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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Bgs0l1r7oc","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ21Ӻ","startOffset":0,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ27Ӻ","endOffset":203°Ӻ,"quote":"This seems to me a good reason to take a brief look at the history of epistemology. There were single thinkers who already at the beginning of Western philosophy suspected that realism and its claim of objective knowledge were untenable. The sceptics have persistently denied such a possibility for more than two millennia. Most philosophers acknowledged the incontrovertibility of the sceptics’ arguments, but nevertheless went on hoping to find a path that would lead towards unquestionable truth about a real world. The paths they chose always led into the realms of metaphysics, that is to say, they tacitly implied some form of mystical belief.\nPlato’s famous metaphor of the cave is a good example. In this fairy tale, human beings are chained in a cave the entrance to which they cannot see. In front of them, on the wall of the cave, they see shadows, and from these shadows they must guess what things there are in the world outside and what goes on there. But plato added that God, had instilled latent truths into the souls of humans, and if they learned to use their intuition, they would come to acquire truths about the real world.\nThis metaphor is powerful because it presents a poetically plausible situation, without making it clear that this situation could be described only by a god, for only a god could know what lies beyond the domain of human experience.\nThe Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico said this very nicely at the beginning of the 18th century: “God knows the world, because He created it, human beings can know only what they themselves have made.” The treatise from which this statement is taken, is the first constructivist manifesto. Immanuel Kant, some seventy years later, wrote in the Introduction to his famous Critique of pure reason: “Human reason can grasp only what she herself has produced according to her own design” (Kant, 1787).\nNeither Vico nor Kant, however, was able to shake the general belief that somehow we must be able to discover how the real world really is. In my view, the persistence of this belief springs from the fact that we all have a lot of knowledge that we consider reliable, knowledge that we trust when we make decisions about how to act.\nWhen we run down the stairs, we feel confident that the next steps will be there where we need them. And we have no less faith in much larger contexts. When I stepped into the plane to come here, I had no serious doubts that it would bring me to Geneva and that the old city would still be the one I know from many previous visits. Such faith in the permanence of objects and circumstances is essential in our everyday living – in spite of the fact that things do not always turn out quite as we expected.\nWe simply have to believe that, by and large, the world we experience is a stable world. But this belief should not lead us to assume that the world we experience must be like a reality that lies beyond.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°,^"jQuery3210165293970052871722":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"Argumentation2","data_creacio":1592816510685°
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