Which sources of knowledge—books, web sites, the media, personal experience, authorities or some other— do you consider most trustworthy, and why?
Eva Schreuder IB1 18-05-‘02
Which sources of knowledge—books, web sites, the media, personal experience, authorities or some other— do you consider most trustworthy, and why?
Eva Schreuder
In this essay I will be looking at the above statement in relation to the problems of knowledge, using where appropriate my experiences as a knower. To ascertain as to whether which source of knowledge one can claim to be the most trustworthy one would have to define them all first. The proposed sources are: books, websites, media, personal experience and authorities.
When talking about books I would think that one was talking about non-fictitious books, for fiction would not be reliable as fiction is writings about events that have not really happened, something imagined or untrue. The definition already says that the facts or things written in such books are un-true. Books I think are reliable only when one looks at encyclopaedias. Yet with the books one always has to be careful with who writes it. The author may have a biased point of view that will influence the information in them. The land of origin also is some thing that one needs to be aware about. If the book was written in a country at the time where a dictator was controlling what was being published, then the “real” truth wont come out, therefore it is important that one looks at more than one book to get a broad view of what happened. Books mostly claim what happened in the past, historical events. If one would use a book that predicted the future, like 1984 by George Orwell, one would have to be careful as to see when that book was written, as the future might look different that it does presently. A good example of it is that every one thought that by the year 2000 no cars but floating cars would be used, and every thing would be extremely high tech. That isn’t the case. Personally, I think that books like encyclopaedias are reliable, like Encarta, but other books are only reliable when reading the other point of view as well, not only for example Hitler’s experience in World War II.
