The Piano Handbook by Carl Humphries is an excellent book for amateur piano enthusiasts. It consists of an introduction and 18 units classified from easy to difficult. However, can anyone learn to play the piano by reading The Piano Handbook, a series of systematically organized facts (from easy to difficult), without ever touching a real piano? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay When studying the greatest pianists in history, from Chopin to Rubinstein, it is evident that they acquired their knowledge through practice. It would therefore be rather absurd to claim that one can know how to play the piano by reading a book. In this case, playing the piano represents a special type of knowledge called tacit knowledge or know-how. This is a type of knowledge that philosopher Michael Polanyi describes as “More can be known than can be said” (Polanyi, 8). Since facts are things that cannot travel without being symbolically encoded, knowledge such as riding a bicycle, driving a car, or swimming cannot be represented by a system of facts (Howlett and Morgan, 1). A similar argument can also be constructed for knowledge by acquaintance; It is therefore obvious that the given statement does not capture the whole reality of knowledge but only propositional knowledge, which can be transferred through language. In this essay I will explain why the given statement should be corrected as follows: “A posteriori propositional knowledge is the synthesis of the systemic organization of facts”. Even though terms such as “facts”, “systematic organization” and “nothing more than” are used loosely in the introductory paragraph, for a deeper understanding of the given statement, these terms should be clearly defined. It should primarily be recognized that the statement given is a definition of knowledge and therefore a competing definition will not be used; rather, I will explore the lexical and stipulative implications of using this definition. In definition theory, the lexical definition indicates how a term is already used in a linguistic community. On the other hand, a stipulative definition freely assigns a meaning to a term. According to this theory, a definition must include both lexical and stipulative elements; if it is to correspond to reality, it must also have a stipulated element to reduce any vagueness in the definition. For other terms, there are numerous definitions; nevertheless, we must choose one, as it is not possible to explore the consequences of using each different definition within the scope of this essay. David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding defines a fact as a correspondence to reality acquired through experience (Mulligan, Kevin and Correia, Fabrice, "Facts"). For example, the proposition that “the cat is in the hat” is considered factual if and only if the statement corresponds to reality, that is, if the cat is really in the hat. This approach assumes that sense perception is the only way to know. But can't we acquire knowledge through reason, emotion or intuition? Another important part is "nothing more than", this part represents a reductionist argument that knowledge can be reduced to facts; however, there can be a synergistic effect of facts, as Kurt Koffka once said: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (Dewey, "The Whole is Other Than the Sum of the Parts") . Finally, the systematic organizationrepresents an arrangement according to a formal procedure. Hume's definition of facts implies that propositional knowledge must be a posteriori, that is, acquired through experience. However, this approach poses a problem in the field of mathematics since mathematical knowledge is considered a priori, independent of experience. Consider the following proposition “2+2=4”: it is not a human fact (Humele would define it as a relation of ideas) because it does not correspond to an experience, numbers being abstract concepts. According to the definition given, we should reject mathematics as a field of knowledge because it is not empirical. This poses a lexical problem since mathematics is considered a field of real-world knowledge. In reality, people claim to know mathematical concepts. On the other hand, one can claim that mathematics is a posteriori; in order to include mathematics in the given definition of knowledge. Proponents of this approach might argue that every mathematical concept corresponds to an experience. For example, the abstract idea “2+2=4” corresponds to the experience that “two apples and two oranges make four fruits”. This view that mathematics is a posteriori becomes more plausible if we think about how small children learn arithmetic. They first learn through visualization, for example adding two apples and two oranges to make four fruits. However, we know that some mathematical ideas have no correspondence with real life. Pure mathematics is an ideal example of this phenomenon because no experiment can match the concepts of pure mathematics. Even in the field of applied mathematics, most ideas had been discovered before being applied to the real world. Complex numbers were invented in the 16th century. They were studied diligently by mathematicians such as Descartes, Euler and Gauss purely as a mental effort. It was not until the 19th century that complex numbers began to be used in electrical engineering; for 300 years they were just an abstract idea (Merino, A Short History of Complex Numbers). It is therefore logical to conclude that the construction of mathematical knowledge is independent of experience; it is therefore a posteriori. We can resolve this lexical contradiction by modifying the given statement as follows: “A posteriori propositional knowledge is nothing other than the systematic organization of facts”. As not all knowledge is empirical, the given statement must be refined to include only a posteriori knowledge. Unlike mathematics, evidence in natural science is considered purely factual. However, systematic organization is not enough for the formation of scientific knowledge; we need a synthesis of the facts. A simple physics experiment testifies that knowledge is more than a systematic organization of facts. Recently, we conducted an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration in Istanbul. We recorded a ball falling against a ruler. The ruler is used to determine the displacement and the camera for the time taken. Ultimately, there were two sets of data; time and movement. They are called raw data and correspond to the idea of ​​facts. We arranged the data in a systematic organization: the independent variable, time, was plotted on the horizontal axis and the dependent variable, displacement, on the vertical axis of a graph. If the definition given were correct, we would have finished with the experiment; nevertheless, in reality the acceleration was not evident on the graph..