What Is Knowledge - Essay Example

Assignment 3: Knowing Knowledge is something that is always unproven until the facts show otherwise. Until we can prove what we know is true, there will always be someone who doubts what we know. First of all, we need to have knowledge that is acceptable to society. Second, it must be proven true through double-checking our facts and showing that there are no other possible truths that prove us wrong. Lastly, we must have belief in our knowledge; if we don’t, then nobody else will believe in it.

One example that meets these criteria would be the debate about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. There were some who doubted if he was really born in the United States of America. Going by our criteria, most reasonable people in society have no problem with President Obama’s proving that Donald Trump was wrong. This gives justification to President Obama’s birth certificate. Secondly, President Barack Obama released a copy of his birth certificate to prove the doubters wrong.

The majority of people accept that his birth certificate is legitimate and that he was in fact born in Hawaii. Finally, we can accept the accounts of witnesses at the time, who verified that he was born in Hawaii. We believe that those doctors actually carried out the birth of Barack Obama and did not make anything up. On the other hand, however, one example that does not meet these criteria was the claims of Harold Camping, who predicted that the world would end on the 21st of May, 2011. According to our definition of knowledge, Harold Camping was not justified in his conviction that the world would end.

The reason for this is that not only did the event not happen, but many people did not trust his word before the supposed event. Subsequently, Camping’s claims were not proven true, so they cannot be accepted as the truth, no matter what anyone says. Lastly, many people do not believe in Camping’s worldview. Even though he may have had his loyal followers, a greater number of people could not believe in the prediction because they could not reasonably accept Camping’s prophecy. In conclusion, none of us can be sure of what we know until we have it tested.

By this, I mean that our knowledge must go through the critique of others to determine if we have our facts straight. Sometimes, what we believe to be true may change over the course of time, and this is alright so long as we keep up the pursuit of new knowledge.