Theory of Knowledge Essay. That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow. Consider

Transcription

1 Theory of Knowledge Essay That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow. Consider knowledge issues raised by this statement in two areas of knowledge. Candidate Name: Zechariah Shrum Candidate Number: School: Booker T. Washington High School Session: May 2014 Diploma Word Count: 1506

2 What we think we know to be true is not constant. Pluto s not a planet anymore, the Earth is round, we no longer burn suspected witches, and we do not believe that kings have a divine right to the throne. Humans have improved how we view and interpret the world around us. Specifically scientists and historians have come a long way in developing how we look at the world as it stands today and as it stood yesterday. It took a fairly long time to formalize both of these areas of knowledge and they are still improving their methods at this very moment. By using the scientific method and revising history, humans have been able to update our knowledge base and discard what is false. However, are there cases where incomplete knowledge is not totally thrown out? I believe it is very important that the word sometimes is included in the prescribed question. If a scientific model is not completely correct yet is much easier to grasp and teach, it becomes a useful stepping stone. If a certain event is analyzed out of context, one can learn about the importance of how context changes our perception of what has happened in the past. What we accept as knowledge and what we deem as inaccurate can both be used to understand what is true. Humans are prone to starting with a conclusion and finding certain situations and data to confirm this preconceived conclusion. People have been trying to make sense of reality for a long time. In some cases, people have been a little too eager to claim that they know exactly what is going on. This is so common that we have identified and categorized many types of cognitive biases and fallacies. Thus, we had to create the scientific method to look at the world in a more objective way. This is not a natural way of observing the world around us. Humans make human mistakes. Yet, if we repeatedly use the scientific method, the process slowly grinds away human error. Instead of proving a belief, we get closer to understanding reality by revealing what is not true. This way of approaching knowledge allows us to discard baseless theories of the past 1

3 and will also point out incomplete theories in the future as well. Earlier this year, I was reading You Are Now Less Dumb by David McRaney, an interesting book about self-delusion and irrational thinking that I got for Christmas. One chapter focused on the common belief fallacy and mentioned the idea of spontaneous generation (52). I knew that before formalized science folks believed in some crazy things, such as bloodletting and astrology. I vaguely remembered learning about this idea about maggots and pieces of meat in elementary school, so I decided to brush up on the subject. Apparently, there were recipes for spontaneously generating various creatures. One included sweaty underwear and wheat, the idea being that within three weeks the sweat would penetrate the husks of wheat and change them into mice (Levine and Evers). However a man named Francesco Redi used reason to believe that there was probably a better explanation that reflected reality. He tackled the common belief of maggots arising from rotting meat. Redi hypothesized that maggots developed from eggs laid by flies (Levine and Evers). He conducted an experiment involving several flasks to place the meat inside. One was left in the open, another was covered in a type of gauze, and the last was sealed. Unsurprisingly, the meat in the open flask was the only piece that the maggots appeared on. This was a fairly simple example of using reason and sense perception to determine that flies do not spontaneously generate from rotting meat. However, some inaccurate knowledge is not discarded because of its simplicity and utility. My physics teacher, Mr. Volle, told our class that Newtonian mechanics, a classic subject in high school physics, is viewed as an incomplete model of reality. When objects are incredibly small and travel near the speed of light their properties deviate from Newtonian physics. However, Newtonian mechanics is sufficient in most physical and engineering applications. On the macroscopic scale, Newtonian mechanics is much less complicated than relativistic physics and 2

4 quantum mechanics. It is a model, and every model is incomplete or inaccurate to some degree. Otherwise, a model would not be referred to as a model, but rather as reality. It provides a type of mental shortcut to build a conceptual understanding to base further study upon. I like to compare it to learning a language. When learning a language, you don't immediately jump to creating subordinate clauses and correcting misplaced modifiers. You start with the alphabet, and build a basic vocabulary and grammar knowledge base. Although you do not refer to the alphabet in daily conversation, it is an integral part of the language. When I was a compact and curious child, my teachers presented history as a sort of long narrative. Story does make up a part of the word history, so I went along with it for a while. Event A logically and unequivocally led to Event B. But history is not this easy. An interesting way to think about history is that it's more like trying to piece together a drunken night out. Sure, we remember the gist of what happened and all of the main points. However, the details and specifics are a little blurry. This calls for reexamination and repeated fact-checking. Historians have a very difficult job in piecing together the past in a relatively coherent and objective fashion. Last year in my World History class, Mr. Waldron talked about this type of dilemma. He was lecturing about the First World War and asked if we had already learned about its origins. A boy named Aaron gave an answer that tied the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination to Germany's invasion of Belgium. Event A led to Event B. The rest of the class nodded silently in support of this answer. Mr. Waldron repeated it back to us, but with a little more information and sarcasm. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, Six days later, Germany invaded Belgium on August 4, The class used reason to recognize the disconnect and chuckled at first. Then we began to wonder. What happened during those six days that connected the two events? Mr. Waldron said that there's always more to an event, more to 3

5 the story. This is how a historian approaches their field. Historians are responsible for deciding which parts of the story are either included or omitted. The Treaty of Versailles is one of the first instances where an ideological shift regarding these decisions is noticeable. The treaty included the infamous War Guilt Clause, which placed a majority of the blame on Germany. However, declassified German war documents led some scholars to question whether all of the blame should be placed on Germany. This reflects what Carl Becker, the President of the American Historical Association, said in He defined history as open to interpretation and not a set of immutable truths (Becker). This is especially true as new facts come to light by means of new accounts on past events or declassified documents. The collapse of the Soviet Union precluded a similar release of many records, which altered our understanding of a large portion of the twentieth century. Researching how historiography has changed over time made me think about textbooks. Textbooks are the supposed authoritative and non-biased view of the past. Language plays a key role in presenting events in an unbiased manner. Private companies, aiming to make a profit, want their textbooks to have a shelf life of around ten years (Pingel). They are essentially dated the minute they are published and even more so ten years later. What happens if our understanding of an event is revised within that amount of time? An interesting solution is to use the Internet. Publishers have supplemented their print material with updated online material. I can find useful and factual information that is constantly updated by experts in peer review journals on the internet. I am also able to look up websites that promote pseudoscientific claims or fringe conspiracy theories. Easy access to both good information and bad information is a two-edged sword. People can seek and find knowledge or they can do a simple Google search and find numerous websites to reinforce baseless claims. That s not an accusation, it s an 4

6 observation. Being wrong isn t fun, yet walking away knowing that you are one step closer to not being wrong is much more rewarding. With an appropriate method of discerning what is and is not likely to be true, one can benefit from analyzing both what we accept as knowledge and what we reject as knowledge. When a knower is able to take a step back and consider why a certain claim is accepted and why another claim is rejected, a knower is able to discard useless and false information while retaining useful yet incomplete knowledge. 5

7 Works Cited Becker, Carl. "Everyman His Own Historian." American Historical Association. Dec. 29, Jan. 4, Conger, Cristen. "How Revisionist History Works" 07 January HowStuffWorks.com. < 01 February Levine, Russell, and Chris Evers. "The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation ( )." The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation ( ). Access the National Health Museum, Web. 30 Jan < McRaney, David. "The Common Belief Fallacy." You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself. New York: Gotham, Pingel, Falk. "UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision." George Eckert Institute for International Textbook Revision. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Jan. 5,