Another way of knowing that is closely related to emotion is intuition. Again, as emotion, intuition is something that is not taught to us, it is just a natural reaction that we have to certain circumstances. There are people that are much more emotive than others and there are also ones much more intuitive than others. The characteristics are sort of similar to the ones in emotion but differ in relation to knowing. It is quite hard to establish how would we learn by intuition and I personally believe that it just builds up our experience for future events. In other words different people intuit different ideas on different aspects and then get their own conclusions for present and future cases. Intuition can be biased given that if for example you know that someone usually lies you are going to tend to feel cheated by him/her and so your intuition will help you in order to know whether the information told is true or false. A problem that involves intuition is that sometimes you may have the wrong impression on something/someone and commit a mistake. This is basically why some humans understand and intuit behaviors of animals, kids and other classes and some are not even aware of this way of knowing that they have. This is a problem with the mentioned area due to the fact that we may not know when we are correct or not and so stop using this tool for our daily development in life.
The third way of knowing I will discuss is perception. First of all it would be important to mention that perception is involved and related to both emotion and intuition. The way in which we perceive the world is biased by our intuition about it. There are millions of things that we can perceive for example smells and odors or sounds and yelling. But how does this relate to knowing?. It is true that we may know when the bread is burning or that a baby is crying, but to what extent can we rely on our instincts to state that we “know”. The perception of things is a matter of how much of an observer the individual is. The more detailed and informed on a given matter the more information you will get from your perception. This is why the best perception is obtained when there is knowledge and understanding in all senses. SO for example if we are talking about a blind person, does this mean that due to the fact that he/she is blind knows less than a viewer. It wouldn’t be fair to state that. This is why I believe that this leads to one of the most important ways of knowing which is language.
After what have been stated before, would it be logical to say that deaf and “mudos” don’t know anything? That they don’t have any class of knowledge in their brains and systems? Language is the vehicle of knowledge in all senses. Language is the only way in which us, human beings, can relate with each other and transmit what we feel, what we intuit, what we perceive and even what do we reason. This is why even deaf or “mudos” have their own language established specially for them. The same happens with animals, although we cant prove it, it is thought that all the sounds they make is a form of communication. With no language there is no communication and with no communication there is no way to “know”. Lets use the example of this kid that lived in the jungle until he was eleven years. He may have a lot of knowledge that came from his past experiences. This knowledge is probably how he survived and it has valuable information but he has no way of transmitting it onto other people. So ironically although he survived he is not able to tell others how he did it and he wouldn’t be able to help anyone in a similar case. There are a vast amount of languages inside the world and although we don’t know every one of them we are given information on our ancestors, or of different cultures.
Finally comes reason that is linked to language. After we receive information by means of language we reason about it and use our perception, intuition and emotion in order to order our brain whether to store the information as knowledge or not. Reason is basically a matter of the brain and the head. We reason according to the circumstances, according to what we want. This means that our reasoning is biased by our knowledge. There is a quote that supports this point and it says, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend” – Henri Bergson” In this aspect it matters a lot what is what you want to believe or not, and what is that convenient to believe or not. Although we seem not to notice it, our brain keeps playing tricks with us that finally led to certain information being cataloged as knowledge. If in the end there is something you just don’t want to believe that’s it and nothing can make you change all your ways of knowing.
To conclude I would have to say that after analyzing the ways of knowing and linking them it is easy for me to understand this entire topic as a chain. This would be considered as an infinite chain that contains the ways of knowing that continuously last in our minds. I would incline to state that although each way of knowing is important the most important one would be language simply because is the way in which we transmit our knowledge and so the most effective one.
