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RE: Knowing, Yet Not Really 'Knowing' - Internal and External Wisdom

in #philosophy7 years ago

We can act from a position of lack of knowledge and understanding and hope to get the results we want. But since we don't know enough about the situation to produce the results we want, acting from a position of ignorance is not likely to produce the results we really want.

But sometimes we do get the results we wanted despite having the wrong assumptions about the world. In this way we get a false-positive feedback that allows us to keep a chunk of flawed knowledge and to even feel that it has been confirmed. This is why being sure of knowledge gained only through personal experience is not always prudent and this is why we should always be open to changing the positions we hold thinking they are knowledge.

I personally think that we should probe into reality as much as we can and should question all assumptions as much as possible, so we can continue to adjust our internal model of reality to something that is slowly creeping closer and closer to correctly describing reality (both individually and as a species as a whole). But we should also keep in mind that it's extremely likely that at least a part of the model that we have established so far might not really correspond to reality.

In a broader sense, I honestly don't know how to approach the term knowledge as I have a very hard time establishing any absolute claim with absolute certainty. As we are limited in our understanding, our internal model of reality is always going to be incomplete and imperfect, so keeping that in mind what it knowledge really?

To a certain extent, the way you approach it here in this post is quite practical if I'm reading your points correctly - knowledge is the beliefs we hold about reality that allow us to achieve the desired results through our actions. In this way, even if we are basing ourselves on false positives or misplacing the causal link, we still have an internal approximation of reality that allows us to get the results we want more often than not through our actions. Am I close to what you meant or am dragging your point out of context here?

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