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 obvious then, that familiarity is something to be sought after, and of course it is sought after in mundane life, in vox populis, and in fiction. However, thither is danger in this. Bacons advert no doubt refers to true knowledge, as power rarely comes from world misled. Yet, we are misled, deceived, and betrayed when in the following of knowledge. A challenge then arises how to incubate in the pursuit of knowledge, something obviously necessary in life, while indirect that we are not being led astray. It seems a well thought out go for collecting knowledge is in order. any pursuit of knowledge essential begin with either an observation by the senses, or a piece of information supplied by a third party. This outset point must be verified, and then the process must transmit forward using a combination of Aristotelian logic, furth er observations and third-party information. Whenever observations or third-party knowledge is used, it must be verified carefully before proceeding. This process seems satisfactory, yet is much more complicated than it reveals on its skin. To further crystalise the issue, some of the terms that have just been thrown around must be more specifically defined for their context. What is Aristotelian logic? This is patently the process of deducing truthful statements 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 beginning with or including a false assumption cannot be trusted. This can lead to attention-getting situations in which the logic itself can be perfect and yet solace yield a false result. What does it mean to imprecate something? This is where things get difficult. Since it is precise hard to know if we actually know anything, we can never verify something completely. This c oncept is well out of the scope of this paper, but it is important to envision that complete verification is impossible, and endlessly inefficient, so we must be slaked with a certain amount of verification. This wildly subjective statement poses a great problem. What is a good amount of verification? There is no answer to this question, because in fact, it differs for every situation, and even within a one situation, two people may apply different levels of verification.