Professional Documents
Culture Documents
09/27/10
P. 1
Reflection on Ten Philosophical Mistakes
My basic understanding about knowledge throughout this chapter was that knowledge, that
which is "true knowledge" anyways, is, without a doubt, always going to be certain to whomever,
whenever where ever. All else is "false knowledge," or "opinion." An interesting point brought up in the
discussion was that what is true to everyone, here and now may not have been true to anyone in the past
and may not still be true to all somewhere in the future. A question asked by Adler on page 84 of the
chapter, "...how much knowledge do any of us have?" is an important question to ponder as human
beings who typically naturally feel empowered by their ability to know and to be distinguished as
"philosophical." Most of us, though having the knowledge that many ideas are disproven all the time,
continue to think that what we know is true because it is true here and now, and for everyone.
When Adler talked about a "selfevident truth" being the antithesis of an impossibility, it came
to my mind that just because something is thought be impossible, it might not, theoretically, be
impossible if we do not know with certitude that it is not impossible. And easing into the question of
whether we can know anything with any certitude may or may not be impossible.
Many examples brought up during the Socratic triggered many questions and personal
knowledge obtained on each subject. One of the most interesting examples was the idea that it is true
knowledge that we all need to breathe oxygen to survive. This fact is not what I found interesting, but
rather what some of the participants of the Socratic thought they knew. I am talking specifically about
Alex's statement that we are breathing oxygen when we are being born. The truth is that it is necessary
for our first breath to be pushed into us. That is why it is possible for a mother to give birth to a child
under water without the child initially drowning. I thought it was interesting that Alex didn't know this
when he made his statement, therefore what he was saying was, at the time, true to him. I understand
that Socratics help us to know what every one else knows, but this instance is one of the reasons why I
do not prefer the Socratic method, because if what we are all discussing is not true then we are
defeating the purpose of having a discussion that is based on truth and that which we know is true.
It was brought up many times that 2+2=4 and 2+2=0. On the subject of Mathematics, Adler
states on page 94 that "Mathematics and logic are also genuine knowledge, but they are not knowledge
of the world of observable phenomena, or the matters of fact and real existence." It is obvious to us that
if we have one, two items in front of us, and then we put one, two more items beside the first two, we
now have one, two, three, four items in front of us. It was true that there were zero items in front of us
at the point in time before the first two were in front of us, and it was true at another point in time that
there were one, two items in front of us before we put one, two more there. This ties back into the idea
that what one knows at one point in time is true to them at that point in time, the idea not necessarily
being true or false before or after that one point that one knew it.
Adler's idea that once we have knowledge, we can understand, and once we understand, we can
be wise is, in my opinion, and implication of the assumption that the knowledge which we understand is
in fact knowledge and that it is not false or an opinion. I agreed with Katie about knowledge that is false
leading to misunderstanding, which ultimately, theoretically leads to wisdom that is unwise.
To sum up, I learned that it is impossible to say that that which we know is actually true or just
that which we know to be true, it is impossible to know that something is impossible when it is possible
that it isn't impossible, and that we can't know for certain that we know things with certitude if what we
know now was or wasn't certain before or after we did or didn't know it to be certain. Basically,
knowledge is what we know, whether we know it to be true or false, and opinion is just what we think
we know to be true or false.