“Doubt is the key to knowledge” (Persian Proverb). To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?
As a Persian proverb once said to have progress in knowledge it is necessary to doubt. In other words, when we begin to doubt what we believed was true, we move forward to better knowledge making a further step to Absolute Truth. To what extent is doubt involved into the process of gaining knowledge? What is the function of doubt? To what extent is doubt either an engine or a brake to the progress in different areas of knowledge? To reveal the different facets of this issue I explored it by examining Natural Science and History.
Natural Science.
We found that the theory did not fit the facts, and we were delighted because this is
…show more content…
However, it’s complicated to doubt correctly because the border between a scientist and a paranoiac is very unclear and if there’s too much doubt it might lead to developing relativistic ideas which suppose that there’s no certain truth in the world. To avoid it a scientist could base his speculation on firm ground. How can s/he guess that particular point is more or less unquestionable? One way is to turn to one of the tests for truth. However, the tests for truth don’t guarantee that a claim is true, so, in this case, a scientist has to act intuitively to feel for right direction for exploring using these tests and his/her genius as guidelines.
However, the problem of certainty is that for our time, for current paradigms this point of view about incontrovertibility of some facts might be true but there are many examples when shifts of paradigms happened and “impossible” ideas really began working, e.g. idea of N. Tesla about the method of wireless data communication. At the beginning of the XX century his idea was considered nonsense but now wireless data communication is a daily and usual thing. Thus, such basic point should be checked by time, i.e. it should be true for at least some consequent paradigms.
History
The charm of History and its enigmatic lessons consists in fact that from age to age, nothing changes and yet is completely different.
A.Huxley.[3]
The essence of History is to describe an event, to determine the main forces in History and to do it
History, a collection of the past, holds a lot of information about events and society to help inform us in the present as it is the only data
To begin with, what is history? The answer to this question varies depending on whom is being inquired. Predominantly, history is regarded as the study of the evolution of ideas or events in chronological order. History is frequently applied to study topics such as economics, culture, politics and society. However, it can also be utilized to clarify alternative topics such as science, ideology, technology and more. The challenging aspect of history is to obtain documents and sources that are not biased or are coherent enough to trust.
The words “certainty” and “doubt” have many varying connotations and implications given a specific context. Even though the definitions of these two words are considered polar opposites of each other, there is one connection between the two that is undeniable: both certainty and doubt can be taken with a grain of salt, as they are all merely just opinions specific to the person that those concepts are presented to. Adding on to that, there is also a concept relating to this; the idea that there is always “the certainty of doubt” and that they are merely two sides of the same coin.
René Descartes was a skeptic, and thus he believed that in order for something to be considered a true piece of knowledge, that “knowledge must have a certain stability,” (Cottingham 21). In his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes concludes that in order to achieve this stability, he must start at the foundations for all of his opinions and find the basis of doubt in each of them. David Hume, however, holds a different position on skepticism in his work An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, for he criticizes Descartes’ claim because “‘it is impossible,’” (qtd. in Cottingham 35). Both philosophers show distinct reasoning in what skepticism is and how it is useful in finding stability.
In Peter Elbow’s essay “The Doubting Game and Believing Game” he discusses the two types of games that an individual can use to look for the truth in a situation. The Doubting game, is when an individual believes everything is false, and prove each assertion wrong, and the Believing game, is the process where an individual believes that all assertions are correct, and go over each one separately. With both games, there are certain rules that must be followed.
This paper will address the problem of skepticism. My focus will be exclusively on Global Skepticism as it is more controversial than Local Skepticism. The stance I am seeking to persuade you to take is one regarding the question of whether or not Global Skepticism is justified. In this paper I will discuss and analyze what other philosophers have said about the topic, my argument, how my opponents might object to my arguments, and how I respond to those objections. My hope is the conclusion to my argument will convince you that Global Skepticism is not justified and we can, in fact, come to ‘know’ things about our reality and obtain knowledge.
Cartesian doubt does not allow us to advance. We would be in a constant state of doubting. How would one lay a foundation of truths if it is possible to doubt all? "No reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject" (Hume Section XII part 1).
One of the most important branches in philosophy, is Epistemology, which means, theory of knowledge. So far, philosophers have made many attempts to discover the source of knowledge, the standards or criteria by which we can judge the reliability of knowledge. We tend to be satisfied with think what we know about almost everything, even though sometimes we are shocked to discover that something that we thought it was sure and certain, is instead proved dubious and not sure. For example, suppose that one person that you know and trust tells you that the moon landing in 1969 is only a lie, and the pictures and film were made in a laboratory. We might distrust our friend maybe or think that in fact there were no prove
History is defined as the study of the science of humanity in the past. It's a broad subject that spans over countless people groups throughout the years that the world has been around. Even before the times we have written word history was still being made, and it is still extremely important. We tend to forget that in our average day to day lives we are still making history. That all over the globe everyone is taking part in what might be in a history book someday.
All human knowledge is only probably true, that is, true most of the time, or not true.
As the great Socrates ones said, that by admiting that you dont know anything, so you can learn something that is how I discover the things that I want to know. The only way of knowing things is the way of becoming conscious of our unknowing, so we can learn. Awareness of the unknowing is the beginning of knowledge. Thus, we can always look for the truth, but the best is if never said that we found it. We may just think of the truth. We may think of what is the truth different in mathematics, the arts and ethics, but let’s never be sure. That is the only way how we are going to become bigger and better people.
For instance, in Physics, Newton’s Law of Gravity may almost be one hundred percent definite but one cannot say that it is absolutely true - for example, what if I drop a pencil, it would fall down, but what would happen if it is released and then rises upwards. So we can’t really say anything about this law. For this law to be one hundred percent certain, we would have to know the future which is impossible. Though, we cannot say that it is false, something which is not entirely true does not automatically become false.
The production of knowledge is a process that occurs through a sequence of related actions, these series of actions allows for the Ways of Knowing to interact in a way that works to develop the knowledge that is being produced. From the prescribed title we can claim that while the Ways of Knowing may appear to be acting in isolation when forming knowledge, they are actually working in a variety of different ways in the construction and formation. In some cases, the Ways of Knowing are interacting so closely together that it is often hard to differentiate between them, for example emotion and reason, or imagination and memory. Given the right circumstances faith can be isolated to a point where it can be acting by itself to produce knowledge. However, this knowledge is often deemed as unreliable, due to faith being seen as one of the more “subjective” ways of knowing. This inability to differentiate the ways of knowing from each other during the production of knowledge, raises the questions “Can any knowledge in any Area of Knowledge be produced by a single Way of Knowing?” and “Is it possible to distinguish between Ways of Knowing if they are working together?”. While reason is used in almost all production of knowledge, it is the other Ways of Knowing used that can determine whether the knowledge is reliable or not, as some Ways of Knowing are more subjective than others. This essay will attempt to
The definition of history, is a question which has sparked international debate for centuries between the writers, readers, and the makers of history. It is a vital topic which should be relevant in our lives because it?s important to acknowledge past events that have occurred in our world that deeply influences the present. This essay will discuss what history is, and why we study it.
We live in a strange and puzzling world. Despite the exponential growth of knowledge in the past century, we are faced by a baffling multitude of conflicting ideas. The mass of conflicting ideas causes the replacement of knowledge, as one that was previously believed to be true gets replace by new idea. This is accelerated by the rapid development of technology to allow new investigations into knowledge within the areas of human and natural sciences. Knowledge in the human sciences has been replaced for decades as new discoveries by the increased study of humans, and travel has caused the discarding of a vast array of theories. The development of