Steimer | Fourth week blog post | 9/18 | Knowing what we know, and understanding what we don't.

The fourth week we discussed Kant’s idea of Sensation to Perception to Conception, Hume's idea that it's not a fact that the sun will rise. The only fact is that it DID rise. We discussed a universal audience as a construct for allowing for the search of truth by applying a group of peoples experience. Then, artificial language vs natural language. Under this idea several specificities emerge:

  • Natural facts are not created by man and exist apart from them, whereas artificial facts are man made.

  • Abstract ideas are a part of natural language 

  • The concept of one, once named, becomes artificial.

Further, if God can create something from nothing, then that must count as natural. With this, the idea of creation; Poets believed that they were inspired by the “muse”, could be in touch with the subconscious. Our understanding of the unconscious gives modern philosophers a reason to want to remove themselves from the connection to the subconscious, moving deeper and deeper into the abstract. 


I think this is about how we take in ‘facts’ and then through our cognitive process, create something artificial. This creation of artificial facts can hinder our understanding of how to interact with our intake of information, but more importantly, our reflection on that information. Modern philosophers that don't accept this idea miss the point entirely.That something is to be gained when the ‘new’ is experienced. Not all the answers come from thought. Like Hume said, we can't know the sun will rise tomorrow, only that we experienced it rising today.

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