The Reality of Knowledge: The Ways in Which Life Constructs Reality so It Can Be Known - Softcover

Towner, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0761854835 ISBN 13: 9780761854838

Publisher: University Press Of America, 2011

Synopsis

The Reality of Knowledge completes a trilogy begun with The Architecture of Knowledge (1980) and Processes of Knowledge (2001). It presents a holistic analysis of knowledge and the reality that is known. The book shows how living things, including humans, construct reality in specific ways that maximize their ability to know it. Different species construct different areas of reality, but they all use the same methods: objectification, categorization, and generalization. In objectification, organisms delimit specific objects of knowledge out of the unknown reality shared by all life. Using categorization, organisms group objects to understand them better, thereby creating new category objects. Through generalization, organisms combine categories logically to create models of reality. Support for this analysis comes from examining certain details of computer technology, because computer architectures have been designed to emulate the ways that reality is known and understood.

About this title

From the Author

During 27 years on the senior technical staff at Apple I discovered that many philosophical questions about knowledge have been addressed by computer designers, because understanding them is crucial to the task of making machines act like people. Moreover, computer architects have often been guided by an innate understanding of how perception works. Unlike philosophers, they have been able to test their ideas by incorporating them in computer designs and seeing how well the machines perform human tasks. Thus, a careful analysis of the hundreds of decisions that have gone into computer technology can help reveal the mechanics of knowledge in human life.
    The Reality of Knowledge recounts what I found. I found parallels between the underlying concepts of computer technology and many of the basic issues of philosophy. The result is a new ontology, which I call Constructionism: a holistic description of the relations between reality, knowledge of reality, and the processes that construct that knowledge. It is classical, big-question philosophy.
    "Towner tackles a dense, nuanced topic in a way that's simultaneously inventive and relatable, which is no small feat. . . . Towner's precisely worded treatise also uses the example of how computers process and display information: Humans can build machines to hold 'reality in perspective' and 'we can understand how the machine works'; a human similarly assembles and constructs knowledge about reality and builds on previous experiences. Most intriguingly, Towner proposes that closed circuits of human knowledge can create impenetrable worldviews, which gives rise to a false sense of 'completion.' . . . A book that aims to show readers how they arrive at their conceptions, which aren't always as complete as they might think."   Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

George Towner received an M.A. in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley and joined the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute as Assistant Director in basic research on the metabolism of primitive organisms. He then switched to electronics, becoming President of Berkeley Instruments Corporation and receiving three patents for digital data systems. For the past 24 years he has been a senior member of the technical staff of Apple Inc., where he has written several books on computer technology. The Reality of Knowledge is the final work of his philosophical trilogy, following The Architecture of Knowledge (1980) and Processes of Knowledge (2001).

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press Of America
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0761854835
• ISBN 13: 9780761854838
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 278