another little bit from my paper: John Locke felt that the mind at birth was a tabula rasa, or clean slate upon which the senses drew or scribed knowledge. This in some part is true. When a child at first encounters some new thing, the first thing they try to do, is look at it, then they turn it over and over and try to see all sides of it. Then they try to put it in their mouth. This says that a baby is trying to gain knowledge by sensory experience. The knowledge that we have from a thing is what we gain from our senses. As we get a bit older we start to rely on our other senses rather than oral, we can’t put everything in our mouth. Sometimes we have to rely on other people’s experiences to form knowledge. A mother knows that bleach is poison, so she puts it high away and tells a child that it is bad. The child has not used its own senses to know the bleach is bad, but mother has said, and mother is always right. The problem with this way of gaining knowledge is that we have to rely on two factors. One that the information giver (mother) is always right which in most human cases is not so; and two, that the information giver is benign, that he or she or it has our best interest at heart. A mother will always give the child the information she think it is best for the child to have, so most of the time we can infer good intent, but this is not so of every information giver that we encounter the whole of our lives. Another factor to look at when using the senses to gain knowledge is perception; everyone is going to perceive an object in a different way. George Berkeley thought that nothing exists without being perceived. According to him, nothing is the world has a true set reality until someone uses their senses to quantify and name and perceive an object. The problem with this theory is that things exist regardless of whether or not someone is there to perceive it. The reality of a rock is that it is a rock, has been and always will be , whether it is buried in the Sahara, or sitting on top of the world at the arctic circle. What changes is man’s perception of the rock. Say we set the rock on a table for people to look at. There is enough commonality in perception to say that everyone will see a rock, however, experience colors perception. A child will look at a rock and maybe think about how fun it would be to throw it, a mother might look at a rock and think that it is dirty and covered in germs, a sculptor might look at the same rock as the potential carving piece for a statue or another work of art, and a geologist is going to look at the rock and try to determine what sort of rock it is, how old it is, and what is inside it. All are seeing the rock, but each has a different perception of it. So it is also with truth. The truth is what we know and perceive, the child’s truth will differ from the mother’s, and those truth will differ from the sculptor and the geologist. On the surface it seems that there are four contrasting truths, all derived from valid experiences. And yet all are possible. Yes it is just a rock, but yes it may be fun to throw it; it may be dirty and covered in germs, it most definitely is made of something and does have an age, and an original location, and yes it may be able to be carved into something. Harder to quantify are those truths which are abstract, which only exist in the mind of man. Freedom is a word and concept of which we all become aware. The truth of freedom is so complex and so abstract that you could say the word to a hundred, or a thousand different people, and each person will have a different idea on what the word actually means. The mind wants to classify and name all known and unknown things and ideas, that that it becomes easier to store knowledge. What becomes more difficult is when the mind continues to use generalities even when such naming has out lived its usefulness. Take the original rock. The mind was content to name it a rock, and perceive it in any way it decided to do. And from knowledge and experience might come the thought that there are many rocks in the world, and so be able to form a general theory that all rocks should and ought to look the same as the first rock. If the first five or five hundred rocks are grey granite , the mind starts to form a set hypothesis: all rocks are made of grey granite. All it takes it one piece of blue marble to destroy that theory. A closed mind will refuse to acknowledge that the blue marble is indeed a rock, in that it is not grey granite ,and so therefore must NOT be a rock in any way shape or form. A more open mind will think it may indeed be a rock but that it is an aberration, not to be repeated in a long line of grey granite rocks. A truly open mind will know that the line of thinking used to classify all rocks as grey granite may be false, will take the knowledge of the blue marble as an opportunity to readjust a set perception of rocks, and use the experience of having seen the blue marble as an opening to re-investigate all previously perceived grey granite rocks, to see if he might have passed a blue one without knowing it. Thus the open mind will shy away from forming set opinions with a limited amount of information( the one rock), and continue to examine all information coming from the senses; continue to reassess and reclassify , and continue to think critically about all information being received.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 16:17:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015