Epistemology: The koker on Muneshwer’s property

Jun 05, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of the great schools of inquiry in philosophy is called epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the origins, nature and possibility of knowledge. Two questions epistemology seeks to answer – what is knowledge; is knowledge possible.
In attempting to answer the second question, three philosophers have left everlasting legacies – George Berkeley (1685-1753), David Hume (1711-1776) and perhaps one of the greatest minds whoever wrote, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
Kant is the most difficult philosopher to read and if you are interested in him, and you are not a philosophy student, then it is advisable to seek guidance. His seminal work and one of the great books of philosophy, “Critique of Pure Reason” is the most complicated philosophy book ever written.
These great philosophers may have different approaches to answering that second question, but they agree that the physical object has no existence. Knowledge of the object is based on our perception. It sounds crazy, but you have to read these epistemologists to understand what they mean by the non-existence of the object.
In his book, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” Hume writing on substance and matter told us that “We may well ask what causes us to believe in the existence of material substance. It is certain there is no question in philosophy more abstruse…by what argument can it be proved that perception must be caused by external objects entirely different from them? By appeal to experience? The mind has never anything presented to it but its perceptions, and cannot possibly have any experience of their connection with objects…as nothing is ever present in the mind but perceptions, it follows that we can never observe any object or any connection, casual or otherwise, between perceptions and objects.”
Berkeley puts it another way and perhaps clearer than Hume and the recondite Kant, when he wrote in his book, ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ the following, “Can you but conceive it possible for one extended movable substance to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it …when we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas.” (end of quote).
What Berkeley is saying is that trees, tables, kokers etc., are not material things that exist outside the mind. Reading Berkeley will make you like philosophy.
I immediately thought of these three philosophers when I saw the koker on Muneshwer’s property and the family’s response to its blockage. Does the blocked koker exist? Is it real or just an expression of perceptions in our mind? If you accept the epistemological constructs of Berkeley, Hume and Kant, then the blocked koker does not exist, so I am not going to proceed with my inquiry as to who covered the koker.
The Muneshwer family said that it has been spending its own money to maintain the koker? Who am I to call the family liars? I don’t have the proof that they were stingy in not spending money. But I know what I read. I read in the two independent dailies a letter in which an employee accused the family of a policy whereby the staff at the family’s large Water Street store had to buy their own toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
I did two columns on that. Of course I didn’t expect a reply from the family, but I would have thought that civil society and the Guyanese people would have made an enquiry from the family. In my opinion that would not have gone uncommented in any other country in the world.
The story of the koker brings into focus how broken down this country has become these past thirty years. What was a koker that drains a large part of the city, including my hometown of Wortmanville/Werk-en-Rust, doing on private property?
Let us say that the Muneshwer family did not upkeep it, contrary to what the members claim (a citizen has the right to believe or disbelieve) but in a brutally practical way the question can be posed as to why should they have spent money on it in the first place.
The koker is public property. It should never have been allowed to fall into the hands of a private business. As I wrote earlier, given my acceptance of Berkeley, Hume and Kant, I don’t know if the koker exists and therefore cannot level pungent criticism against the family, but surely there should be an investigation. What intrigues me is the thought of the koker remaining in private hands.
If it does, I hope the operator and the watchman aren’t compelled to buy their own toilet paper when they are working at the site. Toilet paper is an object that exists.

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Epistemology: The koker on Muneshwer’s property

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