Knowledge, Confidence, and Deceit in Descartes and Shakespeare :: Philosophy William Shakespeare Religion Essays

Knowledge, Confidence, and Deceit in Descartes and ShakespeareKnowledge is power, the English philosopher Francis Bacon once said1. It seems intelligible thus, that knowledge is something to be sought after, and of course it is sought after in everyday life, in thoughts, and in fiction. However, there is danger in this. Bacons quote no doubt refers to true knowledge, as power seldom comes from being misled. Yet, we are misled, deceived, and betrayed when in the pursuit of knowledge. A challenge then arises how to continue in the pursuit of knowledge, something obviously necessary in life, season verifying that we are not being led astray. It seems a wellhead thought out process for collecting knowledge is in order. whatsoever pursuit of knowledge mustiness begin with either an observation by the senses, or a piece of information supplied by a thirdly party. This starting pose must be verified, and then the process must move forward using a combination of Aristotelian lo gical system, and observations and third-party information. Whenever observations or third-party knowledge is used, it must be verified carefully in the first place proceeding. This process seems satisfactory, except is much more complicated than it reveals on its skin. To jack off ahead clarify the issue, some of the terms that have just been thrown or so must be more specifically defined for their context. What is Aristotelian logic? This is simply the process of deducing truthful parameters from other truthful statements. The main point here is that only a truth can imply a truth. Any findings based on a string of logic opening with or including a false assumption cannot be trusted. This can dealer to tricky situations in which the logic itself can be perfect and yet still yield a false result. What does it mean to verify something? This is where things get difficult. Since it is very hard to know if we actually know anything, we can never verify something com pletely. This concept is well out of the scope of this paper, but it is great to understand that complete verification is impossible, and endlessly inefficient, so we must be satisfied with a certain amount of verification. This wildly subjective statement poses a great problem. What is a good amount of verification? on that point is no answer to this question, because in fact, it differs for every situation, and even within a single situation, two people may apply different levels of verification.