How do we know something is true?

We know something is true if it is in accordance with measurable reality. But just five hundred years ago, this seemingly self-evident premise was not common thinking. Instead, for much of recorded history, truth was rooted in scholasticism.

How do you know you have knowledge?

In What is This Thing Called Knowledge, chapter 1, knowledge is defined as a true belief. In order for one to truly have knowledge, one must believe a proposition, and that proposition must actually be true. For example, if one believes the sky is purple, when it is clearly not, that person does not have knowledge.

How is it possible to know anything at all?

To know anything at all is to go through a process of a series of experiences which grow from an opinion, to a belief about it, and finally to justified knowledge. One can have an opinion that a particular event happened, but can’t lay claim to certain knowledge unless this knowledge can be justified.

Can I know anything philosophy?

One goal of epistemology is to determine the criteria for knowledge so that we can know what can or cannot be known, in other words, the study of epistemology fundamentally includes the study of meta-epistemology (what we can know about knowledge itself).

Can our senses must be trusted?

Senses are needed in almost all the cases of daily life and without them living would be hard to picture. Humans have five senses, to smell, to hear, to taste, to feel and to see. Even though we cannot say our senses are trustable, it is all we have, and therefore we trust them.

Do we really know what we’re talking about?

None of us really knows what we’re talking about. Not me, not you, not anybody else. I mean, we know some relative things about living on this planet, but in the big picture, the absolute? Nothing. We live in a culture where there’s a premium on having the answers.

What happens when we realize we know nothing?

The point is this: when we realize we know nothing, and I’m not talking about when we just flippantly say, “I know nothing,” but when we have that deep realization that we really don’t know anything, then our awareness is heightened.

What do we know about life?

Life is a mystery. We are part of a vast living organism, tourists living on this planet, in this solar system, in one of 200 billion (or more) galaxies, in a universe the bounds of which scientists have yet to discover. We think we know all kinds of things, but really, we don’t know anything.

Is there such a thing as color?

There’s no such thing as color.” Wait, what? As Wellesley neuroscientist Bevil Conway, who studies color and vision, explained, “Color is this computation that our brains make that enables us to extract meaning from the world.” Color is simply perception. There’s no such thing, objectively speaking.