Experience

"What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon, and touched with our own hands..."--1 John 1:1
The first, perhaps most fundamental form of knowledge is that of experience. Experience comes to us through the five senses; we have made these particular encounters first-hand. Our experience is the material off of which our reason operates. Aristotle says in his Posterior Analytics that all teaching and learning that involves the use of reason proceeds from pre-existent knowledge. He also believed that at birth, our mind is like a blank slate, or tabula rasa, and is developed as we become more and more experienced. During our early years we take in tons of information, and these years are the most important to the formation if our experiential knowledge stash. A particular form of this knowledge is empirical knowledge, which is obtained by measurements and often encountered in science.

Authority

"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 Everything that we know which we have not experienced can be said to have come to us through authority, or someone who claims to have knowledge that we do not have. I take most of my advice for running from my coaches and sometimes my dad. Coaches Linhares and Enke (see picture above) are some of the most knowledgeable men around when it comes to running (and many other things), and a lot of their knowledge comes not only from authority but also from experiences of their past runners and teams. Coach Enke has coached many state individual and team champions in cross-country and track, and Coach Linhares has a state team track title to his name. I take advice from and listen to these men not only because they know more than me but also because they want me to be the best I can be. In St. Augustine's autobiography Confessions, he brings up the issue on how hard it is to believe when we may not have experienced something firsthand. We must use our best judgement when we use authoritative knowledge because the greatest obstacle to this is fear of the cost. When we put our beliefs in something, we are making ourselves vulnerable to that thing. William O'Malley, S.J. shared his ideas on the fear of cost in one of his most powerful essays, saying that to be truly open-minded means to be both unprejudiced and receptive to consider even the ideas contrary to our own.

Reason

Every human being is equipped with the tool of reason, the power to think in such a way that we proceed from what we know to what we do not yet know. Sometimes, however, we think irrationally and pass incorrectly from what we know to what we do not know. Aristotle proposed two forms of reasonal thinking: deduction-the power to draw a conclusion from two premises, and induction-the power to make universal statements based on limited experience. We base our reasoning on our experiential and authoritative knowledge.

Source Consulted: Class Reading Book