Ebook An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge Yves R Simon Vukan Kuic Richard Thompson 9780823212637 Books

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Product details Paperback 180 pages Publisher Fordham University Press; 1 edition (January 1, 1999) Language English ISBN-10 0823212637

An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge Yves R Simon Vukan Kuic Richard Thompson 9780823212637 Books Reviews

• You have enjoy the turgid, tortured academic language of metaphysics to enjoy the book, so I just 'like it' (four stars), but the content is excellent.
  
  Simon defines knowledge as intention. The argument of the book is pretty simple knowing grounds in the senses (which are material). But there is more to know than sensation, so we have ideas (which are immaterial). The question he answers is how sensations become ideas. The answer is the action of knowing is to intend something that is, to experiment. It is intentions that bridge material and immaterial, giving us ideas.
  
  His framework is framework is ‘being and knowing’ (8), ‘thing and idea’ (18), ‘material and immaterial’ (12). This corresponds to the ‘cognitive complex’ in the theory of action, which defines knowledge as the relation of behavior to expressive symbolization.
  Culture provides cognitive standards for behavior.
  Behavior decides which standards are relevant.
  Because there is a gap between standards and behavior, behavior demands new categories of knowledge.
  Knowledge is experience and understanding of this system by demanding new categories.
  
  This relation is between two goal-attainment systems – implementive capacity in behavior and expressive symbolization in culture. So, defining knowledge as intention accords with the theory of action.
  But the cognitive complex requires four systems – culture, personality, social system, and behavior. These are distinct systems, each emergent from the others.
  
  Simon, however, proceeds on two systems – knower and object. Simon sometimes detects the other systems. For example, he says that ‘There is an intentional being of ‘sheer instrumentality [personality] as well as an intentional being of transcendent goodness [culture] in things used as means’ [social system] (28).
  
  He says ‘…there is a real distinction between to be and to know, as in any knower who knows not because he is, but because he becomes the object known [personality] in an additional, intentional existence.’ [social system] (30)
  
  But, he always returns to a dual framework, essentially the intellectual’s epistemology that the atomistic knower contrives in his experience (or behavior and the organism). Since dualism is not sufficient to analyze knowledge (as he must know on some level), he worries that the ‘superabundance of nature’ (22) raises the questions whether our senses ‘are as 'indefectible' with regard to their own proper objects as any faculty of knowledge can ever be’ (37). He feels satisfied that gustation, olfaction, vision, and audition are ‘indefectible with regard to their own proper objects’ (37). 'Indefectible' seems to mean that you know what you taste, smell, hear, see [and touch].
  
  But there is more to experience than sensation. So the senses do not exhaust the 'superabundance of nature'. So, humans need experimentation. Experimentation is 'intentional transitive action' that produces an idea (126). The idea 'lends its immaterial state, the state between potency and act (133). Thought produces a state, 'judicative synthesis,' the complex act of creative knowledge (141).