasons.
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by Belindi »

Wordandtruth wrote:
This is the way I see the acquisition of knowledge or the debate nature versus nurture.
By putting your mind to work and pushing you to find the answers inside yourself. Briefly - a book is like a mirror - you read it and you create bridges from here to there in your own mind. Those things happen unconsciously, you are not fully aware of your mental functioning. You read about Arezzo ancient pottery somewhere by chance - and you go out to the supermarket and you find Arezzo tomatoes for sale for the first time, then you buy sunflower seeds once in a lifetime and you come home, you rest for a while and your book of poetry opens by chance exactly at the “ode to the seeds” poem. Things like this seem paranormal or supernatural to the less educated people. They can become paranoid and say - Oops, someone stole my thoughts! It is not true. This is normal functioning and it happened to me endless times, day after day. It is because the human brain has strong connectivity properties with other brains and other systems in this world. We are not isolated stars. We live within the universe, the brain can adapt and is organized and autonomous to some degree, even if everything is connected as a whole, with our body too. I wrote above about the imprint in this world of our mental functioning. And self-control is possible, even though we are influenced and we influence others. I was not conscious of this when I was young and most of the people don’t pay attention to this.
Finding the answers inside yourself can be understood as innateness (as Chomsky) or as intuition i.e. unaware reasoning from empirically acquired knowledge which, at least sometimes, works better the more involuntary it is.
a book is like a mirror - you read it and you create bridges from here to there in your own mind.
True. The more sophisticated reader has a sort of silent dialogue with the author during which the reader decides what if anything they want to accept or adapt to their own ego structure. The ego structure will have been already set up with ideas got from a culture, so I like your idea of the old church site that has successive structures built on top of the old foundations.

Do you think that one's cognitive dissonance is reduced sometimes by a process of synthesising from thesis and antithesis plus environmental information?
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Re: There appears to be Two Types of Knowledge

Post by The Beast »

In Ancient times and, before Aristotle scientific method, there were two schools. The school later headed by Plato and the one presumably in Velia or the Iatromantis school. The school of Plato and the school of Parmenides. The great achievements of Rome at all at hand coming from the augurs and the haruspex to qualify as impressive. Frontinus ‘on Aqueducts’ makes a case on how the water flows. As far as bridges and how the mind makes them it is obvious that you need to be a priest/priestess to receive the visions and translate them while watching the flight of birds. It was after Aristotle when the division of Art and Science began. As far as “water is wet”, it must come from a priest of Amun/Apollo receiving the holly water and reciting the mantra creating the circumstances of the right frame of mind to receive the vision of the atomist.
If one can discredit the Atomists and their methodology, then “water is wet” will be discredit as well. Since they were iatromantis it must be obvious they wet their lips with the sacred mist to induce visions of atoms and their wetness. I’m expecting a Huxley like account of “water is wet” …if using the scientific method as it was taught in the sixties.
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