Sunday, October 19, 2014

How Do I Know What I Know?

How do I know what I know? I don't. Not really. Seriously though, I don't know much of anything. I think things and I feel things, but to me that doesn't equal real knowing. The closest I get is being pretty sure I know something. Like I'm pretty sure I know how to spell the word know but I can't really prove that I actually know how. It's entirely possible that I'm completely deluded and I'm just typing gibberish- or not typing at all. I can't prove that I'm not a little blob of slush with a crazy imagination that's just inventing everything I'm perceiving. But going through life constantly considering that I might not even be a person and that everything around me is a lie is not an okay for my mental health (at least I think I know that?), so I try to just assume that I am a person but remember that there are very few things I can actually prove.

Anyways, lets say that I do actually know some things. Most things I know because I have been told it by someone else and I have observed it for myself. Like I know that sometimes when people are angry they take that anger out on other people that are not at all related to why they are angry. This is a commonly accepted "fact" and I've been reminded of this since I was a kid but I have also seen people exhibit this behavior, so I have accepted it as a truth. An important part of knowledge is choosing what and when to accept something as a truth. A lot of people accept truths when they just hear it from reliable sources, but I think its important to make a conscious decision to accept something as a truth rather than not consider its validity.

Knowledge is a really, really hard thing to define and claim. I'm pretty skeptical of anyone that thinks knowledge is a certainty.

1 comment:

  1. I also talked about observation and experience as the center of knowledge. And even what we observe and experience is so subjective to the conditions involved that we can't even truly say we know what we know through experience to some extent.

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