To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?

Authors Avatar

Theory of Knowledge Essay

To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?

The common phrase, ‘seeing is believing’, implies the message that you can only believe in something once you have seen it with your own eyes. The topic question for this essay, to what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge, challenges the idea of whether we need to see something in order to confirm our beliefs; or if through other ways of knowing such as reason, language and emotion we can support and trust in our own beliefs and ideals.  

This topic forces you to question the trust you have in yourself, in other people and in the world around you; it makes you think about the different areas of knowledge and to what extent we need different types of evidence to eliminate any doubts in our minds. For the purpose of this essay I am going to define the term ‘evidence’ as physical evidence, examples of this type of evidence can range from fossils to written accounts of events. The knowledge we gain from this type of evidence is empirical knowledge, we interact with the evidence through sense perception. I would also like to define the term ‘beliefs’ as your personal opinions on a particular issue/subject; deciding whether something is real or fictitious.  

The first area of knowledge I would like to examine is the natural sciences. Natural sciences are those which use scientific methods, such as observation and experimentation, to gain empirical knowledge about the world around us, in particular, nature. The natural sciences are built on tests upon tests that confirm hard data and results; therefore sense perception is a key way of knowing in this area as it allows us to verify information and theories on our own with great confidence.

This brings up my first knowledge issue, to what extent does the presence or lack of physical evidence in a knowledge area affect its validity? The title of this essay and this question in particular relates to my studies, and I found an answer within a personal example. I’m taking biology and physics in school, and we are taught that whenever we do an experiment we need to take multiple readings or samples and to conduct several trials in order to get a more fair and accurate result. This scientific method in the natural sciences is there to prove the validity of our data and also helps support our beliefs that what we discovered was in fact true.

Join now!

Senses are what you base your judgment on, they are the most primal way of getting information, and in most cases, they’re right; your senses give you the basic knowledge about an object or situation. However, some would argue as a counterclaim that sense perception can be deceiving, so in my opinion you shouldn’t rely on it too much. To be a smart learner you need to think beyond what your senses perceive, you need to reason and analyze what you initially got from your senses.  

An area of knowledge that relies on reason and analysis is mathematics. In math ...

This is a preview of the whole essay