Thursday, April 26, 2012

epistemology

     How do you know things? Did you learn them from someone you consider a reputable authority or trustworthy witness? That's one way to know things. You have to know who is a reliable source of information and who is unreliable to know things through authority.  As soon as you have conflicting reports, which one do you believe?
    You can learn things through your own experience--through what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste--through your senses. Your senses can't actually be wrong, but you may still draw false conclusions based on what your senses tell you.You may see a flashing light and assume it's a police car, but when you pull over it turns out the flashing light was a sign. You may think you hear your phone ring--and then realize that it was a phone somewhere else in the building.
     You may hear people say that they "just know things", but this really doesn't happen. Either they don't know anything, but insist that they do ( like being wrong twice on the same question ), or they don't understand how they know what they know. They may not remember everything they saw, heard, or felt, but may still have drawn correct conclusions from it. The only way to know if they actually "know" something, or just think they do, would be to remember what led them to the conclusion. Otherwise the thing they know remains a "maybe", and doesn't really do them any good.

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