Reference request: How do we grasp reality?

Question

I am curious whether there are any wide-spread philosophical thoughts about the nature of the mental concepts by which we grasp reality, know or understand things.

Note that I do not directly mean the discussions about what it means to know something, or how we define knowledge. Instead, I am interested in a more practical/pragmatic perspective on the subject: before we define knowledge or its acquisition, we must have already formulated an abstract concept of the things we make statements about. I am interested in references or works about the methods by which we do so.

For example: Assume I stand in front of a hot stove. I predict that if I put my hand on this hot stove, it will singe my hand. How did I arrive at this prediction? I would argue that I formulated a mental model of the universe in which I put my hand on the stove, and following the rules of my mental model, my hand would get burned. I equate this (maybe false, definitely incomplete) model with reality, and thus I don't put my hand on the stove.

Finding out if this is knowledge or not then would demand testing its truth value, justification, and belief, plus whatever the Gettier problems might match - but that's already beyond my question. I would like to know about the case before that: how we get a handle on the universe in the first place.

Answer 1

It seems like, a question about practical epistemology - how do we begin to know, before we have even defined knowledge? Sartre's aphorism response is 'Existence before essence', we begin by being, and living, and only then can abstractions and systemising them begin. There is the generalisation of the problem beginning in any specific place, expressed in Munchausen's Trilemma. For me the solution is Hofstadter's idea of strange loops, we begin systemising wherever we are, and weaving our methods & systems together into something that coheres. Our knowledge also crucially depends on language, a tool developed in community which shapes our minds from infancy, so via the The Private Language Argument we are already woven in and expressing from our culture, by the time we can do something as complex as question.

Tegmark & Wu's 'AI Physicist' is an interesting case of 'throwing' an unprepared mind into unknown physics. Alpha Zero provides similar insights, into how learning can be pictured as interactions who's results are used to weight predictive probability trees. And Nancy Cartwright in How The Laws Of Physics Lie argues we are only ever working with mental 'toy models', who's inferences are always conditioned by how valid the abstractions we make are, which we must make for making inferences to become tractable.

John Vervaeke has some interesting ideas, and is part of a modern renewal of interest in philosophy in the idea of wisdom. He uses terms around relevance realisation, cognitive grip, and the idea that a good effective understanding of our situation depends on a salience landscape, which highlights truly important things from 'noise' (his series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, linked to there, is a great intro to Western Philosophy). Examine what we do, try to find guidance how to do it better.

Answer 2

This is a very old question. Consider Meno’s paradox. Meno asks Socrates how he can learn anything if he does not know what he is searching for, for if you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary, and if you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible. Socrates responds with his [Plato’s] [in]famous Theory of Recollection: that the soul recollects memories from previous lives when exposed to experiences in this life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno#Meno's_paradox. In this context, you may also want to note how the Platonic Forms (later, Universals), the supposed objects of our "recollections," from our past life in Platonic Heaven, rounds out his Theory of Recollection (see the last section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_realism).

For a non-voodoo response to the apparent epistemological quandary, consider Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic” response to the di/trillema, as outlined in On Certainty (discussed here: https://humstatic.uchicago.edu/philosophy/conant/Wittgenstein,%20Moore,%20and%20Therapy.pdf).