Which areas of knowledge are affected by doubts?

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“Doubt is the key to knowledge”, is from a Persian proverb. The key point, ‘Doubt’, could be interpreted as thinking and also could be wisdom. Here, I would like to ask the main question of this presentation: “Which areas of knowledge are affected by doubts?” Doubt in this proverb could be interpreted as thinking, or wisdom, but the proverb is stating that doubt is the KEY to knowledge. As thinking and knowledge do not always equate to the same concept in studies, the use of the word ‘thinking’ should be translated in terms of knowledge as the question is related to knowledge. The word doubt in wisdom means an axiom of development in one of Descartes’ saying “cogito ergo sum”, which could be translated into “I think, therefore I am”. Sometimes this representation of doubt and this meaning of wisdom differentiate in each area of knowledge. These areas of knowledge would be natural science, history and technology.

Starting with the quote from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”, one can see that the reason Descartes stated this is because he believed that senses cannot be proven, therefore what we see, touch, smell, hear and taste does not exist. For example, we know this book exist, because we can see the book and also we can feel the book. However, according to Descartes, because these five senses cannot be proven, therefore there is a possibility that the book does not exist. Then what can be said to exist with certainty? Descartes stated that he found himself thinking to the answer to this question of “what does exist” therefore he came up with the idea of “I think therefore I am”. By which he meant that he could be tricked or fooled into sensing things which did not exist, but he could not be tricked or fooled into believing he existed. He believes that axiom of human knowledge development is “Cogito Ergo Sum”.

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Moving in to different areas of knowledge, in early centuries, lots of things in many ways had been developed on the basis of belief. At that time, people had ignored a method in scientific processes. So people were all dependent on belief. They have developed lots of things based on belief and achieved some results from it. There were also human developments based upon these counterfeit ideas. The major example of this is doctors giving a placebo to their patients. People do not know the medicine given by doctor is a placebo and believe if they take the medicine, ...

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