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“Doubt Is the Key to Knowledge” (Persian Proverb). to What Extent Is This True in Two Areas of Knowledge?

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“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

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