The Three Kinds of Knowing

~Experience

~Authority

~Reason


Experience

"The only source of knowledge is experience"

-Albert Einstein

This type of knowledge comes from our personal experiences in the past. We take in experiences through our five senses(sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch) and convert them into knowledge. An example of this is that I know dogs bark because I have heard them. The gathering of experimental knowledge begins at birth. Aristotle said that at birth the mind is a tabula rasa, meaning empty slate. It is ready to be filled up with knowledge. Even during the first two years of your life, you took in infinite amounts of information.

Another kind of knowledge from experience is empirical knowledge, the knowledge we obtain from measuring things. Such as knowing distances by measuring them with a ruler or knowing the weight of an object by weighing it.


Authority

Knowledge we receive by learning from someone or something is called knowledge of authority. An example of this kind of knowledge would be learning from the newspaper that the Cardinals won the baseball game the night before, or being taught the by your geometry teacher. When receiving knowledge from authority, we must recognize whether or not the source is reliable. Only certain people can be authorities in certain areas, for example: A geometry teacher is an authority on basic geometry, Yo-Yo Ma is an authority on the cello, and so forth.

It is important to make sure you are receiving information from a viable source because if you are not, then you information could easily be incorrect.


Reason

The third and last form of knowledge is Reason> Reason is "the power to think in a way that we proceed from what we know to what we do not know." According to the text, there are two kinds of Reasoning: Deduction and Induction. Deduction is the ability to draw a conclusion from two premises. An example of deductive reasoning is:

All living humans can breath

Jack is a living human

Therefore, Jack can breath.

"If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins."

-Aristotle

The second type of reason is Induction. Induction means making universal generalizations about something or someone based on a limited number of experiences of that thing or person. However, there is no way to prove it logically.


Interesting Related Links

Infant Learning and Television

Logical Consequence

The Analysis of Knowledge


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