In ethics, people use language to persuade people’s moral belief and values. If an authoritive figure tells us something that we don’t know, we are likely to believe what they tell us whether it’s true or not because we may look up to the person that tells us. People using encouraging words to make light of a bad situation is called euphemism. In totalitarian governments like the Soviet Union, leaders like Joseph Stalin used euphemisms to convince the citizens that controlling their rights was acceptable. People believe that these things are ethical when really they are wrong which goes to show how language has an impact on ethics.
History and ethics go hand in hand. They both involve people acting on their morals and values and there are different views on it all around the world. Unlike ethics, we know when we have made progress in history by looking back at past events. When we educate ourselves and learn from past events that have taken place, we are able to prevent the events that were unfortunate from happening again. For example, the holocaust was an event in which Hitler and the Nazi party killed millions of innocent people, mainly Jewish people, just because they were apart of the Aryan race. Teachers teach us about the holocaust and other genocides today so that they do not happen again in our society. When we look at how we gain knowledge in history, emotion and language help explain why people make the actions that they do and, it helps pass down history from generation to generation.
Just like in ethics, emotion in history is extremely important. Emotion is the feeling behind what people do and looking at it in history can help clear up any confusion as to why someone did what he did. If you look at Martin Luther King Jr. and his contribution to the Civil Rights movement, you can tell that he felt passionately about the rights and equality of all people. His feelings and emotions led him to put him and his families’ lives in jeopardy so he could peacefully fight for the equality of every one. King’s dedication and willingness to fight for what is right is a perfect example of how emotion takes part in history, and how it drives people to take actions that can change society for generations and generations to come.
We learn about history through books, news articles, music, movies, television, and more, and without language, we can’t learn about the past. Although language in history can be a good thing, it can also be a bad thing. Just like in ethics, euphemisms can be used to persuade people to believe in things in language in history. Throughout history, totalitarian governments, just like the one in 1984 have used phrases and slogans to convince their citizens that unethical actions are right. Language is another thing that ethics and history have in common, and it is how history is passed down from generation to generations.
Areas of knowing like ethics and history share a lot in common, but they are completely different from the natural sciences. Unlike ethics and history, we can know when we have made progress by the scientific method. The scientific method is how we can know something is accurate. The method is made up of three steps: observation, reason, and experiment. Although the scientific method can determine if something is scientific or not, it is best when the experiments are repeated numerous amounts of times and check independently by other people that observed it. If you and the people around you are the only people that have seen and understood something it doesn’t count as a science. For example, if you made a claim that you and they people around you are they only people that you saw an UFO, but you’re the only person who saw it and you have no way of proving that there is one, then your claim is not scientific. This means that it is likely to be false. Sense perception and reasoning are two ways of knowing that support the scientific method.
Sense perception in natural science is how we start the process of finding out whether something is scientific or not. The first thing we do in the scientific method is observe. Observing something could be any of the five senses; For example, the claim that the earth is flat. Someone made the observation that the world was not on a slope so they assumed that it was flat. Although people of that time made those observations, their claim was not true because reason proved otherwise.
Reason in natural science can either prove a claim to be true or false. People used reason to conclude that the earth was not in fact flat, but a sphere because people that traveled the world could not find the edge of the earth. This shows how reason can either prove an observation right or prove an observation wrong.
As I did my research, I found that areas of knowing like ethics and history have a lot in common whereas other areas of knowledge such as natural sciences have nothing In common with each other because people in history used their morals and values to make the decisions and that fueled their actions. Although ethics and history have a lot in common, all three areas of knowing have different ways of knowing when we have gained knowledge. In ethics we know when we have gained knowledge when we can see the consequences that unethical actions have on people. In history, we know by looking back at past events and learning from society’s mistakes; and for natural sciences, we know when we have gained knowledge through the scientific method.
