Theme 1 - Theory of knowledge and theory of science

Question 1
"Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

The metaphysics contains questions about matters like time and room. Since time and room is arbitrarily objects it is something that we percept through our experiences and earlier peoples definitions. But in order to percept time and room in a different way we need to question just that, how we see and percept time and room. The author means that time and room (or any kind of object that we're trying to understand) must be perceived/studied through the object instead rather than through ourselves. That in order to understand objects we can not simply study them through our own eyes, we need to see ourselves through the objects eyes in order to understand the object. Take the sun as an example, for hundreds of years humans were under the impression that the sun was moving around the earth. It wasn't until Copernicus came along and saw the matter from the opposite perspective, the sun's, that we could understand that it was the other way around.

Question 2
At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this?

Socrates asks the question whether we know everything we see and hear or not. He takes an example of hearing someone speaking a foreign language, which you haven't learn to understand, do you then not hear? Or reading a letter in the same foreign language, do you then not see the letters of which you can't understand?

As an oppose to this argument Theaetetus then answers that we do see and know the figures and colours of the foreign letter, even though we can't read it. Also that we do hear and know the intonation of the foreign language, even thought we can't understand it. He means that just because we see and hear these things, that does not mean that we know or understand these things.

As an interpretation of Socrates argument, we do see and hear things with our eyes and ears. But they are just tools, tools for gathering of information. Information that needs to be processed and interpreted through our eyes and ears by the help of our minds. Because without the mind it is all just imperceivable information.

And in what way is it correct to say that Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

The empiricism emphasizes evidence, and that this evidence should be obtained through experiments and observations. Since we can't obtain evidence of knowledge by just our own seeing and hearing, since we humans perceive things differently, we need impartial perceptions through a lot of observations and empirical studies in order to obtain knowledge. If you were to obtain knowledge from just one single person then you could arguably say that you see and hear with your eyes and ears. But since we humans perceive things different we need a lot of persons seeing and hearing the same things in order to know that we see and hear the same things. By collecting a lot of impartial observations we obtain knowledge from seeing and hearing through our eyes and ears.