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"What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon, what we have touched with our hands..." -1 John 1:1
The prior knowledge we all possess about certain things that comes before reasoned knowledge is experiaential knowledge, because it comes from personal experience. We gain experiential knowledge through our 5 senses.
There are different kinds of experiential knowledge, and one of them is empirical knowledge. Emperical knowledge is knowledge we obtain by measuring something. This type of knowledge is a form of experiential knowledge because you have to use your senses in order to measure things.
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"It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them down, and we know that his testimony is true." -John 21:24
Authority is simply a person who claims to possess knowledge that I do not have. They are only considered authorities if you choose to beleive what they say. If a person has experienced the things first hand, and did not learn about them from an authority, then this is not knowledge from authority, but rather experiential knowledge.
The greatest obstacle to authority is fear of the cost. For example, we dont bother questioning a person when we dont care what he has to say. William O'Malley wrote an essay on fear of the cost, and in it he stated that "to be truly open minded means to be both unprejudiced and receptive.
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Reason is the power to think in such a way that we proceed from what we know to what we do not yet know. Reason works according to two processes called deduction and induction.
Deduction is the power to draw a conclusion from two premises that we alread beleive. In order to deduce something you must begin with premises and end up with a conclusion.
Induction means making universal generalizations about something based on a limited number of experiences of that thing. Universal in this situation means something that is almost always true everywhere and in every context.
Peter Morville's Problem With Authority