Knowledge: Internal and External

Internal knowledge is independent of any particular external experience; it uses intellectual intuition to abstract necessary relationships and patterns between possibilities. Primarily, this includes knowledge of ones own existence, but extends to all logical truths as well; the truths of the logic used in analyzing and synthesizing possibilities ought to be accepted as necessarily true, otherwise we are believing inconsistently. Knowledge of ones own existence is, as Descartes showed us, provable (at least to oneself): I think therefore I am; perhaps there are at least two levels of being, since it is also true are "I have an experience therefore I am" and "I feel therefore I am". Importantly, knowledge of ones own existence implies one has knowledge that an external world exists (although ones experiences of it might be inaccurate); that is, in order to distinguish oneself as an individual, one must draw a distinction between oneself and the external world. In other words, there is no I without a not-I.

Since external experience can be inaccurate, external knowledge must have a coherentist, fallibilistic nature; that is, what justifies a belief about an external experience is that it coheres with other external experiences with the caveat that it can be inaccurate and may be superseded by more coherent experiences that have contradictory implications. At the foundation of external knowledge lies sensuous intuition, which is our way of gathering information about the external world; sensuous intuition exists in multiple modalities: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, etc.. Each modality provides fallible information about the world through its medium; through apperception, we unify the various sensory modalities into an experience, upon which we base our empirical beliefs.