Possibility of Knowledge from Avicenna’s Point of View

One of Avicenna’s attempts with regard to the possibility of knowledge for man is the delineation of the process of knowledge and its stages. The possibility of knowledge, from Avicenna’s point of view, is based on a realistic relationship between the immediately known and the indirectly known. Assuming that the meaning of truth is two-dimensional, he agrees with truth in the sense of correspondence between a real object and its knowledge associates but he opposes the assumption that in studying the real object all of its knowledge associates are transferred to the mind. The reason is the limitations of knowledge resources in reporting the truth of the real object to the man's cognitive system. Avicenna makes further efforts to respond through analysis to the skeptic’s major claim of the impossibility of knowledge and justified belief through enumerating the benefit of knowledge and its realism. Avicenna has based the secondary beliefs which are justified in their relation with other beliefs on fundamental beliefs and has tried to justify the way images constitutive of fundamental beliefs are achieved through reference to the reality and the way it is documented. Ultimately, it is through his provision of some solutions through his references to the principle of the meaningfulness of language and its quality of being referential that he challenges the skeptic. Adopting a realistic approach in epistemology, Avicenna regards contradiction as an attribute of being- qua- being and by making references to the actual text he draws up the theory of ontology of meaning.