PART 1: HOW DO WE KNOW THE WORLD?

The easy answer to this question would be: we know the world because we're aware of it, because we're conscious of it, because we perceive it. In short, we know the world because we're acquainted with it through our senses. If we were deprived of our senses, if we were unconscious, in a coma for instance, we couldn't know the world. That's why Aristotle thought that knowledge starts with sensation.

Yet, being aware of something isn't the same as knowing that thing. You can see something and have no clue as to what it is. Think of the men who 1st found dinosaur bones: they could perfectly see giants bones but they didn't know what these bones were. Some people actually thought they belonged to giants. So you know something when you have a right or correct idea of that thing. Knowledge is a good, a right, a correct, an adequate representation of reality. Therefore, to know something, you have to interpret your sense-data, i.e. you have to come up with the concept of dinosaurs in the case of giant bones, which means you have to use your mind to imagine things, to make hypotheses and to arrange them in a logical way. So you don't only need the senses to know the world, you also need imagination and reasoning, understanding which are both faculties of the mind. This is pretty much what Aristotle thought : knowledge begins with sensation and goes on with the work of the mind.

Now, this easy representation can be contested in 2 different and even contradictory ways: ➢ you could point out that knowledge being an adequate representation of things, knowledge lies in the mind. Sense-data are only the rough material worked out by the mind in order to achieve true knowledge. This stance is called rationalism, the epitome of which being Descartes. ➢ You could also say that the ideas you use to analyse sense-data actually come from the senses themselves, they're impressions made by reality on the mind. Therefore knowledge is