Name: Nkole C
Date: 19th October, 2012.
Instructor: Maurice H
‘Seeing is believing.’
Belief is the mental reliance or acceptance of a condition. It causes people to validate and actualise what they have or get as information and consequently apply that to other situations in order to create new patterns- what is called Knowledge. ‘Seeing’ refers to the sensation of obtaining information through sight, or our senses.
People can claim to obtain their knowledge in many different ways which include senses, intuition or intellectual reasoning, past experiences, priori knowledge used to develop a new organisation of patterns and perception of what is to come which usually results from relating with past experiences and cultural beliefs.
Humans refer to sight, hearing, smell, temperature or pressure and taste as the senses used to obtain knowledge. Intuition refers to the relating of a condition and giving an intellectually valid reason to come up with truth. For example, we believe that three and four are greater than two, and so we can propose that there are numbers which are greater than two. This, in a sense, depends on the fact that we made true the fact that three and four are actually greater than two, which is a prior assumption. These different areas of knowledge all have their problems.
However, true knowledge and the ways of obtaining it is something that has caused controversy among many scholars. On one hand is the idea of Empiricism while on the other hand is the idea of Rationalism.
Empiricists are people who believe that whatever we know, and hence believe in, is gotten through sensory experience. They assert that the mind was as pure as white- defined as tabula rasa by them- and whatever that we know now as knowledge was installed or written on the mind by the senses’ experiences and absorbed into the brains. The information gotten in this way helps the human brain to relate this to other sensations and be able to make