19/2/11

THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

"A man with only one theory is a lost man" - Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1900

Bertolt Brecht

The three elements that make up Knowledge as Justified True Belief are; truth, belief and justification.

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Truth brings up the questions of 'How can we ever be sure that what we think we know is true? 

and

What if our knowledge is based on lies, how can we tell what the truth is?

The main difference between truth and belief is that truth is objective and belief is subjective. This means that belief is personal and not as certain as truth is. The main difference between belief and knowing is that, when you know something you're certain, but when you believe something, you're not.

The three beliefs are vague, well-supported and beyond reasonable doubt. Your belief must be justified in the right way. A persons belief may be true, but we cant say that they know because their belief have not been justified the right way. Therefore, in order to say you know something, you must justify your belief in the right way.

H-O-W - - D-O - - Y-O-U - - K-N-O-W - ?

You can't know for sure, can you?

the four ways of knowing in dialogue:

"Someone told me" - Language

"I saw it" - Perception

"I worked it out" - Reason

"It's obvious" - Emotion

There are different LEVELS OF KNOWLEDGE; what we claim to know is usually second-hand knowledge. This means that is has been passed down and less reliable because we don't know the original source.

Albert Einsten

There's a difference between knowledge and information. Information, if pieced together properly can help us gain knowledge. However, if we do not have previous knowledge or an understanding of the information we are told, we will not gain knowledge. Someone who has a genuine knowledge of a subject, means they have an understanding of the information together, not just memorized information. Today, with the amount of internet access to all the information can be overwhelming and even though there is a lot of information to read, we may not understand it, resulting in us not gaining knowledge in that subject.

Another fact to remember is that just because we be an 'expert' in one subject, does not make us an expert in all subjects. E.g Albert Einsten; he was a wizz at maths, but not so much in other areas of knowledge.