Untitled Essay, Research Paper

Practical Cognition

Theories of Knowledge (Karl Marx)In his early years of writing, Karl Marx’s ideas were similar to American Pragmatism,

especially his ideas about epistemology. He defines truth in a pragmatic fashion and

explains cognition in terms of practical needs of the human being. While some of his ideas

were not followed to their logical conclusion, nor made sense, the fundamentals of his

epistemology contain

valuable ideas which can be viewed as furthering pragmatism as a respectable philosophy.

His theory of cognition states that cognition is a biological function of the human which

is used as a tool for his survival.Marx defines truth in a pragmatic way. The truth value of a judgement is due to the

usefulness of accepting or rejecting the judgement. A statement is true if accepting it

makes a positive difference or has a helpful influence and it is false if accepting it

causes difficulty or

dissatisfaction. The meaning of a statement is the practical result of accepting the

statement. In general, then, the truth or falsity of a statement is relative, not only to

the individual accepting or rejecting the statement, but also to the circumstances in

which that person finds

himself. Truth is relative, but Marx is not an extreme relativist (no one to be taken

seriously is) because there is a constraint to how relative the truth can be; Humans are

making the truth judgements, and humans have a common element, viz . their needs, which do

not vary greatly between people.Humans are in contact with nature at a fundamental level. The human understanding of

nature is a consequence of the fact that nature confronts humans when they try to fulfill

their needs. This is the case with any organism, and each species reacts according to the

tools of that species.

One of the human tools is the intellect, and it works through the cognition of the

perception of elements of nature. Cognition occurs as the organizing of sensory data into

categories. Without the ability to make generalizations, man would not be able to think.

Moreover, the human

capacity to think is exactly the same as making abstractions about experience. There is

nothing more to descriptions of the world than those abstractions. Details about the world

are described only in terms of generalizations, for if there were a word for a specific

detail unique to

only one event, then that word would be nothing but a name -an abbreviation for the term,

the specific detail x , unique to only this one event, y .The assimilation of the external world, which is at first

biological, subsequently social and therefore human, occurs as an

organization of the raw material of nature in an effort to

satisfy needs; cognition, which is a factor in the assimilation,

cannot evade this universal determinism. To ask how an observer

would see a world whose essence was pure thinking and

consciousness of which was defined exclusively by a disinterested

cognitive effort, is to ask a barren question, for all

consciousness is actually born of practical needs, and the act of

cognition itself is a tool designed to satisfy these needs.(1)A world which is independent of what humans might think, which is what the logical

positivists seek to know, is useless to humans, and impossible for a human to comprehend.

Even to say, It is impossible for a human to comprehend the world in its pure form, words

the problem incorrectly

because the very meaning of comprehend contradicts anything which is not artificially

broken into abstractions.According to Marx, the world seems to be naturally divided into species and genera, not

because the world divides them as such, but because man is at odds with his environment at

a fundamental level and the categories into which his world is divided are a natural

result of his effort to survive.

We do not have concepts that are not useful to our survival, or do not help us in our

endeavors, though such concepts could easily fit in our intellectual capacity. We could

ostensibly make the general dichotomy of objects that either ding or thud when hit

regardless of whether such a

dichotomy is useful. We do not have a word for such a dichotomy. The point is that

"natural" distinctions are still artificially applied by the human intellect

upon the world which has no such distinctions inherently, but those distinctions seem

natural because they helped humans survive and succeed in their efforts. Marx’s theory of

knowledge is a form of pragmatism which includes elements of Darwinism that explain how

certain types of categorizing became prevalent.