TOK

Beyond the Realm of Reason : The strengths and weakness of reason as a way of knowing

Following the Western philosophical and scientific Enlightenment reason as a method of inquiry and knowledge gaining came to dominate in all realms of life from the scientific method as a way of testing a hypothesis through deductive reasoning to the inductive nature of epistemology . But where does reason reach its limits and what types of things can we not know through this paradigm ? This brief essay will explore both the strengths and the weaknesses of what

we have come to learn through our powers of reason and logic

The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant termed the bounds of reason a paradigm . By this he meant that reason , as a practiced discipline in all fields of knowledge , represents a particular view of the world . A paradigm is a lens through which we can share knowledge with other people , but only with other people that recognize and are fluent in the specific paradigm we engage . His Critique of Enlightenment relied on reason as a way of explaining the limitations of reason - it was an immanent critique of reason - which means that his criticism was of reason through the use reason , or what has come to be known as a metaphysical critique . Kant 's paradigmatic viewpoint called for a paradigm shift that would open up new ways of learning and understanding the world that did not solely rely on our mental processes of reason (both inductive and deductive...