7/2/11

The five senses;
Taste, Touch, Sight, Sound and Smell.

We use sense perception to help us understand our world.

We rely on our senses for knowledge. If we were lacking in certain senses, it would make it harder to accumulate knowledge. However, perception isn't the only way we gain knowledge. We also acquire knowledge from the four ways of knowing; Language, Reason and Emotion.

Language enables us to require knowledge from others. We are passed down stories, when we are young we are told the knowledge that is known as 'common-sense' and we experience for ourselves, which we bundle up into our brains.

We also learn from our emotions, e.g gut feel. This isn't as accurate as perception per say, but it still gives us a general understanding of the world we live in. The problem with relying on emotions for knowledge is that everyone has a different 'gut feel' or sense of what is obviously 'common-sense' or not.

When trying to figure something out, we reason it. This means that we use our senses to negotiate in our brain, the chances of it being true or false. The problem about reasoning something is that our perception can be off and we may inaccurately calculate something.

In the four ways of knowledge, we question, how can we be certain and trust our ways?

A french philosopher, René Descartes, states that he knows one thing is absolutely certain, we exist.

..right?

Relativism is an extreme way of thinking that there is no absolute truth, but anyone can believe what is true and false. You may think that this works out well, but when you come to other people's beliefs, it starts to get fuzzy. For example, if i say "For me, fairies are real and for you, fairies are not", it can't be true because there is only one true fact. There cannot be fairies existing and fairies not existing at the same time because the both contradict each other.

You may ask, what should i believe? But theory of knowledge is about how you believe. If you are going to support your belief, show evidence by deconstructing the meaning behind it.

So we have slipped into the discussion of

deconstruction, aka. Jacques Derrida's term;

I may as well try to explain it to you. Mr. Skinner's little example to help understand the term deconstruction was this:

If group A philosophers are saying "come join our practice! It's the best!" and group B philosophers are saying "No! come join us! We're the best!", instead of choosing the most appealing group, you have to deconstruct each concept to come to a final decision. In doing this, you break down each theory to find the real meaning behind the theory. Whatever theory you believe in, you have to show evidence.

Tada! And as I said in my previous post, this may be dated 19/2/11 when this was posted, but I wrote this down in my notebook before i discovered the wonders of internet blogging. [A lot quicker and more 'flowy']