How do we know what we know?

‘The greatest obstacle to progress is not the absence of knowledge but the illusion of knowledge.’ Daniel Boorstin, 1914-2004

How do you view your world? Why?

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html

‘The world in which we live does not exist in an absolute sense, but is just one model of reality’

Representation is not reality

‘We usually attribute resemblance to things which may or may not have a common nature. We say ‘as alike as two peas in a pod’ and we say, just as easily, that the fake resembles the authentic. This so-called resemblance consists of relations of comparison, whose similarities are perceived by the mind when it examines, evaluates and composes. Likeness is not concerned with ‘common sense’ or with defying it, but only with spontaneously assembling shapes from the world of appearance in an order given by inspiration.’

– René Magritte

We are surrounded by knowledge claims.

Many are misguided and some even dangerous.

We make sense of the world through various ‘ways of knowing’. LANGUAGE EMOTION Ways of knowing PERCEPTION REASON Yet, can we ever know anything with

certainty

?

Language

:

How do you know that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969?

Colour blindness: not everyone perceives the world in the same way.

Perception:

How do you know which line is longest?

Emotion:

How do you know what is right or wrong? Can you feel it?

I fit into my pyjamas, my pyjamas fit into my suitcase, so why don’t I fit in my suitcase?

Reason:

How do we know if (wrong) reasoning leads us to reasonable knowledge claims?

This could lead to

Radical doubt

or

Relativism

Radical doubt

What can we believe?

Do you think you could be dreaming right now?

Is it desirable to question everything all the time?

Relativism

Neither radical doubt nor relativism are desirable positions from a TOK perspective.

Rather than asking ourselves

what

we should believe, we should ask ourselves:

How

should we believe?

Danger of gullibility Danger of scepticism

We should ask ourselves if knowledge claims we come across in our daily lives are reasonable.

Positive evidence Evidence

Argument ad ignorantium

‘Ghosts exists because no one has proved that they do not.’ Later on in the course we will develop these reflections into Knowledge Issues