Knowledge, Believes and Truth

Truth is an idea we get when we exclude lies, distortion, concealment, and errors. Some truths can be true for a group of people and false for another. This is because the standard for judging the truth is mostly beliefs, experience, perception, knowledge, and they are different for all people. It also depends on what generation you are living at. For example, people from a time before Galileo believed that the planets and sun revolved around the earth so it was a truth for them.

However, after Galileo proved that the planets revolve around the sun, the truth from before is no longer true, but there is a new truth, which everybody knows that it is true. From my personal experience, I tend to think that what I know is close to the truth. So truth would be a piece of information that a person think is true based on their belief or knowledge. Belief is a piece of information that is thought to be true by a person based on what they see, feel, hear, or experience.

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There is no right or wrong, true or false to beliefs. This is because there is no exact answer to this.

Beliefs can change the way people live because it can make them stronger, weaker, timid, brave and so forth. For example, people who believe in god could think that god will help them when they face a problem so they gain courage. Or some could believe in themselves and gain courage and power.

They could think there is nothing to help them so they will work harder. Beliefs could be small things such as believing your family or your friends. It is enough to change the way you act and live. To know is to have certainty on a piece of information. The certainty is gained by seeing, hearing, experiencing, feeling and more.

It is very important that people know things. The reason being is that people’s way of acting could be extremely different depending on what they know. What people know could be true but it can be false at times. When people hear, see, feel, or experience an incorrect piece of information, they can know an untrue piece of information. For example, I know that I was born in 1995. This is because my mother has told me and so did many other people around me. Also, when I study for exams, I study using notes that I took during lessons and I get correct answers using those notes.

However, I get wrong answers in spite of using the notes I took during lessons. This is because I could have written down wrong information that I got from people and think that it is true. In this case, I knew it but I knew a wrong piece of information. Knowledge is what people gain from seeing, hearing, experiencing, feeling and so on. It is similar to ‘to know’. What you know is knowledge. As mentioned it is very important that you have the right knowledge and the appropriate amount of knowledge. The quality of your life depends on the amount of knowledge you have.

For example, depending on the knowledge you have, you get a score or a result from school and that limits the universities you can go. Then the universities limit what jobs you can have in the future therefore, knowledge is something that people must have. People with insufficient amount of knowledge could have difficulties sometimes. For example, if a person didn’t know what to do when there is fire, they could hurt themselves or in the worst case, die. In conclusion, knowledge is very important. Argument ad Ignorantiam is the wrong idea of believing that the fact that you can’t prove that something isn’t true shows that it is true.

For a belief to be reasonable there should be some positive evidence to support the idea. For example, when I want to say that UFOs exist, I should provide positive evidence such as photography or a video. There should also be evidence to prove that the photo and the video are not manipulated. By saying that there is no evidence to prove that UFOs don’t exist does not make the fact that UFOs exist true. This is because if someone claims that UFOs don’t exist and say that it is absolutely true because there is no evidence of UFOs existence.

Therefore, when people try to make a belief to be reasonable, they should avoid acting in such way but providing a clear and positive evidence to support his or her belief. Certainty is a way of knowing. There are many things that people know. However, there should be a way that allows people to be sure that they know what they know. This is certainty. Certainty allows people to accept a piece of information as their knowledge. By looking or hearing from a very trustful person, people can gain certainty to a piece of information. For example, I could think that there are creatures living in Venus.

Then, when I go to Venus and see the aliens myself, I would have certainty that aliens exist. Then I would gain a new knowledge, which is that aliens live in Venus. I could experience indirectly to gain knowledge. I could read about something and have certainty on something if the source is a trustful source. Common sense is as the vocabulary itself suggests, it is “common” among people and most people have the same because we are born with it. It is “sense” what many people are born with. There are different types of common sense.

There is one, which you have from the moment you are born, and one that you learn as you live. An example of a common sense you are born with would be that not blinking for a long time hurts. Most people would think the same as they all feel pain when they don’t blink for a long time. An example of common sense based on learned information would be that going in the deep see when bleeding is dangerous as a shark may attack you. Some people learned that sharks smell blood from kilometers away but some may have not and therefore go in the water while bleeding. So some common sense couldn’t be common sense for some people.

Conformation bias is a tendency that people notice only the evidence that supports their beliefs. In other words, they do not pay much attention to evidence that oppose their beliefs. For example, when writing a report on a remedy, people often research deeply on the positive sides to prove their hypothesis true. There could be opposing facts but people tend to ignore those and only notice the fact that makes their argument stronger. From my personal experience, I do something similar. When writing reports, I tend to only write facts that would support my hypothesis and exclude information that oppose to my hypothesis.