Society and Knowledge

How do human beings know what they know? It's the simplest way in which the methodological craving for knowledge could be expressed. The Kantian division of things into “things in themselves” and “things as they appear” is the classical depiction of the debate that revolves around Representation versus Reality. The deeper one goes into some of the basic themes in western Epistemology, one without any difficulty, discovers the underlying dialectic in all that is attempted to be explicated. The objective-subjective dichotomy is probably the mainstay of Epistemology in the West. A somewhat similar distinction could be discerned in the ancient schools of thought in India that clearly demarcate methods into “pratyaksh” and “anumiti” that roughly translates as direct observation and inference respectively. Thus, this paper is an attempt to draw a critique of the various ways in which we as a species have tried to make sense of the world around us including a short appraisal of science as a method, especially as applied in the West.