Skepticism and Rationalism -
I agree with Descartes' idea that we are more certain of our own thoughts and what we think we know about the World around us, than we are of the ACTUAL World around us. He believes we should be questioning the things we know, and only accepting those things that we can prove without any doubt to be true. While I think methodological skepticism is a good strategy for making decisions about the validity of some things, I don't think it can be applied to all things in life. It's important to realize that if there is great doubt about a certain concept and it's validity, or if there are many little doubts about an idea, that it may not be true. However, there are also a lot of things that you may never be able to prove without a shadow of a doubt, and that doesn't necessarily make those things untrue. This method is simply not practical; it would be exhausting if applied to every idea one holds about life and about themselves.Empiricism -
I agree that a lot of what we know comes from what we've experienced before, but not everything. I think in terms of what we see and experience in everyday life - things like our environment, the weather, etc, our knowledge does come from what we've seen before; but for more complex ideas this doesn't really apply. While parts of empiricism apply to most of what we encounter in our everyday lives, I do not believe the idea that ALL of our knowledge is based on the use of our senses because there are some things that are just too complex to rely solely on our experiences.
Pragmatism and Feminism-
The more I read about pragmatism and feminist epistemology, the more I found myself agreeing with their view that knowledge is not a completely detached intellectual activity. Both theories question our ability to separate ourselves from society and outside influences, in order to gain real knowledge about the World. To me this makes sense because all people are different based on the kind of environment they were brought up in. Knowledge cannot really be an entirely detached and independent thing because there is always something that led us to gain that knowledge or come to a certain conclusion - these things are affected by outside sources. Unless someone has never encountered any sort of human interaction or socialization (including TV, newspapers, etc.), the way they gain and perceive knowledge about different things will be in some way skewed by their human experiences. However, I do not completely agree with pragmatic idea that true knowledge of something is based only on an idea's ability to help us do something useful because this implies that if we are not getting some sort of practical use of out an idea, than we do not have any knowledge. I don't think this is always the case becuase again, some ideas are too complex to rely on just one thing, in this case the value of an idea.
Overall the theory I most agree with is Kantian Constructivism. I agree that both sense experience and reason are needed to gain true knowledge, and that our ideas of space and time are simply a part of the way we structure and organize what we see and feel at different times. The only thing I'm not totally convinced on his idea that intuition is only anything present to the senses, because I think there are some things we know simply due to human nature. After looking at many different views, Kantian Constructivism made the most sense to me and seemed to fit best with my views of the definition and origin of knowledge.
The main thing about pragmatism is that knowledge is part of our practice, its a way of doing rather than simply contemplating the world as though from outside it. You capture this quite well in your post.
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