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What’s on today: An analysis of our knowledge and just what we can know … PLUS … Social services are at it again. Poland agrees to maybe take US missiles. Oh dear.
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WHAT CAN WE KNOW?
There are many opinionated people in the world, and they all think they know about this or that. But do they really know? Indeed, does our knowledge allow us to really ‘know’ anything?
Knowledge comes in three main forms. First, we have religious knowledge. However, when ‘facts’ concerning religions are analysed they can all be reduced to belief. This may not be a bad thing if you’re peaceful, but in terms of real knowledge it is flawed.
At the opposite end we have science.
This is the ‘in’ knowledge today. Through the scientific approach we find out about the world, and provide ‘proof’. However, this is not so. Rather, science can only provide a probability of proof.
This is not properly understood. Science itself is concerned with conceptual answers to why things happen as they do. And a concept is always open to interpretation. Indeed, this was understood in the middle form of knowledge, which is often shunned today.
Between religion and science is philosophy.
Philosophy is the use of the human mind to ‘reason’ why something is. Caught between a belief and a probability, it is not much used today. Which is maybe a big mistake.
This is so because it is philosophy that has been used to rationalize, here, what religion and science can really know. Hence, philosophy cuts through the assumptions of the two extremes and tells us we cannot really know anything.
Maybe this should be understood more. For when knowledge is properly deconstructed we learn that any knowledge is simply a way for us to make sense of an enigmatic world. And in this sense, knowledge is important, for it defines who we are.
But bearing in mind that this is ALL it is, we should maybe learn a degree of tolerance for the concepts of others.
© Anthony North, February 2008
KIDNAPPED
I’m pleased to see a High Court judge standing up to social services for a change. A newborn baby, taken from a teenage mother without a court order, is returned; although the decision is being challenged. So often the SS get away with kidnap …
… read more …
BIG POINTY MISSILES
Poland has agreed ‘in principle’ to allow the US to install their missile defence system. In return Poland will get help in bolstering their air defences. The missiles are needed, it is claimed, to protect against possible attack from Iran or North Korea …
… read more …
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