Continued from Knowledge (Part III) Another philosopher, René Descartes ( 1596-1650), had a distinctive perspective on knowledge. He believed that knowledge was a matter of certainty, and that the only way to achieve such certainty was through rational inquiry and doubt. Rene Descartes Cogito, ergo sum Descartes is a rationalist philosopher. He was known for his method of radical doubt, which involved questioning everything he knew in order to arrive at a foundation of knowledge that could not be doubted. He believed that all knowledge should be based on indubitable, self-evident truths, or what he called "clear and distinct" ideas. In other words, knowledge had to be based on ideas that were so clear and distinct that they could not be doubted. Descartes believed that the human mind was capable of arriving at such knowledge through the use of reason alone, independent of sensory experience. He argued that this was possible because the human mind had an innate knowledge of
The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge The tripartite analysis of knowledge has been held by many philosophers throughout history and its origin can be traced all the way back to Plato's discussion of a tripartite analysis of knowledge in the Theaetetus . There are three components to the traditional analysis of knowledge; i.e, the truth condition, the belief condition and the justification condition. Let's go through them one by one: - The Truth Condition According to the tripartite analysis of knowledge, a person S can only know the subject of a proposition p if and only if the proposition p is true . Nonetheless, sometimes what is false cannot be known, and s omething’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical , as opposed to epistemological. It ( truth