The Mayan Civilization And Lack Of Knowledge

“No two snow flakes are alike”(Matthews, 2014); likewise, no two individuals are the same. People have different cultural background and personal experiences that contribute to their personal knowledge; and that personal knowledge enable people to form their unique perspectives that will determine people’s approach to gain knowledge and the learning out come. Perspective is a person’s pre-established idea on a specific topic, having his or her own interpretation, and sometimes the idea can be biased. The knower, literally, means someone who has the ability to know things by applying ways of knowing, including sense perception, memory, belief and so on. Knowledge can be categorized into different areas such as human science, natural science,

We have to put on assumptions, using imagination and intuition, in order to lead us to find the truth in history. To large extent, the knowers’ perspectives matter because as I mentioned above there is lack of evidence to justify some historical knowledge. There has been fierce debate on how Mayan civilization disappeared. Obviously, no one at present day has witnessed the decline of Mayan civilization and the historical records only indicate the time of termination of the civilization (Suter, Buell). By applying their own perspectives, people make their own hypotheses to help them understand such historical event. History is knowledge about the past; yet living in the modern world means we did not have any past experience. All we rely on are past records and our imagination. If we read the same historical event written by different historians, we could possibly find out that the event presentations are slightly different. In this case, we can see that the narrator’s perspective is essential for him or her to understand the historical context and make interpretation of the

When talking about racism, we may refer to discrimination of Negro from the white, as whites believe that “black is low-class”. Such belief rendered the white a thought that syphilis affects both the body and mind of Negroes while it only affect the mind of whites. Once the idea was form, people were motivated to seek the truth, and therefore the infamous “Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was conducted to verify the whites’ hypothesis. Ironically, the so-called clinical study was meaningless since the researchers gained no constructive result. Although the Tuskegee experiment was highly approachable, we can still see clearly from this case that the white’s perspective is essential for them to attempt to make discoveries on the Negroes. As bioethicist Larry Churchill has written: “Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity” (Larry, 1999, 253-74). From my own perspective, harboring the idea of open-mindedness and caring, the experiment was ethically unjustified because it showed racism and inequality that contradict with my