Knowledge Is Knowledge Today

1177 Words3 Pages

When thinking of the knowledge we have today, we realize that some of it is different to what it may have been in the past. The knowledge issue that arises from the statement, “That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow,” is on what we can believe to “know” today, if it can be proven false tomorrow. “Knowledge that is accepted” is another way of saying that it’s what is generally believed by everyone, but that it’s sometimes “discarded,” which is another way of saying that some knowledge is updated or cast away as false. The problem is that people strive to gain knowledge, which can be classified as false, which makes gaining knowledge pointless after a time. I’ll be focusing on how the areas of knowledge, history and the natural sciences to be specific, are major proponents of this concept. Knowledge has never been concrete because of the way people change their views on the histories and natural sciences. I think history is consistently recorded and “revised” by many historians, and consistently gets discarded when it isn’t necessary anymore. What is accepted universally in the natural sciences is that there is always more to be discovered when it comes to what is already known, which in turn can disprove itself. It’s important to note that we are bound by the ways of knowing, as well, because it’s about how our reason and language are used, that also result in new knowledge being formed while old knowledge becomes rendered useless. There is also the counter-argument that knowledge in mathematics because it follows the principle of only having one correct answer, thus it can never be proven wrong. But, to start off, history is usually full of information that is important then gets buried with new ...

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... being replaced by new knowledge because there is an expectation to find new information to disprove what was taught in the past, this then becomes glorified by the people around. There is an outlier in mathematics because the knowledge in math is rather set-in-stone because there isn’t much to improve upon or disprove. The issue of knowledge being discarded in the other areas of knowledge is that there isn’t any way to know what is true or false. We accept what we are taught in our schools, but that’s where there can be a problem. We learn in
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the theory of knowledge the intricacies of what we’ve been taught since we were children and we have to judge to an extent of how much we believe the knowledge we have received. It’s hard to argue against someone about the knowledge we learn today, when the knowledge of yesterday has already been discarded.

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