My pride in my culture and my ability to speak Korean give me personal advantages in my life. I enjoy going to restaurants and meeting Korean people who I can chat with, and I also enjoy listening to Korean music and engaging in Korean activities, such as traditional holiday celebrations, watching Korean shows, and going to the kareoke bar with my friends. I know that a great deal of my social life is shaped by my Korean culture. Plato asserted that knowledge is true if the belief is true and can be justified. I know that my knowledge claim that my Korean culture gives me advantages in life is true because I can justify it. I know that I cherish my culture because I feel happy when I engage in cultural activities. I know that it is advantageous to be able to speak another language because I have experienced those advantages. I am able to communicate/translate in another language and this ability also allows me to communicate with my Korean family and relatives, from whom I learn about my culture and gain some of my values and beliefs. With the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, my knowledge claim is true because it is useful and it is verified through experience. With the Coherence Theory of Truth, my knowledge claim is true because it is consistent with other established truths that are accepted as true. I say that my culture is advantageous to me. It is accepted as true that having multiple paradigms, interests and hobbies, knowledge of other cultures, and personal values and beliefs is advantageous to a person.
Although I believe that my knowledge claim is true, there are limitations to my justifications. The biggest limitation is that my knowledge claim is based wholly on perception, subjective experiences, rather than objective reality. With the Correspondence Theory of Truth, which states that a concept is true if it matches the objective reality it describes, my knowledge claim does not really have an actual reality. It would be far more difficult or maybe even controversial to prove that my knowledge claim is true than to prove that I am sitting at a chair at Tualatin High School at this very moment.
My knowledge claim is also not eternal; that is, my knowledge claim has the ability to change within time. It is not a concrete, set knowledge claim such as, "I know that I am human." In the future, I may experience more negative aspects of my heritage and my disadvantages may outweigh my advantages. Therefore, it is possible for my knowledge claim to change into: "I know that my heritage is disadvantageous to my life." My knowledge claim seems to be based solely on my experiences. Therefore, if my experiences change in regards to the joy they bring me, my knowledge claim will change in response. For example, I may enjoy Korean music and activities at the present, but in the future I may dislike them. There is no guarantee that my interests will stay the same. The same goes for my values and beliefs. As I introduce myself to more paradigms, I may come to abandon my Korean-culture paradigm. If I lose this paradigm, I will disagree with Korean values, and I might come to the conclusion that my heritage tries to enforce a set of beliefs that I do not want to believe in.
Philosophers claim that "believing is seeing," not "seeing is believing." it is true that my knowledge claim is highly derived through filtering. By saying that my Korean culture is advantageous to me, I am filtering and accepting those that are of interest to me. Although I do see the disadvantages, I am attributing my culture with the advantages because I have a preconceived notion that if there are more advantages to something, then that something should be labeled as advantageous than disadvantageous. Speaking of the word "advantageous," I now come to wonder what I meant when I claimed that "I know that my heritage gives me advantages in life." What things are advantageous? How does something get labeled as advantageous? Is the fact that something brings joy to one's life make that something advantageous? What is advantageous? How can something be labeled as advantageous if it is sometimes disadvantageous as well?
After exploring my knowledge claim and its justifications, I have come to the conclusion that my knowledge claim is not very strong and that there are many limitations to it. I am less certain of my knowledge claim; In fact, this exploration has merely led me to ask questions. What I can say for now is that it is true that my heritage has brought me joy in my past life, and that at this very moment I can say that I am glad that my Korean culture has made some positive impacts on my life. However, I cannot label my heritage as advantageous to my life: it would be contradicting because I have sometimes felt the negative impacts of my heritage. Also, I cannot foretell the future; therefore I can only say that my heritage has been advantageous many times in my past life.
