Chapter 7: You should know the difference: Epistemology (December 22, 2019)

Due to man’s body-soul unity, we do not begin our lives knowing anything at all, but we are born with innate abilities. As we interact with the world, real objects impress themselves on our senses, and an image is formed in the intellect of those objects. Our intellect is then able to abstract the essences of things and their properties. For example, when I see a table, my senses perceive the table. My abstract intellect then takes the sense impression and abstracts those characteristics to form the idea of a table. As I see more tables, this idea is refined. Our mind, then, is able to recognize those same essences in other things and analyze those abstract concepts derived from our experience with the world. As we discover new things, our minds are able to think about how those new things are different from the other things we know. When I see a tree, I know that it is not a table because it doesn’t fit with my idea of table. And as we discover different things in the same class, like learning that there are different types of tables, our mind is able to tell us how these are the same and yet different from each other. Lab tables, dinner tables, and coffee tables are all tables, but they are not the same type of table. Telling the difference between things is an important part of learning and knowing. This theory of knowledge fits perfectly with the body-soul unity of man and the fact that we interact with real objects, and so the name of this theory is realism.