ToK What is The Most Reliable Source of Knowledge
Uploaded by dudespanky on May 18, 2006
I believe that there is no such thing as the ‘most reliable source’ because every thing that we know or experience must be confirmed by a combination of different things. Reason and Emotion are not reliable sources of knowledge on there own. Therefore we must use a combination of reason and emotion to draw an accurate picture of the world.
It is possible to draw an accurate picture using only emotion or reason by itself, but the most accurate picture can be drawn using both emotion and reason. To start, let us analyze reason first. Reasons, such as logic are examples of knowledge which take thinking and calculation to draw a conclusion. There are two types of logic; inductive and deductive logic. Inductive uses specific examples to draw a general conclusion, and deductive uses general examples to draw a specific conclusion, but both believe that
2 + 2 = 4. Emotion is instinct as well as learned. We are born with a form of emotion called innate emotion, which includes feelings such as laughter and crying. Another form of emotion is learned emotion; these are feelings that develop depending on the society we live in, location and our upbringing, such as hello and goodbye which are different in many cultures. One obvious disadvantage of emotion is how easily it can be affected, with things such as alcohol and drugs, giving us a false picture of the world.
It can be argued that reason is more accurate than emotion because emotion can also affect our decision making in very negative ways. Our emotions can hinder our learning and can force us to think in negative ways. For example a soldier who survived a war may be living with guilt because he is wandering why he was spared and why he was ‘chosen’ to survive. The soldier may very skeptical and stereotypical way towards the ‘enemy.’ However it is emotion that drives our hunger for knowledge. It is because we want to learn and discover the unknown that we are curious and cause us to reason. Without the emotion of curiosity we would not want to draw a an accurate picture of world.
In some cases we even use reason to try and explain our emotions. For example, the character Mr. Gradgrind in ‘Hard Times’ by Charles Dickens, is a very practical man, a man of facts and calculations, and he...