Validity of Knowledge

Knowledge is:

My question is since facts are facts is it wrong to question them? I mean if you consider many hundreds and hundreds of years ago the world was considered to be flat. Today with the internet fact seems to be a relative thing. I can get a legitimate study that says X is true and another that says X is false on nearly everything.

So the question is how valid are the facts that we hold as truths?

 

We cant depict them as facts unless they have been indefinitely aided by multiple conclusions, i.e 2+2=4. If you have two things and add two more you evidently get four. You can depict anything as a fact but unless it has been aided by a source and has physical evidence to back its claim, it's nothing more then a mere opinion.

 

We "Assume" nearly everything in our life, but we need to "assume" and take a risk to move on.

 

A fact is not a fact if it changed. If it was; it was information of its time.

Facts are proven to be true. The flat world belief was a belief.

 

Yes, but how many 'facts' to this day are really proved with concrete logical proof? I can only imagine such logic belonging to the realm of math - an abstraction of reality.

A lot of our scientific 'facts' are merely proved empirically, which, as we know, does not necessarily mean that said fact is 100% absolutely true. For example, Newton's 3 laws of motion were 'proved' empirically, and for the longest time, it was thought that his laws could explain the motion of all matter. However, when Planck opened up the realm of quantum physics, it was realized that Newton's laws began to show discrepancies as objects approached the speed of light. And such 'fact' was thrown away - a paradigm shift occurred, and to this day, there is still a lot more room for paradigm shifts to occur in regards to the realm of quantum physics.

 

as valid as our current evidence presents them to be.


ex. back then, we had no evidence the world was round and there was more conjecture that it was flat, so it was rational to believe it was flat at the time.

now, we have satellites that show us the world is round, so it is rational to believe that.

This is why, in research, we never seek to "prove" anything. we merely provide evidence supporting one claim.
each claim's validity is based on the amount of evidence backing it.


I will give you a quote that you should really think about.


“The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it,neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses”
― Xenophanes

 

You're probably familiar with the Tripartite Theory of Knowledge, but it's argued we do not have knowledge unless we satisfy three conditions, "Truth, justification and belief." Each condition is individually necessary and all three are jointly sufficient. The only way you wouldn't have knowledge I suppose is if you are a global sceptic or you argue the infinite regress argument.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

Of course there are going to be false information on the internet, but we possess something the people didn't have a lot of back in the day. Critical thinking.

We can reasonably make sound judgments on what is true and what is false. (Well most of us can)

 

I would't say that people "back in the day" weren't critic thinkers.. In fact, I believe that people then were smarter than the people now.
There are those selected few people who leave their marks in history every period

As to answer the question:
Scientific theories are held valid until disproven, or a better one comes along. Until then, they are generally accepted as valid.
Scientific models are theories as well; we don't know what exactly is going on, but a model is made for that instance to at least guess what is going on.
For example, we have the quantum mechanic model for how electrons may behave in atoms.

Tl;dr: accepted to be true until proven false

 

to be fair, you can never prove anything false.

you can only present evidence against it that makes it extremely improbable or unlikely.

this is because you can never really know anything, as all is just a woven web of guesses.

 

Scientifically, sure, why not

But if you're arguing about the color of a color, maybe a hex value... Hehe

 

This isn't true, our understanding of the world, and ability to analyze and challenge their validity wasn't prominent back when ideas such as the geocentric model, flat earth model, or other silly explanations for life were prominent.

While great thinkers did exist, some cultures at the time didn't support it, and only select civilizations were truly open to this. I mean look at the demise of Copernicus or other great thinkers.

 

facts are all lies. its all a conspiracy, put on by the government, man.

no, but srsly.

i think that no matter what is constituted as a fact, nothing is concrete. i say this because time is a dimension, and whose to say the people 5000 years down the road havnt managed to actually harvest enough energy to make time travel possible? even something that is a "concrete fact", something like the united states winning the revolutionary war, that could be changed. someone could easily have gone back in time and changed a few things around. if thats the case, nothing that we know can ever be considered a fact.

on the other hand, i tend to take things as facts because if i didnt i would probably lose my mind.

 

I once read a book about Einstein, it was written about how he solved the toughest of problems and he did that by disregarding all the facts, so called "rails" that will only get you to certain places. I think that is very true and it is being proven true all the time by people discovering something new that makes us question something we've considered to be a fact.

 

Facts are only facts if they are indefinitely true and have been proven so with absolutely no exception.

Nothing is fact. Question everything, young one.

 

To understand anything, we use thinking. Thinking is the process of electromagnetic charges that occur in our brain. Today's science, it is said that an electrical charge such as electricity is an electron that accumulates and then gives off energy. So when you look at it as such, our entire thought process is only by the fluctuating electromagnetic charges that manifest its energy into a satisfying reaction that gives us speech, movement and expression. As you read my sentences, you are understanding it only by the electromagnetic charges that are jumping back and forth all around your brain. We are made from atoms just like a tree or rock, we are carbon based life forms, which means we are made from minerals and more so carbon. To understand anything, you must understand where it came from and how did it begin to uncover its self so we can view it and try to understand it. Now that we know what knowledge is, which is the electromagnetic interchange that occurs in the brain, we can now narrow down what is false or true about knowledge. What I am about to tell you is very scary, but has been understood and documented for a while now. There is no such thing as knowledge. Knowledge is only understood by humans, because we have made it so. The entire universe does not understand as we do, it does not even think it only does. It has no emotion, it doesnt have a fight or flight adrenaline system. It does not function as we do, only we, only we function as we do. And we create words to express a thought or expression. , how does two plus two equal four. Again to understand it, we have to find out where it started. If I have one rock and add it to another rock, we get two. But that is not the case. One rock does not consist of one. One cannot be one with out its parts. One rock has a diversity of parts with in its self. And if you add the diversity of its individual parts, you will find that it is not one. If I take one rock and cut it in half, do I still have one rock or two rocks. If I take one rock and add it to another rock I get two, but if I cut one rock in half that I already counted with the other rock, do I have three rocks or still two. Knowledge is what you create it to be. There is no such thing as true, false, because knowledge gives existence to the words true or false. There is no knowledge, it is a man made thought that gives an ordered way to think like you , I and the rest of us.

 

just FYI: it is electrochemical signals passing from one neuron in the brain to the next, not electromagnetic.

 

Fact/truth is that which best conforms to our reality. If it's the best, most plausible explanation available then it's considered fact.

Questioning facts is extremely important. The laws of quantum physics broke the earlier conventional "facts" of physics. I think that the most important aspect of "facts" is asking questions. Many people like to say "oh it was completely normal for people to think that the earth was the center of the universe because it looked like it", A great response is "well how would it look if it were orbiting the sun?".

I guess the point I'm trying to get across is that facts change. So ask questions and take everything with a grain of salt.

 

All facts have truth and certainty associated with them, however when these facts are confronted and questioned, the truth and certainty are lost, it may no longer be a fact.