Sources+of+Knowledge

How do you acquire knowledge and understanding? What are your sources of this knowledge? There are a lot of ways to acquire knowledge and understanding. These ways include observations, senses, beliefs, experiences, memories, assumptions, familiarity, educational understanding, introspection, and a lot more. To talk about my way of knowing things, I could easily absorb new things through reading books or newspapers, interacting with other people, watching television or listening to the radio, and trying to do things that I’ve never done before. For me, reading is something that easily bores me but there are times that I enjoy it because it gives me a lot of details about things that I’m not familiar with. For instance, I am asked to find a representation of a mole. Since I don’t have any knowledge about it, it would be helpful if I will use some books to collect informations and gather ideas from it. Another source that you can use other than reading books is researching over the Internet. Though it is much faster and easier to get informations, books are more appropriate to employ because it gives you complete facts. Interacting with other people is what I think the most essential because when you interact, you can share your own thoughts and notions. I would also say that through communicating you could make some changes. You can possibly modify other people’s point of view on how they see things. For example, your best friend smokes a lot because she thinks smoking is cool but she doesn’t have any idea that it can cause a lung cancer. You could help her by talking to her and advising her to stop because it’s not good for her health and it may be the cause of her death. Media is also important in the sense that it tells us what’s going on around us. It gives us new updates to be aware of what’s happening globally. For instance, the hostage taking that happened in the Philippines, no one knew about if before it was televised. In that case, you have to be aware on what’s happening whether it’s about your home country or not. It doesn’t only talk about things that happen in the world. Sometimes, it also gives us educational ideas that we’ve never learned from school. For example, a TV show that teaches us how to make a recycled tissue box made by a shoebox. Some people don’t know that we could recycle a shoebox and turn it into a tissue box. The sources of knowing these things are television and radio. Lastly, the one that I consider as my best source of knowledge are my personal experiences. By doing things that you’ve never done before makes your life challenging. Having experiences in life whether it’s personal, cultural, or whatever it is, it always gives you a lesson at the end. And from all the lessons that you learned, you can somehow apply it in other cases that you’ll encounter. The best example that could fit in on what I’ve said was when I tried snorkeling under the sea. I never thought that I would have done that because I had a fear of drowning although I know how to swim. But the interesting part was I got to see how the corals look like under the sea. They really look rough and hard which I never believed until I saw it.

- Symbols

WAYS OF KNOWING:

Perception Practice – to be aware because of consciousness Introspection – aware, curiosity, observation Empirical - to observe something that you're aware of

Emotion Faith – needs emotion to trust someone and have confidence in doing something Belief – trust, faith, confidence, opinions Conscience – guilt, brings us closer to God Empathy – share your emotions to other people Instinct – thinking, confusion

Reason Memory – experiences, stories Logical – decision Acquaintance – experiences Ethics – moral, principles

Language Authority – right to speak, give orders, make decisions