Knowledge may be attained from experience. That is, by performing some action you come to a greater understanding from the result of that action. This is called experiential knowledge.Experiential knowledge enters one's mind through the five senses. For example, I know that ice is cold because I have felt it with my hands. A sub-category of experiential knowledge is used heavily in math and sciences. It is called empirical knowledge and is knowledge we obtain by measuring something. An example is that I know I am six feet and two inches tall because i have measure my height with a tape mesurer and seen the result.
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2) Authority
It is impossible to know most things by experiencing them first-hand and therefore another type of knowledge, knowledge from authority, exists because some poeple have knowledge that others do not. Most of what we learn in school is knowledge from authority. We were not present when the Declaration of Independence was signed yet we believe it was because authorities tell us, who were told from other authorities, and so on. Another example of knowledge from authority is that most people believe our solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy but how many people have actually seen this with their own eyes? Authority tells us that we exist in the Milky Way and we unquestionably believe it because it essentially has no effect on us.
3) Reason
The final type of knowing is through reason. Humans have been gifted with the ability to take facts of reality and from those facts come to a conclusion that they did not previously understand. For example, I came home from school the other day and neither of my parents' cars were parked in front of my house and my front door was locked. Based on these facts I came to the conclusion that my parents must not be home. There are two types of reason, induction and deduction. Both help us draw conclusions from things we believe are true. Deduction is the human ability to draw new facts from statements which we all ready believe to to be true. Induction is makings universal generalizations about something bases on a limited number of experiences of that thing. An example might be that I have never seen a human with anything but two ears therefore I might make the induction that all humans have two ears. Inductions are very easily proven wrong because it only takes one example of a person with one ear to make false my entire statement.
