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Introduction

Cassandra Stewart Trustworthy Sources 11/26/04 Which sources of knowledge books, websites, the media, personal experience, authority, or some other do you consider the most trustworthy? There are many sources of knowledge throughout the world that communicate to people about what events that have happened and what is happening at that very moment. Not all these sources can be trusted. This is because sources lie or are misleading, have bias, and come from different perspectives. Being misleading, having bias, and having different perspectives with in a source make the sources harder to be considered trustworthy. Though despite what the sources can do to the public there are sources that I consider to be trustworthy even though to some extent these sources contain bias, misleading information, and perspectives. ...read more.

Middle

This would be considered trustworthy because it had come from within the family and had been told by a trusted member of ones family. Thus this is why I consider personal experience to be trustworthy. Though this is only one side of how personal experience can be considered to be trustworthy. Psychologists throughout history have discovered that these personal experiences such as eyewitness accounts are not trust worthy sources. According to Elizabeth Loftis eyewitness accounts or personal experiences are not to be trusted because of the fact that memories are reconstructed and can be altered with the use of prepositions. Bartlett discovered that memories are reconstructed to fit ones schema making it easier to understand the story from their own perspective. ...read more.

Conclusion

Personal experience is the best source for knowledge because all other experiences come from it, it is a first hand account, it can be passed down from generation to generation within a family, and it comes from a trusted authority which makes the story able to be trusted. For these reasons personal experience is trustworthy. Even thought personal experience has its faults those faults are also seen in not only personal experience sources of knowledge but in all other sources of knowledge because each personal experience creates and leads to the next source of knowledge. This means that all the sources are intertwined in some way starting with personal experience first. ...read more.

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge section.