How knowledge can keep you from knowledge?

Knowledge conceptBefore we go, actually, I go into this intellectual indulgence, lets ponder What Is Knowledge? And Why the Feck do we care

Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of aspects of reality. It is the clear, lucid information gained through the process of reason applied to reality.

An understanding of knowledge requires some grasp of its relationship to information.

In everyday language, it has long been the practice to distinguish between information — data arranged in meaningful patterns — and knowledge — which has historically been regarded as something that is believed, that is true (for pragmatic knowledge, that works) and that is reliable.

Now the lemony part comes around the term “reliable”.

  • According to Evidentialism, what makes a belief reliable or justified is the possession of evidence – a belief is justified to the extent that it fits a person’s evidence.
  • Again another school of thought suggests that either:
    • reliably-produced true belief; or  any reliable cognitive process (e.g. vision) is sufficient justification.
  • Yet another school, Infallibilism, holds that a belief must not only be true and justified, but that the justification of the belief must necessitate its truth, so that the justification for the belief must be infallible.

 

Now imagine Suppose that the clock on campus (which keeps accurate time and is well maintained) stopped working at 11:56pm last night, and has yet to be repaired. On my way to your noon class, exactly twelve hours later, you saw the clock and form the belief that the time is 11:56.

Your belief is true, of course, since the time is indeed 11:56. And your belief is justified, as you have no reason to doubt that the clock is working, and you cannot be blamed for basing beliefs about the time on what the clock says, Nonetheless, it seems evident that you do not know that the time is 11:56. After all, if you had walked past the clock a bit earlier or a bit later, you would have ended up with a false belief rather than a true one.

So why Do we Care of some convoluted intellectual over indulgence, we just get fine…right? we know “Stuff”

But we do care about this topic whether we “know” it or not. A bit of reflection exposes just how important having a solid view of knowledge is and spending some focused time thinking more deeply about knowledge can help us get better at knowing.

Really, knowledge is the root of many (dare I say most) challenges we face in a given day. Once you get past basic survival (though even things as basic as finding enough food and shelter involves challenges related to knowledge), we’re confronted with knowledge issues on almost every front. Knowledge questions range from larger, more weighty questions like figuring out who our real friends are, what to do with our career, or how to spend our time, what politician to vote for, how to spend or invest our money, should we be religious or not, to more mundane ones like which gear to buy for our hobby, how to solve a dispute between the kids, where to go for dinner, or which book to read in your free time. We make knowledge decisions all day, every day and some of those decisions deeply impact our lives and the lives of those around us

In assessing attempts to define knowledge it can be helpful to remember that the human mind has often been capable of two kinds of knowledge — the rational and the intuitive.

And we can safely assume, that till the day we are willing to keep that “mind” open, we can keep assimilating both rational and intuitive knowledge by experience.

What really makes information or a series of data or anything as of matter knowledge, is how we perceive it, and perception is relative to the then socio economic political scenario, hence completely situational thus nullifying Absolutism

The moment we close ourselves with the idea, that we have The Knowledge, It will stop us from knowledge.

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