By Celia Coates
This week’s post is both very short and unending.
It’s about only two questions:
“What do you know?’
and, “How do you know it?”
These are two very old questions for humans that give rise to more and more questions. Most of us have opinions about what knowing is.
I found some sentences on a page by Richard Webb in NEW SCIENTIST, * interesting,
“Knowledge is a slippery concept: what we know, how we know we know it, what we know others know, what others know of what we know, how what we or they know differs from what we just believe.”
And,
“In the end, though, an answer might not be the point. All these epistemological investigations point us to one fact that we are wont to forget: that knowing something is a far richer, more complex state than merely believing it. The ability to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to constantly question what we call knowledge, is vital to human progress, and something we cannot afford to let slip.”
Opinion? Fact? What about experiences? We can know that ice is very cold because we can touch it. We can know that we really love someone without being able to prove it or measure it. Knowing from experience, not only from experiment, is very important when we turn to the discussion of the multidimensional nature of reality. And that’s the subject of many, many posts in WINN.
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* ”What Is Knowledge?”by Richard Webb, NEW SCIENTIST, 1 April 2017, page 32.