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Quick history of punishment
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“That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow”.
What is stated above happens around us all the time. Something might be proven today, but proven wrong tomorrow. Therefore I completely agree to this statement. But how do we accept something to be knowledge, and what makes one thing knowledge and the other thing just a theory? We can look at it from various aspects.
We can define knowledge as a justified, true belief that can be shared by means of language.
If something is knowledge today it is known as a paradigm. It is a sort of pattern.
When the paradigm changes it is called a paradigm shift.
So what is a paradigm shift?
According to Thomas Kuhn, who was an American physicist, historian and a philosopher of science and the first person to share this idea with the world trough his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share". So in other words it is a scientific proven fact.
Here is an example of a paradigm shift:
If we look at the way humans were punished for murdering someone 100 years ago and compare it to the punishment they get for committing the same crime nowadays. We see that the punishment in the present is way less violent then 100 years ago.
It is a fact that punishments 100 years ago were harsher then they are now, that makes it a paradigm. Since it is not like that anymore these days, we can speak of a paradigm shift.
There are several Areas of Knowledge you can use to determine if something is accepted as knowledge or not. I am going to look at some paradigm shifts by use of the Area of Natural Sciences.
If a person in a lab is going to look at several blood samples. This person sees that all of the ...
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...aradigm shifts take longer to develop therefore it happens over a longer period of time.
Humans with white skin thought they were superior to the ones with black skin for thousands of years. It was normal in those days for a white person to lower a dark skinned person. Nowadays both live next to each other. Racism and discrimination is even against the law nowadays while slavery was still supported around the year 1850.
It is hard to prove that something is ‘true’ in Economics, since in Economics mostly words are used instead of pure facts. In Natural Sciences it is the contrary. Proving something as ‘true’ and as knowledge is very straight forward in natural sciences. Therefore I believe that the statement “That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow” applies more to the natural sciences then to the Human Sciences such as Economics.
...ective and previous knowledge, as well as comprehension and understanding of information are things that determine the end result. Even the definition of a concept or reality can be different. Gravity is just a word attributed to a physical law but other civilizations might use different terminology. Does the name of a physical law make it knowledge or does the law itself, being in existence, make it true, thus being true knowledge. It seems that knowledge is simply a general and unspecifically
There is no concrete definition of knowledge, but there is a definition that is widely agreed upon, or a standard definition. This definition may be widely accepted, but just like most things in philosophy, it is controversial and many disagree with it. The definition involves three conditions that must be met in order for one to truly say that they know something to be true. If one were to state: “The Seattle Mariners have never won a world series,” using the standard definition would look like this: first, the person believes the statement to be true. Second, the statement is in fact true. Third, the person is justified in believing the statement to be true. The three conditions are belief, truth, and justification. There are the “necessary and sufficient conditions” for knowledge. Necessary and sufficient conditions are linked to conditional statements, ‘if x, then y’ statements.
But what is this “knowledge”? The dictionary defines knowledge as “facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.”1 However, the whole idea of knowledge differs from person to person. In todays world, knowledge is of many types and is very complex and variable. The two main types of knowledge are Personal Knowledge and Shared Knowledge. Personal knowledge refers to the knowledge one acquires by acquaintance and first hand experience. It is gained through practice, personal involvement and observation and is influenced by one’s circumstances, values and interests. One’s perspective is both influenced and contributes to one’s personal knowledge. On the other hand, Shared knowledge refers to the knowledge possessed by more than one person. It is clearly structured as it is a product of many people and has been agreed upon by many people. It is also influenced by the diverse cultures present within the communities and reflects the attitude of the society towards the different areas of knowledge.
The dictionary definition of knowledge is information acquired by a person through experience or education. Knowledge in the 21st century is viewed as a thought that is backed up by facts or evidence, therefore making this idea a very credible one to many. I believe that there is no such thing as knowledge, but rather justified true belief. The facts and the evidence used to amount to so called knowledge are just opinions of very educated people meaning they are falsifiable just like any other opinion. Edmund Gettier backs up this claim with, “it is possible for a person to be justified in a proposition that is in fact false” (109). On the other hand, a justified true belief is one that has plenty of evidence and reasons to believe that it is true, but it is also known that there could very well be evidence against this belief. A good example of justified true belief would be the principle of God. There is no way to know for a fact that the God people learn about and worship exists, for the fact that no one that is alive today has met God. However, as far as the other end of the argument goes there are reasons such as; reproduction, respiratory relationship between plants and humans, the urge to seek love, and many others to believe that God is alive and well today. If these ideas were facts that could be wholeheartedly
What we assume is knowledge in society is only what we have been told or been persuaded to believe by other high powers and dominant economical, intellectual or even political positions. For example, what proof do we have that the earth is round? We might not have actually seen it for ourselves or figured it out on our own, but it is what we have been taught to believe. “This idea simplifies what the earth actually is, and that such statements trick us into thinking that we truly understand that Earth’s shape, when really, there are many place...
How we approach the question of knowledge is pivotal. If the definition of knowledge is a necessary truth, then we should aim for a real definition for theoretical and practical knowledge. Methodology examines the purpose for the definition and how we arrived to it. The reader is now aware of the various ways to dissect what knowledge is. This entails the possibility of knowledge being a set of truths; from which it follows that one cannot possibly give a single definition. The definition given must therefore satisfy certain desiderata , while being strong enough to demonstrate clarity without losing the reader. If we base our definition on every counter-example that disproves our original definition then it becomes ad hoc. This is the case for our current defini...
So, so far it is decided that knowledge should be true belief. How does one come
Knowledge is something that can change day to day, which can be learned through both the natural and human sciences. Knowledge changes in the natural sciences when an experiment is conducted and more data has been gathered. Knowledge changes in human sciences when patterns are recognized in society and further tests have been conducted. Does our knowledge of things in the natural and human sciences change every day? I think that our knowledge grows everyday but does not necessarily change every day. The areas of knowledge that will be discussed in this essay are natural and human sciences. In History we can see that at one point something that was considered knowledge then transformed into different knowledge, especially in the natural sciences. However, in the past, due to lack of technology, it might have been more of a lack of knowledge that then turned into knowledge on the topic.
In order to evaluate the extent to which knowledge is provisional, one must first examine: when, if at all, does knowledge have to be discarded? In the sciences, many theories cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be proven true; however, they can be proven false and therefore discarded. Human scientists spend their lives attempting to understand human behavior and human phenomena. As time progresses and technology advances, they make new discoveries about humans. I discovered one example of this while studying addiction in my standard level psychology class. Over 50 years ago, psychopathologists, those who study mental disorders and that which is abnormal, acknowledged the abuse of alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, and nicotine, amongst other substances, as addictions. This was based largely on the fact that the...
can't be knowledge if there is any doubt in any of it. It must be
paradigms help scientific communities to bind their discipline in that they help the scientist to do several things. they help to create avenues fo inquiry, formulate questions, select methods with which to examine questions and define areas fo relevance. Kuhn writes “In the absence fo a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (Kuhn 15). what he was trying to show was that there must be a way to limit the direction of one’s research based on what is considered to be known from the past.
The idea of change is the most constant factor in business today and organisational change therefore plays a crucial role in this highly dynamic environment. It is defined as a company that is going through a transformation and is in a progressive step towards improving their existing capabilities. Organisational change is important as managers need to continue to commit and deliver today but must also think of changes that lie ahead tomorrow. This is a difficult task because management systems are design, and people are rewarded for stability. These two main factors will be discussed with reasons as to why organisational change is necessary for survival, but on the other hand why it is difficult to accomplish.
How is it that a body of knowledge is to be established as fact ?
However, because of the fact that knowledge is constantly evolving and changing, knowledge that was once considered to be fact is disproven creating a scenario where the theories that we accept today are waiting to be proven wrong in the future due to advances in areas such as technology. This is demonstrated by the changing in understanding surrounding the atom. Ideas have constantly changed surrounding the shape of the atom. This can be seen by John Dalton who in 1803, built upon previous interpretations concerning Proust’s Law by determining the Law of multiple proportions . This would have made previous scientists using the older model question what they knew was actually true and that their theories had been proven wrong and so should be discarded. From this stems an issue whereby there are factors hindering you to accept new knowledge, one may believe that we can have solid facts but by time progressing, perspectives change and with that facts can become reinterpreted due to ...
Knowledge has a preliminary definition which is that it is justified true belief. Due to its dynamic nature, knowledge is subject to review and revision over time. Although, we may believe we have objective facts from various perceptions over time, such facts become re-interpreted in light of improved evidence, findings or technology and instigates new knowledge. This raises the questions, To what extent is knowledge provisional? and In what ways does the rise of new evidence give us a good reason to discard our old knowledge? This new knowledge can be gained in any of the different areas of knowledge, by considering the two areas of knowledge; History and Natural Sciences, I will be able to tackle these knowledge issues since they both offer more objective, yet regularly updated knowledge, which is crucial in order to explore this statement. I believe that rather than discarding knowledge we build upon it and in doing so access better knowledge, as well as getting closer to the truth.