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Introduction

Truth is an idea we get when we exclude lies, distortion, concealment, and errors. Some truths can be true for a group of people and false for another. This is because the standard for judging the truth is mostly beliefs, experience, perception, knowledge, and they are different for all people. It also depends on what generation you are living at. For example, people from a time before Galileo believed that the planets and sun revolved around the earth so it was a truth for them. However, after Galileo proved that the planets revolve around the sun, the truth from before is no longer true, but there is a new truth, which everybody knows that it is true. From my personal experience, I tend to think that what I know is close to the truth. So truth would be a piece of information that a person think is true based on their belief or knowledge. Belief is a piece of information that is thought to be true by a person based on what they see, feel, hear, or experience. There is no right or wrong, true or false to beliefs. This is because there is no exact answer to this. Beliefs can change the way people live because it can make them stronger, weaker, timid, brave and so forth. For example, people who believe in god could think that god will help them when they face a problem so they gain courage. ...read more.

Middle

However, to make a reasonable knowledge, people should not only think about their side, but also think about the opposing side, as it will make the knowledge more accurate and less biased. Evidence is a piece of information that supports a belief in order for it to be reasonable. There is a lot of knowledge out in the world but there are many biased and inaccurate ones as well. So there should be support for an argument or belief for it to be reasonable and that is evidence. Evidence can be in many different forms. Photos, videos, witnesses, and so on could be evidences. For example, in a court, to prove an argument people provide evidences such as witnesses, photos, and many more. To support that a person robbed a bank, photos of the person robbing the bank could be an obvious piece of evidence. Knowledge that is not proven with evidence could be dangerous as they could be wrong. So evidence is important as they make reasons to accept beliefs. Gullibility is the believing in wrong information due to failure in applying reason or logic. Sometimes, people become gullible when they talk to people with authority so they tend to believe everything they say without any doubt. Sometimes, situation makes people gullible. For example, many people tend to ?follow the crowd?. So whenever they see big crowds, they are more likely to join them without any application of reason or logic. ...read more.

Conclusion

If something hasn?t been proved to be true, it cannot be knowledge. The most obvious thing that distinguishes knowledge from belief is truth. To be knowledge, it should be a truth and a belief, which is not perfectly certain, should be justified to be true. Some people talk a lot and try to show how much they have knowledge but they are not actually smart if he or she just pretends to look smart with beliefs, which are not perfectly true and not justified to be true yet. A belief cannot be knowledge because it is not justified to be true. If it?s justified to be true, it can now be considered as knowledge because justification is done with certain evidences. Knowledge by authority: Knowledge by authority is also known as ?second-hand knowledge?. People have acquired lots of knowledge and have got lots of information from the past. They acquire knowledge from diverse resources such as media, the internet, friends, school, etc. People actually mostly use those resources in order to acquire new knowledge and get new information. However, people should always be aware and seriously consider their resources. They should determine if the resources they are using are reliable. Otherwise, they would get information that are not actually true and therefore, it should be said that they acquire ?knowledge? because knowledge should be proven to be true. For example, some knowledge I had acquired from the internet was later turned out to be not true. Therefore, since most people get new information and acquire new knowledge from resources which are called second-hand knowledge or knowledge by authority, they should be careful about the resources they use. ...read more.

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