Homo knowledge

This chapter is structured in three sections. In the first one I present the few remarks on which there is consensus about ‘knowledge’ as well as the major views attempting to define it. These remarks and viewpoints provide the basis for what follows. In section 2.2, I present a new physicalist, evolutionary, and socio-biological theory of Homo knowledge. In a nutshell, my thesis is that understanding, communication, and scientific reasoning (equivalently, method) are the three principal and interdependent processes that jointly define the H-science and its compatibility with both animal knowledge and the steadily increasing AI- and robot- derived knowledge. Section 2.3 presents the immediate consequences of my theory. They concern: (i) the nature of mathematics; (ii) the place of philosophy within human knowledge; and (iii) the unity of Homo knowledge and the extent of its formalisability.