Knowledge and justification
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The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
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Descartes takes the statement I think, therefore, I am as a self-evident truth. Elsewhere, for example, in the Meditations, he expresses this idea by saying, "I am, I exist is a necessary truth". The Latin expression for I think, therefore, I am is Cogito, ergo sum. Hence, this argument is known as The Cogito. To summarise the point we have reached so far. Empiricists propose that there are self-evident truths based on sense-experience (sense-perception); Descartes, as an example of a rationalist, proposes that his own existence forms the basis of what is self-evidently true. Let us suppose for the moment (and only for the sake of developing the argument) that Descartes is right and the cogito is self-evidently true. Then what could make that true? If it is perception that makes sense-experience self-evident, then there must be another form of perception that makes the cogito true. This perception of one's own "soul" and affirmation of one's own existence is not a form of sense-perception. It is, therefore, another form of experience. In other words, the mind must be equipped with another faculty that gives it the power to affirm its own existence. Descartes called this power reason or rational insight. Another term used by rationalists to denote a power of the mind that is independent of sense-experience is intuition. Here intuition is being used in a specific philosophical sense and should not be confused with "intuition" in the sense of "having a hunch" or "gut feeling" about something. It is used to denote a power of "seeing" into one's own soul and affirming its existence.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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