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We humans understand the world around us through the knowledge that we gain. We attain knowledge in three ways. These three types of knowledge are experiential knowledge, knowledge from authority, and knowledge from reasoning. We attain experiential knowledge through our own personal, everyday experiences. Our senses take in the things we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste from the world and process that information into a general understanding of how the world works. Knowledge from authority is attained from authorities, people who calim to have knowledge that we do not. This knowledge is like a scientist telling us that atoms exist. He tells us this ,and ,even though we havent acutally touched or seen atoms, we believe this information to be true. We also attain knowledge from reason. Reason uses what we do know to form better opinions of what we dont know. The two types of reason are deduction and induction. Deduction draws a conclusion from two premises, things we believe are true. Induction is the ability to make statements that are true for everything despite our limited experience. We use the knowledge we gain from the world around us to draw conclusions. The Process of Knowing is the way we translate our experiences and the knowledge we gain from the world into conclusions of how the world works. There are five steps in the Process of Knowing. First, we perceive the world around us. Perceiving happens when we gain information from the three types knowledge from earlier in the paragraph. Second, we categorize the information that we gain from perceiving. Categorizing makes it is easier on our mind to handle the huge amounts of data that we take in. Thirdly, we evaluate the importance of the information. We decide what data is trivial and what data is important to us by evaluating it. Then, we use symbols, clear word choice and and proper definitions of these words to convey what we have evaluated. Finally, we test these evaluations over and over in our everyday lives. We must accept that our evaluations may be wrong and we must learn to correct the mistake we made.
The three important ideas to remember from this section are the five steps to critical thinking, the five common thinking errors and that we maintain a reality that may not be the truth.
The Five Steps to Critical Thinking are knowing the facts, remembering the Principle of Contradiction, properly defining the terms you use, being itellectually humble, and looking for different perspectives. We must use all of these to make critical judgements and correct reasoning otherwise we are making bad and incorrect judgements of the people around us and how the world works.
The Five Common Thinking Errors are Non Sequitors, False or Vague Premises, Ad Hominems, Begging the Question, and Red Herrings. When the five common thinking errors happen to us often. We arent properly reasoning. When we use false and vague premises and Non Sequitors we make incorrect statements about how things work and its fairly dangerous to do so. If we were to assume that all republicans were bad because of their viewpoint then we would unfairly judge them based on their opinions. How would we like it if others were to do that to us?
We, as humans, maintain what some people would consider an incorrect reality. We only select one possibility of what happens around us out of the many. We really are not open to what may be true and what can be true. While it might not be possible or plausible it still seems to be the better thing to do if we were to be more open to the infinite realities of our universe. If we are more open to possibilities we can more fully experience life and the good things that come from it.
"What the Bleep (do we really) know?" Is the world we live in reality or do we just choose this life out of millions of possibilities and accept this world as the truth? Can we find the true nature of things and how can we know the reality of millions of possibilities of our lives? Can we be the ultimate observer?
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