Epistemology (Body)

At work, there is a security guard who studied philosophy in school. I myself, like reading about things like "What is the meaning of life?" and other philosophical questions. Needless to say, we have some pretty interesting conversations. Once when I was going over my notes at work, I mentioned how I am learning about epistemology. Epistemology refers to study of knowing, and attempts to answer "how we know what we know?" During the discussion, we talked about how limited the human body is in experiencing the universe since we only have five senses. He argued that what we consider "truth" is what we can feel, touch, see, or otherwise perceive. Therefore, without the aid of machines capable of detecting radioactive rays and invisible neutrinos, we are doomed to never understand everything around us.

Another thing we talked about is how we decide what we "know" by collectively agreeing on certain things. We "know" that Columbus discovered America because it is common knowledge that is passed on from person to person. Well that may be a bad example, seeing as how it is widely known that Columbus did not in fact discover America. Rather, he kind of stumbled across it accidentally. But this just proves my point. The fact that we now "know" certain things happened or not is the result of unanimous agreement.

Another interesting tidbit that we discussed in class is Body Epistemology. This refers to the body's ability to know how to do certain things without us having to consciously command it. For example, my typing of this entry is not a laborious process because my fingers are used to tapping the keys in a certain order to form words and sentences. Similarly, when I play a fast solo on my guitar, I don't think about each individual note and finger motion. My fingers know where to go and my picking hand knows where each string is in relation to another. If I slow down the process, I make way more mistakes than if I just left my hands do their thing.