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◗ Plato
Plato (427–347 bc), as a pupil of Socrates, wrestled with a wide variety of moral and philosophical questions in the form of dialogues. He expressed his ‘idealist’ doctrine mainly through the mouth of Socrates in the form of ‘Socratic questioning’. Socrates would start with a concept and get his pupils to understand the problems with the concept until they formed an answer to the problem. In subsequent dialogue, Socrates would then show the inadequacy of their answers by revealing contradictions within them. The end result was not to provide a firm answer but to gain a better grasp of the problem. Plato believed that ‘conclusions’ did not have any special status as our assumptions and beliefs are open to perpetual questioning.
In a later dialogue, Theaetetus (360 bc), Plato explores the nature of knowledge. Is knowledge purely subjective and why is it better than opinion? Plato provides three answers to the question of ‘What is knowledge?’:
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● Knowledge is perception.
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● Knowledge is true judgement.
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● Knowledge is true judgement together with an account.
Each answer is knocked down in true Socratic style. There is no consensus to this day about knowledge except that it is derived from perception that can provide a rational justification for it.
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◗ Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 bc), Plato’s star pupil, saw philosophy as an ongoing attempt to explore the complexities of human experience. After a sharp reaction against Platonism, he achieved a synthesis of the natural and rational aspects of the world in The Metaphysics (350 bc). In every area, his approach was to start with ‘appearances’
(ordinary beliefs and language), work through puzzles (work through contradictions and find beliefs that were most basic and central) and come back to ‘appearances’ with increased structure and understanding.
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◗ Descartes
René Descartes (1596–1650), a rationalist philosopher, struggled with the question ‘Can we know anything for certain and, if so, how?’ He saw ‘certainty’ as a state of mind and
‘truth’ as a property of statements about the external world. He developed scepticism to an art form and promoted doubt as a method which later became known as ‘Cartesian doubt’. In Meditations (1641), Descartes provides three stages of doubt in order to know something:
1 Lay aside things on commonsense grounds that are doubtful.
2 Doubt that at any given moment you are awake or perceiving anything at all, i.e.
you may be dreaming.
3 Imagine that a malign spirit or a malicious demon has the sole intent to deceive you.
This led Descartes to his first certainty:
‘Cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, therefore I am’.
In Meditations, Descartes sees ‘thinking’ to mean all forms of conscious experience including pain, perceptions and feelings. The true value of Descartes comes from his questioning different aspects of knowledge:
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● What do I know?
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● What can I doubt?
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● How can I know whether any of my beliefs are true?
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● What is the difference between my beliefs and prejudices?
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● Is there room for scepticism?
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◗ Locke
John Locke (1632–1704), an empiricist, believed that everything we conceive or con- struct has come from experience. His dictum was:
‘Don’t blindly follow convention or authority. Look at the facts and think for yourself.’
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he develops the concept of
‘idea’ as something sensory that has the properties of a sensory image before the mind.
An ‘idea’ can also cover thoughts, pains and emotions. He views reasoning as a mental
Critical thinking and reflection
Reflect on your way of looking at the world. Have you ever done any philosophical introspection to understand your own position in amongst the diverse ways of looking at the world? Are you more of a thinker or a doer? Do you think that this has any impact on how you see the world? Have you ever thought about the effect that diverse ways of thinking about a problem may have on the functioning of a team?
What do you think could be the implications of this?
Chapter 2 / The nature of knowing 39 operation of these ‘ideas’ which leads to knowledge or belief. In this sense, knowledge is a perception of relationships between ideas. He accepts that our senses provide us with knowledge of the existence of things but not knowledge of their nature or essence. Locke saw Newton’s laws as a kind of crude fact. They were a good description of how things behave but not an explanation. He was keen to point out Newton’s most quoted words:
‘Hypotheses non fingo’ (‘I’m not offering explanations’). Locke saw memory as key to per- sonal identity as each person’s awareness of history makes them the individual they are.
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◗ Hume
David Hume (1711–76) knocked the bottom out of science with his insights into causal links. He acknowledged that one could make ‘inductive inferences’ about ‘matters of fact’ such as A causes B from observation of A followed by B, such as day follows night and night follows day. But he argued that past experience could not justify a conclu- sion about future behaviour. Even though defenders of induction invoked the principle of ‘uniformity of nature’, there were clearly no grounds to prove that this principle was correct. This insight showed that scientific laws gained through observation were no longer universal statements as previously held (Hume 2000). Subsequently, the doc- trines of ‘logical positivism’ have been derived from Hume. He divided propositions into ‘truths of reason’ (analytic or a priori – from theory) and ‘truths of fact’ (synthetic or a posteriori – from practice).
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◗ Kant
In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) suggested a third propo- sition to Hume’s truths of reason and truths of fact. This proposition was synthetic yet a priori, namely the Form of Sensibility, and concerned space and time. He argued that space and time were inescapable modes of experience and could be specified in an a priori manner (space with geometry and time with arithmetic). He saw knowledge as bounded by ‘possible experience’.
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◗ Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) viewed the primary goal of knowledge as the greater development of the mind towards freedom. In The Philosophy of History (1837), he considered all concepts historically as part of a ‘dialectic process’. Using the example of Greek society, the dialectic process starts with a ‘thesis’, where there is harmony between reason and desire in society. However, he argues that this stable condition cannot persist indefinitely and gives rise to its ‘antithesis’ through ‘Socratic questioning’ and the subsequent breakdown of Greek society. In turn, the dialectic process moves forward to create ‘synthesis’ of these opposing views to give way to a new thesis. Hegel’s view of reality is ‘Geist’ (mind or spirit) which is fundamentally mental or intellectual in nature.
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◗ Pragmatists
The primary contribution of the American Pragmatists (Peirce, James and Dewey) towards knowledge was to create a link between belief, meaning, action and inquiry.
Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), often seen as the father of pragmatism, was principally focused on the question of how we are able to investigate the world rationally. In his Theory of Inquiry (1867), he suggests that we inquire by testing hypotheses and holding certain beliefs constant that may be revisable or fallible. In scientific inquiry, he pro- poses the following phases in the development of knowledge:
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● ‘abductive’ inquiry – presenting theories for consideration;
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● ‘deductive’ inquiry – preparing theories for test;
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● ‘inductive’ inquiry – assessing results of the test.
William James (1842–1910) presents a pragmatic theory of truth where our beliefs need to be in accord with the underlying evidence (1909). For instance, he suggests that our preferences for one theory over another need be based purely on the strength of the competing evidence. In circumstances where evidence is equal, James suggests that we can use other criteria such as bias. He views people as players in the world rather than mere spectators.
John Dewey (1859–1952) applied Peirce’s theory of inquiry to social and political philosophy. In The Quest for Certainty (1929), he sees science as an activity and pro- cess of ‘inquiry’ that is essentially dynamic in nature. He is against a ‘spectator’ view of knowledge. Instead, he views human activity as a concern for survival in a dynamic environment where knowledge is the most important survival mechanism. For Dewey, knowledge was closely bound with activity, and notions of truth and meaning also needed to have some connection with it. Dewey made a significant contribution to the philosophy of education (Dewey 1990, 1991) by highlighting the interconnectedness of learning and doing and the need to encourage children to learn by doing, by activity and by adopting a problem-solving approach.
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◗ Phenomenology and existentialism
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) influenced a number of philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and established a movement known as phenomenology. In addition, he made a crucial impact on the development of continental and analytic philosophy.
Critical thinking and reflection
On many levels, the pragmatist perspective may be considered to be the most appropriate one for managers. What do you think are the strengths and limitations of this perspective? Can you think of any circumstances when a pragmatist perspective could be detrimental to an organisation? Why do you think problem solving could be enhanced by this perspective?
Chapter 2 / The nature of knowing 41 In his masterpiece Logical Investigations (1901) Husserl starts his general theory of knowledge on the basis of our conscious awareness being undeniably certain. He con- tinues that our consciousness is always an awareness of something and, in practice, it is difficult to distinguish between states of consciousness and objects of consciousness.
He calls the directedness of mental content ‘intentionality’ and the aspect of the mind that accounts for this directedness ‘intentional content’. He argued, for example, in his account of intentionality that it didn’t matter whether there was a chair out there or not.
He could bracket it and perform a ‘phenomenological reduction’. This meant that all that was needed was that he took there to be a chair in the world of objects. He further argued that no one could experience anything without this directed mental content (intention- ality). This became his unquestionable foundation for all understanding. For Husserl, phenomenology was allowing things to show themselves as they are in themselves.
Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) predominant philosophical preoccupation was to answer the ‘question of being’. In Being and Time (1927), he views human beings as
‘Dasein’, meaning existence, and sees activity characterised by humans coping in cer- tain situations. Heidegger suggests that we become ‘Dasein’ when we conform to public norms and become socialised in shared coping skills. Any Dasein is aware that the way of the world is ungrounded. He uses the word ‘Unheimlich’ (not being at home) to describe the anxiety in the form of guilt caused by the unsettling character of just being. This notion is taken up by existentialists in their liberation philosophy to accept no meaning in Dasein and the unsettling groundlessness of experience.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was a student of Husserl and Heidegger and was also greatly influenced by Descartes’ notion of human consciousness as free and distinct from the physical universe. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes conscious- ness as ‘nothing’ (‘not-a-thing’) but an activity (‘a wind blowing from nowhere towards the world’). As consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality.
This is fundamental to Sartre’s thesis as it forwards the primacy of human freedom. He argues that consciousness is always self-determining and follows a playful paradox:
‘It is always what it is not, and is not what it is.’
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◗ Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was primarily concerned with the role of language in human thought and life. In Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1922), Wittgenstein argues that if language represents reality and sentences represent states of affairs, there must be something in common between sentences and states of affairs. As part of his ‘picture theory of meaning’, he regards sentences as a picture of possible fact and the funda- mental unit of meaning. Furthermore, he views the arrangement of words (‘names’) in sentences corresponding to possible arrangements of objects in the world. This leads to his premise that the structure of the real world determines the structure of language.
In his later work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein employs a ‘tool’
conception of meaning whereby words are tools and sentences are instruments. The meaning of a word is its use in language and the structure of language determines how we perceive the real world. Language is not strictly held together by a logical structure, as argued earlier in the Tractatus, but consists of a multiplicity of simpler substructures
or ‘language games’. In this analysis, as language permeates all thinking and human experience, the notion of thinking can exist only with expressions. This resulted in some controversy over the ‘private language’ argument where critics argued that indi- viduals could use words to name private sensations that no one else understood.