Emotions are formed due to the world’s impact on us; they tend to shape both our mental and social lives. They are expressions of how we feel as individuals and are very powerful element that affect the way we view things around us. Therefore how reliable is emotion in justifying whether something is true or not? With emotion we tend to believe what pleases us and what sounds good to us this tends to form what we believe to be true. For example when I was a child I would feel happy when I saw superheroes such as superman saving people and being killed but not die, I would think that all human beings could do that and so I could do that. As I grew up I learnt that human beings are mortal and that we cannot resurrect after we have been killed. Ethics is linked to emotion, what may be right in our eyes may be wrong in somebody else. Bishop Beilby Portheus said ‘One murder made a villain, millions a hero…. Princes were privileged To kill and numbers sanctified the crime. Ah! Why will kings forget that they are men, and men that they are brethren?’ From this quote we can see that ethics are different for everybody and what we see as truth will be affected by our emotion. For example if I you saw one of your siblings commit a crime, and you are asked to testify against them will your emotion hinder you from seeing what is the truth? Another example a mother is in court because her child has been accused of murder and her child has been proven guilty, will her motherly love prevent her from seeing the truth as she will argue that she knows her child best? On the other hand emotions as seen from the above example can be so strong that they hinder us from seeing what the truth is and eventually from distinguishing what the difference is between the truth and the believed truth. Emotion can also hinder our ability to reason.
Language is the key to knowledge it’s a way that we can communicate our ideas and thoughts. Therefore how can language help us understand the knowledge we have thus helping determine if it is true? Language is a medium which we use to deliver the belief or truth. Language is also used when convincing an individual of a reason that has been stated or when sharing a perspective, these reasons or perceptive maybe true or believed to be true. Through the way in which language is used it may be very persuasive and can change our view on something as well as help us differentiate the truth from the believed truth. For example news no matter what form of media; radio, TV and newspapers, is used to report it language is always used. Language will therefore help the audience form a decision on what is true and what is believed to be true. If the body presenting the news is certain that what they are reporting is true then they will say that it has been ‘reported that...’ but if they are not certain or they predestining something which is believed to be true they will say it has been ‘alleged that’. However language can be misunderstood or when being translated some words may be left out and these words may have been crucial in understanding the truth. These problems can hinder us from identifying the truth from the believed truth.
Lastly we sense perception which is subjective to our past experiences culture and socially wise. So how can sense perception be used to differentiate something which is true and something which is believed to be true? In our day to day life we use our senses (touch, smell, taste and sight) to distinguish between something which is true something which is believed to be true. For example it is universally known that if an individual comes in contact with fire they will burn to different degrees this is true because through peoples experiences when they touched fire or came into contact with it they got burnt and using our sight we confirmed it to be true. This links with the statement that was made at the beginning that something which is true is something which can be proven. In science we also use senses when making observation which are then used to make theories. For example in chemistry a exothermic reaction always give out heat and therefore when we touch a beaker and feel that it’s hot we will know that it was an exothermic reaction also I know as a chemistry student that the test for hydrogen will always be a ‘squeaky pop sound’, this is because I have tested this myself and I heard the sound a made. However as human beings we tend to have limitations to how far our sense can be used and this limitations lead to people having different perceptions on things. This idea tie in with Federico Fellin’s quotes that a ‘different language is a different vision of life’, will see that different cultures have different views on the same thing.
Despite their limitations the four ways of knowing all provided evidence for us to get closer to knowing the real truth thus distinguishing the truth from the believed truth. In the world there is no set ‘truth’ only truth that we believe to be true, even theories which may believed to be the universal truth may be provided wrong. Sometimes we fined that there is no difference between the truth and what is believed to be true and therefore seeing that the ‘believed truth’ may actually be the true. With the different ways of knowing we use them to identify the truth by examining what we have. Universal we may find that they are some unresolved question such as the old age question that who created the world and how was it created? But the question to be asked is who decided which of the theories and evidence that have already been provided are wrong when we as human beings don’t have the power to ‘know’ that much.
Bibliography
Sunday 3rd June 2013
by
achieng_103 (student)
