Justification Of Knowledge

1424 Words3 Pages

Knowledge, which is believed and justified as true, is usually supported by facts, believed to be true by the Ways of Knowing such as perception or reason. However, this claim may be limited by using the term “nothing more”, as knowledge may contain more than only organized facts. This essay will evaluate the claim in relation to Mathematics and History, involving Ways of Knowing such as reason and perception. As an IB student, studying is not only a process of memorizing knowledge provided, but also evaluating the process of generating knowledge of the subject studied. In relation to Mathematics, I will address that knowledge can be supported by concepts that cannot be perceived or are not necessarily a fact, and that the organization of facts can happen after the knowledge is generated. In contrast, I will look at how knowledge in History is difficult to be justified and therefore can be biased depending on who is organizing the facts.

Looking at my IB subjects, I suppose Mathematics is the best example demonstrating that knowledge is a “systematic organization of facts”. The development of mathematical knowledge must follow through logically, establishing according to other knowledge; when knowledge is justified then mathematicians use it as a fact to prove other knowledge that coheres within a logical system. For example, the Pythagorean theorem is justified supported by the fact that length of sides of a right-angled triangle follows the rule. The Cosine Rule is proved using the Pythagorean theorem, and the Cosine Rule is justified as knowledge . This is known as deductive reasoning, when knowledge is deductively inferred from the formal features of other pieces of knowledge (or systematically organized facts). To unders...

... middle of paper ...

...on distorted facts are not spotted. So, the boundary between belief and knowledge in History is ambiguous, the justification of claims as facts supporting knowledge can be inaccurate, indicating that what is systematically organised as fact and therefore knowledge may simply be a series of beliefs on wrong assumptions.
In conclusion, the generation of knowledge can depend on logical reasoning and theory rather than organization of facts, and does not necessarily need to be based on facts that can be perceived existing in reality. Or, what is believed as knowledge can be based on biased facts and therefore not necessarily systematically organized or true. Counter points to above arguments are mainly based on the ambiguity of defining knowledge and fact, but it is still too extreme to conclude that “knowledge is nothing more than the systematic organization of facts.”

Open Document