The Interconnectedness Of Knowledge By Rene Descartes And...

The Interconnectedness of Knowledge Renà © Descartes and William James take two opposing views in an attempt to answer the question of what true knowledge is. Descartes takes the perspective of a foundationalist, and James takes a coherentist approach when trying to answer this question. A foundationalist is someone who believes that there is an indubitable proposition in which all other knowledge receives justification from. This method of thought is often referred to as The Pyramid, because the tip of the pyramid represents a belief that an agent knows with no possibility of doubt, and all other beliefs expand from that indubitable claim, similar to how a pyramid expands from the smallest point. On the other hand, a coherentist believes that pieces of knowledge are justified on such a basis that they cohere with a comprehensive system of beliefs that mutually support each other. Coherentism can be referred to as The Raft, because it represents our body of knowledge as a raft that is floating free from any anchor. When replacing a piece of the raft, you stand on one side and fix the other, similarly, when replacing a piece of knowledge, you work from the other claims you have in order to fix the claim being doubted. Both Descartes and James use their respective approaches in order to answer the question of what humans can be said to know. In Descartes’ quest to answer the question of truth, he looks to certainty to tell him what beliefs are justifiable. A belief that isShow MoreRelatedChristian Ethics in a Postmodern World Essay example6531 Words   |  27 Pagesreacted against the ‘excess’ of modernism in 1934, (Rose 1991: 171) â€Å"Postmodernism† became very popular. It has been used in the fields of art (Christo-Bakargiev 1987), architecture (Pevsner 1967), literature (Hassan 1971), video, economics, films (James 1991), ideology (Larrain 1994: 90-118), theology (Tilley at al 1995), and philosophy (Griffin et al 1993). In trying to understand ‘postmodern’, we have to understand ‘modern’ first. According to Rose (1991: 1), there are many related yet different