How can Different Ways Of Knowing Help Us To Distinguish Between Something That Is True And Something That Is Believed To Be True?

How can Different Ways Of Knowing Help Us To Distinguish Between Something That Is True And Something That Is Believed To Be True?

Introduction

The Theory of Value is concerned with the nature of ideals and with the ways in which they may be made actual. It may be subdivided into: (1) the study of the good and of the means of realizing it in conduct, which is Ethics; and (2) the study of the beautiful and of the means of realizing it in art, which is Æsthetics. (Helbig, 2006) Metaphysics is concerned with all questions of a general and fundamental character as to the nature of the real. It may be subdivided into: (1) Analytical Metaphysics or Ontology, which is the study of the basic categories of the sciences; and (2) Synthetic Metaphysics or Cosmology, which is the study of the generic conclusions of the sciences (Markman, 1998), and which, by the inter-relating of these, produces a unified picture of the world as a whole.

Methodology may be subdivided into: (1) Logic, and (2) Epistemology, which deal respectively with the ways of attaining and with the ways of interpreting knowledge.

It is clear that these three main divisions of philosophy are partly, though only partly, independent of one another. What ought to be in the way of goodness and beauty is not necessarily determined by what actually exists. To that extent the ideals of ethics and aesthetics are independent of the conclusions of metaphysics. But the manner in which our ideals can be realized is obviously controlled by the kind of world we live in; hence, from the standpoint of the practical moralist and artist the philosophy of values is to some extent bound up with the theories of metaphysics. The same mixture of dependence and independence is to be found in the relation between metaphysics and methodology. What criteria we shall use to attain truth will depend largely upon the nature of the reality we are investigating; and yet the same criteria may often be used to test the most diverse judgments. And as with logic so also with epistemology. The ways of interpreting truth as such, or the knowledge relation itself, will certainly depend in part upon what psychology and physics reveal as to the nature of the knowing subject and the known object. Yet here again the epistemological problem of whether realism or idealism is correct in its interpretation of the knowledge relation is a problem which at least in some of its aspects is independent of the particular nature of the terms of that relation. And finally, it would be easy to show that the relation between theories of method and theories of value contains a similar blend of dependence and independence. (Helbig, 2006)

In the philosophy of the last two centuries, however, the problems of method have been interwoven with those of metaphysics to such ...