Theme 1-reflection:Theory of knowledge and theory of science

Theaetetus

“How to get knowledge of the world”and “what is knowledge”are both difficult topics for me to understand. To have a better understanding of Plato’s Theaetetus,I surfed the Internet to search for some materials about Socrates. Socrates was a classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher and was one of the founders of Western philosophy. He used the dialectic method to debate with others,which have a significant impact on the later philosophers. Although he didn’t bring forward his definition of the knowledge, I was inspired by him and understood that it is the soul that view things herself through the organ and forms the conception automatically. Socrates imagined himself as a midwifery helping young thinkers to create  noble thought. In fact he did well.From putting forward this question,Socrates made sure that Theaetus was a man with noble though. Also,I searched many other philosophers’ works. In Aristotle's works,he attributed our cognition to our learning from experiences. In this way,our conception plays an important role on obtaining knowledge. Meanwhile, Socrates did not stress the importance of experiences.Maybe it is his limitation in that time.

Critique of Pure Reason

As for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,he proposed an new idea that objects must conform to our cognition. It is hard for me to figure out what Kant said. In the lecture class,the professor told us the history of the philosophical development and gave us a clear explanation of Kant’s thought. As far as I am concerned,the meaning of “cognition must conform to objects” is that we can not have a knowledge of a object until we perceive it. We use our different method to observe the object and carry out experiment to figure out what it is. By doing this, we can form a conception of a object after our observation of it. On the contrary,Kant put forward the idea that "objects must confirm to our cognition",explaining that we should form a conception first,which is also called A Priori. For human,we can not get knowledge of the world because our knowledge is limited. Let us assume,as if we were the god sitting there with totally object view of the world. Then from that stand of points,we will see human can not have the objective knowledge of the world because our conception of the world is structured by your faculty of knowledge. Different people may have different A priori. The same object in different places will have different meaning.For instance,a can of Coca Cola dropped in jungle will be regarded as an artifact from god,and the primitive will pray towards it. That is because our recognition differs from primitive’s recognition .Even the same object,what you perceived from the object may differ from what I perceived.Every one has different world and your world is different from mine.In fact,Kant investigate the critic of pure reason to see how it is possible to have knowledge of the world. A priori is organized according to categories and form of intuition. These outside “bodies” are constituted by form space,time and twelve categories from our conception.Meanwhile,perception is a way for us to perceive the world. Perception and concetpyion supplyment each other. If we can not perceive objects,our cognition have nothing to be based on. Meanwhile,If we can not form a conception,what we've seen before our eyes become meaningless. That is to say:"perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty". All in all,our cognition is formed by forms of intuition and twelve categories.  

Here is the table of Categories:

Quantity	Quality	Relation	Modality
Unity	Reality	Subsistence	Possibility
Plurality	Negation	Causality	Existence
Totality	Negation	Community	Necessity

(u1ucvszr)