I was thinking that there is only posteriori knowledge, animals ‘know’ by instinct, its just the biological machine running.
Remember that one of the main points here concerns someone being born with all-knowledge = ubermensch. We are all born pretty much the same, with the same mechanistic ability. A new born calf can avoid a predator to a degree, or ‘knows’ to stay near its mother by instinct, but it doesn’t know that.
To know ~ to have the quale of knowledge about a thing, or for the mind to have arranged memory and information such that it consciously ’knows’ a thing.
At most there is a very limited instinctual knowing at birth, but I maintain that is not the same thing as something which has been consciously understood.
Amorphus, you can’t be born with all knowledge…that’s hard rationalism, and you can’t be born with none…that’s hard empiricism. This was like the main thing Kant was doing w/ those critiques. Essentially, a couple groups of guys were debating this very shit, forever. And it was totally deadlocked, because neither would compromise to come to the proper understanding, which Kant laid out. There’s just no way around it. You can’t separate the “biological mechanism” from a person, the whole person is a biological mechanism. There’s no need for mind/body duality at all. It’s just the simple matter of saying hey…how can i interpret sense data without some kind of information by which to interpret it? I can’t. Information is knowledge, so I must have some before experience. Then you say hey…I don’t know what any of this shit out here in the world is, or what it’s called, so I gotta go out and take it in through my senses so I can know those things. It really is both.
Ok I see your point and you are probably right, my only doubt derives from my thinking there to be many kinds of information. ‘knowledge’ to me is not the same as instinctual and other kinds of collocative information [electrical signals denoting info as a wavelength etc], it probably occurs when mind quale arise in communication with such informations, the top level of the fractal landscape one could say.
Perhaps a similar difference to computer and user ~ or at least user interaction with that.
No problem! I think it’s all in the wording. Kant says you’ve got knowledge a priori and a posteriori, which combined amount to understanding, or some other roughly translated concept. If you mean understanding when you say knowledge, then I totally get where you’re coming from and I don’t think we disagree at all other than about the terms.
Perlocution ~ good word there, did it tell us anything we didn’t already know? Either way I suppose in linguistics its important to give the idea a word and category, adds to the tool cabinet - so to speak.
John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911,[1] Lancaster– 8 February 1960, Oxford) was a British philosopher of language, notable as author of the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary a discovery as the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality was for physics
perlocution: Definitions; noun
(philosophy) the effect that someone has by uttering certain words, such as frightening a person Also called: perlocutionary act
nice one.