IMAGES AND KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION                  

One of the major problems in the history of man’s existence is the problem of knowledge. This problem has many dimensions; while there is a problem with the source of human knowledge, others are after the problem of what constitutes knowledge; some others too are concerned with the problem of certainty of human knowledge. These go a long way to show that man has been an epistemic being who is in dire need to know. For Aristotle, all human beings by nature desire to know. He asserts that the evidence of this claim is found in the appreciation of our senses.

The controversy over the source of knowledge led to the extreme conclusions of the rationalists and empiricists. But from the necessary Kantian revolution, we come to know that both the senses and the mind/reason are necessary in the acquisition of knowledge. This is what he named the synthetic apriori statements. These are statements about the world that tells us something about the world of which we may not need experience to validate/ confirm them. Hence we can infer that we know about the world through the senses and the mind/reason and they are not opposed to each other; instead in Complementarity, they help us to know.

 

An image is a depiction, portrait, representation, photograph, photo, print, painting, drawing, sketch, delineation, portrayal, illustration, likeness of a thing in the world. Images are representations of an event or object in reality. Through them, we come to know about what they represent regardless of our presence or absence in the space and time of the image, and we don’t need experience at that moment to confirm. For in the words of A.J Ayer, we would have confirmed that if experience afforded us the opportunity. Besides this fact, most importantly they give us knowledge about the event or object they represent. An important fact about images is that they could be physical or mental. But whatever their nature may be, the knowledge of their representation is arrived at after they have been processed by the mind. Hence both the mind and the senses complement to give us knowledge of reality especially about images. Pictures or photograph is the commonest image in the world. It is a design or representation made by various means such as painting, drawing or photography (the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface may be on papers, as films etc). They give us knowledge of events or objects of reality. Once the sense of sight- the eye(s) experiences the representation, it sends the data through the sensory neurons to the mind/brain (cerebrum) where it is finally and quickly processed. From there we come to understand what is given from the pictures.

 

 For example, take up a copy of any image be it pictures/photographs, within a very short time citeris paribus you will come to its knowledge. On another hand, the image of what one has never seen will also be comprehensible in a way at least if one abstracts the features of the object/analyze its parts, its knowledge will be got. Hence, the eye like every other senses remain very important in the acquisition of knowledge especially those aspects that are more or less pictorial in nature and without sound. This is because knowledge of some reality could be got only from sight.

Finally, the senses and the mind/intellect/reason complement each other to give us knowledge about the world. An evidence of this is the acquisition of knowledge of reality through images especially pictures.

 

Nwanyanwu Christopher