Understanding Language, Knowledge, and Philosophical Models
Language and Knowledge
Language is a tool to express our thoughts and ideas, to communicate with others. Knowledge is also an instrument that aims to understand reality. Language and knowledge are intimately related, since we express our knowledge through language and describe aspects of the reality that surrounds and shapes us.
Fundamentals of Knowing
Knowledge is the ability of our mind to connect with the outside world and understand it, establishing relationships between three key elements: the subject of knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the relationship established between them.
System and Paradigm
A system is a model that organizes knowledge, science, art, and understanding. A paradigm is a way of organizing knowledge within a specific sector. Within the same system, there may be several paradigm shifts. For example, in naive realism, there are different paradigms: geocentric, heliocentric, Newtonian universal gravitational force, Einstein’s theory of relativity, etc.
Man
With Freud, a new era began, focusing on the concrete and particular man, who seeks happiness but often finds himself unhappy due to factors beyond his control, such as repressive societal culture, morality, family, and his own inability to rebel against the establishment.
From a philosophical perspective, the problem of knowledge is no longer relevant, because man possesses everything needed to rebuild this new reality. External reality is merely the outward projection of privacy and thought of the subject. Therefore, man is the creator of reality.
Truth in Nature
Truth, as seen from the viewpoint of nature, is a place of coexistence where daily life is resolved, but also a home shared by gods and men. Nature is seen as a totality, as a mixture of truth and divine inspiration or pure human rationality.
Parmenides
Parmenides created a pure model, foreign and independent of its components. This includes nature as a perfect, eternal, and immutable whole, that is, as the law governing behavior.
Heraclitus
Heraclitus created a mixed model, demonstrating that the components are opposites and are constantly at odds. This opposition is based on a law that regulates and administers its alternation, like cold and heat, day and night.
Plato
Plato considered Nature as a perfect whole, eternal, and immutable. But its components, as the opposite, are imperfect, changing, and subject to death. He concluded that the parts had degrees of perfection or imperfection, as you see, and he called it participation, i.e., the ability of a part to participate in a greater or lesser degree in the whole.
Aristotle
Aristotle said that if something was constant and perfect, changes could result in different things, i.e., that things change while remaining the same. He differentiated between matter, something eternal and unchanging, and properties set on it, that do change. Regarding the ability to change things, he distinguished between power, i.e., the internal possibility of change within all things, and the act, which is the change achieved.