How do we know what we know? In other words, what justification do we have for the knowledge that we claim to know, and to what degree of certainty can we be assured that the various mediums feeding us particular pieces of knowledge (as well as any exploration really into certain fields or schools of thoughts) are valid or even ‘true’.
The first thing to establish when considering something like this is to solidify our understanding of and define terms such as truth and knowledge, and the certainty to which we can hold onto such terms. Truth, in its most traditional sense (base form), is something that is correct – something that is not and will not be wrong. Knowledge meanwhile, can be thought to refer to the truths that we hold or are aware of, our own personal interaction and experience with this concept of truth.
How then, can we justify that something is true? In order to explore what questions, it may help us to rationalize the abstract concept and consider a particular school of thought (a collection or set of truths) – one such example being the Natural Sciences. How then, are we able to establish this concept or idea of truth in the context of the natural sciences? One prominent model many consider is what is known as the scientific model (taught to many of us as early as our very first science lesson – seen as the method through which one may gain and contribute ‘truths’ and hence knowledge, to the scientific community). We start off with a simple idea, a hypothesis that we may have regarding something (i.e. that the Earth is not actually in the middle of our Solar system). We then attempt to devise methods of experimentation to test this observation or hypothesis of ours, to see whether or not what we think will happen, will actually happen. Replicability is key in science, things need to happen again and again, under varying conditions and with various perspectives and points of view, so that we may fundamentally establish a scientific truth – a scientific theory. Truth in this scenario then becomes a replicable process or observation, held by the community (i.e. that in fact, the Earth is not at the center of the solar system, but the Sun is instead). The justifications used in science for this truth are a matter of utilizing evidence and observation, coupled with the use of imagination, insight, and logic to interpret and explain the various observations and pieces of observation awarded to us.
We now however that there are flaws with this method; issues that arise. For the longest time, the laws of classical physics were thought to be absolute (this assumption destroyed by the discovery of quantum physics). Scientific truths are not always correct, scientific knowledge that we have cannot always be said to be certain, despite the various methods of justification used to arrive at said knowledge.
