PHIL 201HOW ARE BELIEFS ACQUIRED? TRANSCRIPTS1:Hello, and welcome to another presentation in PHIL 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. I’m Dr. Mark Foreman.[This bracketed section references a textbook that is no longer used in this course:Before I get into this presentation, I want to make a comment here about what I’m doing in these particular presentations in relationship to the textbook by J. Wood. I like Wood’s book a lot. I think he does a lot of good stuff. I especially like his emphasis on the intellectual virtues. You don’t see that in many books on epistemology. Unfortunately, one of the things Wood doesn’t do, is he doesn’t cover some traditional epistemology topics that I think are important for you to know if you want to take an introductory course in Philosophy. So what I’m doing in some of these presentations is covering some of that material that he’s left out of his book. Obviously, his book has enough in it—you can see that from just reading it that there’s quite a bit there. And I’m certainly not disparaging his book—I think it’s an excellent book. But I do want to cover some material that he simply doesn’t cover here. So that’s what we’re doing here a little bit. Our last discussion on skepticism was part of that. This discussion on rationalism and empiricism is also part of that, as well as my next discussion on truth theories.]Having now discussed skeptics, we are now ready to examine the different elements of our definition of knowledge. Remember, we defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” Now I want to take you to those elements and talk a little bit about them. First of all, I want to talk about beliefs, and begin our discussion with that particular area there and to concentrate specifically on the question, “where do our beliefs come from”. In other words, since beliefs form the basis of knowledge, what is the origination of our knowledge? Where do we obtain knowledge from? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this particular area. And in doing that, we are going to look at a very traditional debate between rationalism and empiricism.S2:Let’s start off by maybe defining what we mean by a belief. What, exactly, is a belief? A belief issomething we affirm to be true in a propositional form. For example, I look outside my window, and I say there is a tree outside my window. I form a belief about that—that there’s a tree outsidemy window, and that comes out in the form of the proposition, “there is a tree outside my window.” One of the questions we can ask about a belief is where do we get the content for our beliefs? How did I arrive at that particular conclusion? This takes us to two classically rival theories about where we get our beliefs from.One of these is called rationalism. Rationalism says at least some knowledge of reality can be acquired through reason independent of sense experience. Now, it’s very important to note here that rationalism is not claiming that all knowledge is acquired through reason. At least it’s not necessarily claiming that. It’s only claiming that at least some knowledge can come purely from reason without any use of my senses at all.Page 1 of 8PHIL 201Now, we can contrast rationalism with the other theory, which is called empiricism. Empiricism says that all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense experience. If I didn’t have a sense experience about it, then I can’t know that it’s true there.Imagine what it would be like to be born blind, to be born without your sense of hearing, withoutyour sense of smell, without your sense of taste, or your sense of touch—your tactile sense. Imagine none of those senses are functioning. Would you be able to know anything about the realworld we experience? The empiricist says no. All knowledge begins with the senses. A rationalistwants to say there is some knowledge that I can arrive at about the real world without my senses functioning at all.That’s where the debate lies, and that is what we will look into at this point.S3:Let’s begin with a discussion of rationalism. I want to look at two rationalist philosophers: the Greek philosopher, Plato, and a philosopher we’ve already looked at, René Descartes.Beginning with Plato, we need to start with a comment about his metaphysics. Plato believed in two worlds that actually really existed: what he called “the world of being and the world of becoming.” It’s important to understand that these two worlds are real worlds. They objectively, actually exist. But they’re not both physical worlds. The world of becoming is the physical worldthat we all exist in right now—the world that we experience every day. The world of being is a world that really exists, but you can’t get there through any physical means. It’s an intellectual world. You can only get there through the mind.We might use the analogy of comparing it to heaven. We believers believe there is a real place called Heaven, where God exists. But it’s not a physical place; you can’t get there through any physical means. But it’s still a very real place.I don’t want to get to close here—I’m not saying that Plato’s world of being is Heaven. I don’t want to give that impression at all. But he did believe that there was this other world called the world of being where things actually really exist.Plato believed that we pre-existed in this world of being before we were born in this world—all of us. We pre-existed in this particular world, and this world is populated with these things he called forms. And we encountered these forms. The form of something is the perfect archetype ofsomething. For example, the perfect tree or the perfect dog. And there was a form of everything in the world of being that we have here in the world of becoming. There was a form of that in that particular world. We had perfect knowledge of all of those forms while we pre-existed in that world.Plato believed that when we were born this knowledge we had was, in some way or another, thrust into our subconscious. So, in fact, we innately know everything—we are born knowing everything. But through the trauma of birth, this knowledge is kind of lost in our subconscious. Itis buried deep within us.Page 2 of 8PHIL 201Plato, then, believed that learning was actually a process of recollection—recalling what in fact we already know. So for Plato, we know things before we actually experience them in the