Is It An Oversimplification To Claim That Some Ways Of Knowing Give Us Facts While Others Provide Interpretations?

We know about the world through the four different ways of knowing: sense perception, language, reason and emotion. Each serves its powerful role in building our knowledge of the external world. Facts are things that are known to be true while interpretation is the act of explaining through a particular view. It is an oversimplification to categorize the different Ways of Knowing into providing facts and providing interpretations . Each way of knowing gives it own unique interpretation, but at the same time providing us with a certain degree of fact.

Sense perception gains us the information through the five senses. I can know a certain phenomenon through experiencing it by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing or tasting it. Independently, sense perception can provide one with objective facts. By nature, it provides unprocessed raw data of the world, but can be hindered by disabilities such as colour blindness. The sense of sight, as I believe, is the most powerful sense perception. The whole world can be seen through the eye, thus light can be considered the dominant phenomenon of the external world, and therefore I believe that sense perception provides more objective facts than any other Ways of Knowing. Astrologists, by observing the sky, can obtain some remarkable facts about the universe. For example, Mr Hubble recorded the recessional velocities of different galaxies and their distance from The Milky Way Galaxy, he obtained a linear relationship and further deduced that the universe cannot be older than 13.6 billion years. With senses, we interpret how the world is like, but judgments are influenced by prior knowledge and personal preferences. For example, by looking at a piece of Ivory ornament, one may think that it is beautiful and love it a lot but since I know that Ivory is obtained through killing innocent elephants, the ornament to me is marked as inhumanity thus it can be seen that sense perception deals with both fact and interpretation.

Language in my perspective, is a way of knowing that involves a high degree of interpretation and lesser fact. For instance, if I hear a news that a business is doing badly, I acquired the knowledge that is doing badly. However, this knowledge is not very useful at all, it is too broad and not objective since I can have multiple interpretations of the news. Possible interpretations can be that the business is losing customers, did not pass the quality check etc. The reason for certain interpretations is again based on the nature of a person. A person s education, cultural background, personal experience can affect the interpretations of an issue, and highly possible for others to interpret it differently. Reading a piece of article for example, the message convicted varies between the readers. Therefore debates are very commonly seen. Language itself also contains a high degree of biasness. In where I live for example, China, due to the cultural background of the success of the Communist Party, news always give this impression that they are the greatest people of all time Chairman Mao is glorified a million times. However that is not the case, news and media are only selective reporting, so that they can control the interpretations of people. Therefore, to me, the language as a way of knowing gives my interpretation rather than an objective fact.

Reasoning is a collective endeavour by which people construct meaning together by exchanging, modifying and improving their ideas and opinions. Compared to language, reason has a lower degree of interpretation but a higher degree of fact. Due to its nature, reasoning is persuasive and this limits down different interpretations and provides a more solid fact. However, for a single phenomenon, there exist more than one way to reason. Reasoning can be subjective due to culture a Christian will reason a phenomenon with God or the teachings from the bible which other religions do not agree on. It can also be subjective due to the limited knowledge a female will usually say that girls live a tougher life than guys do, and vice versa this is of course due to the limited knowledge as a person can t be living two lives, or I should say we assume that it is not possible. Objective reasoning based on scientific theories and mathematics can provide facts Newton s law of gravitation is proven to be valid for all masses in the universe.

Last but not least, emotion. It is very different to the other Ways of Knowing, Emotion shapes thoughts, influences behaviour, and steers the pursuit of knowledge. In other words, it assists other Ways of Knowing or actually controls them. Emotion creates the desire to do, to know. For example, a scientists researches on the same topic for his entire life, the force driving him is a strong emotion attached to the topic he is pursuing, or something that he wants to acquire. Without emotion, there is no wants to know, no expansion of knowledge. Thus I believe that it is the most important way of knowing. Emotion acts as a basis of reasoning, to persuade a truth, there is an emotion in you that you want to veto or support a certain issue. The language that a person speaks is also greatly influenced by his emotions, describing the same person, two different people can speak completely different thoughts. Due to personal preferences, one can speak critically about another, thus emotion makes language subjective. Emotion also affects how our brain respond to our senses. For instance, a bottle half filled with water a positive minded person will say that it is half full while a negative person will say that is half empty. It can be seen that emotion is very influential to how we know and what we know.

In conclusion to this essay, every way of knowing provides interpretation and facts. Some provides more interpretation while others more facts. They are all inter-related in a way to pursuit the truth emotion as a way of knowing, is the origin of the Ways of Knowing.