How+I+know

====** How do you acquire knowledge and understanding? What are the sources of this knowledge? ** ====

==== ==== ==== ==== Everyone is always talking about how they want to become more knowledgeable, but the problem is always the confusion of the sources of knowledge. To make that clear, the main sources of knowledge are:  · Senses  · Beliefs  · Faiths  · Acquaintances  · Practices  · Introspections  · Empathy  · Instincts  · Ethics  · Authorities  · Logic  · Empirical <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"> · Memories <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">What will be explained is the two main sources of “knowing things”. The first is experience and the other one is educational understanding. These categories were the most dominant in my opinion because I believe most of what we think we know originated from one of these two. In clarification everything that we “know”, for example, that glass shatters once its hit hard enough or dropped, is because we either experienced breaking glass, remember seeing glass break or remember being taught that glass could break under these circumstances. Another example would be how we learnt the color blue is actually blue. Humans learn such things in their childhood; they are taught the colors and what they look like in these early years. The learning process is strengthened by experience. For instance when a child calls color by the wrong name and is corrected, this experience is recorded in their minds and they remember it the next time they see this color, leading them to learn and understand the color. This process is called the trial and error process. Another way to learn could be watching someone make the same mistake and the child learns from that. All these help people learn and understand things. <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The second category of learning was educational understanding. To explain this category I will use the example of learning about rain. When people are still in the early stages of their lives they don’t quite understand where rain comes from. These children enter school and learn about it or they simply ask their parents or any knowledgeable person and find out the source of this rain that mysteriously falls from the sky. Another way to learn that falls under this category would be learning from various media. One example is there are educational DVDs made to teach people about a variety of topics. So in conclusion the majority of what we know is through experiences or educational understanding. And humans will keep adding to their knowledge day by day since we experience new things each day and are also taught things daily.