Content area
Full Text
One fine winter's day when Piglet was brushing away snow in front of his house, he happened to look up, and there was Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh was walking round and round in a circle, thinking of something else, and when Piglet called to him, he just went on walking.
"Hallo! " said Piglet, "what are you doing? "
"Hunting, " said Pooh.
"Hunting what?"
"Trackingsomething, "said Winnie-the-Pooh
very mysteriously.
"Tracking what?"said Piglet coming closer.
"That's just what I asked myself. I ask myself,
'What?'"
"What do you think you'll answer?"
"I shall have to wait until I catch up with it, "
said Winnie-the-Pooh.
(Milne, 1926)
Winnie-the-Pooh is a charming children's story, but one must marvel at Milne's insight into matters epistemological. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. The act of knowing finds allegorical portrayal in Winnie-the-Pooh's hunting expedition. Suspecting he may be tracking a Woozle, Pooh reserves judgment until the thing he is tracking presents itself.
Epistemology deals with knowledge and its origins. Two main epistemological positions have dominated philosophy: Empiricism, which sees knowledge as the product of sensory perception, and rationalism, which sees knowledge as the product of a rational mind. The implementation of empiricism in experimental sciences led to a view of knowledge which is still - explicitly or implicitly - held by many people today: The reflection-correspondence theory (Popper, 1968, 1983). According to this view, knowledge results from a kind of mental mapping or reflection of external objects through an intact sensory apparatus, possibly aided by different observation instruments (e.g., thermometer, stethoscope, magnetic resonance imaging).
Pragmatic epistemology, which arose in the early 20th...