Essay On Ways Of Knowing

Ways of knowing are ways we claim that lead us to knowledge. They are humanity’s window to the world and the tools to answer the ‘how do we know’ question. Eight of them are considered to be the most essential: sense perception, reason, language, emotion, intuition, faith, memory and imagination. They all provide us with different components, like facts, interpretations, implications etc., and they interact in various ways in the construction and formation of knowledge. Is there however a clear distinction between the different components, can we claim that some Ways of knowing provide us only with facts while others provide interpretations? Are facts independent of interpretations and is it possible that interpretations may lead us eventually to facts? To proceed we need to determine ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’.

A fact is simply something that has really occurred or is actually the case. Facts, as has been indicated by the Australian philosopher D.M. Amstrong, may be considered as directly related to truth, since every truth must have a truth-maker, and facts are the best candidates to occupy the truth-maker role . As such, facts

The way I conceive blue is very different from the way someone else conceives it, we both however may interpret as blue the color of an object. If everybody sees this object as blue, then we may conclude that this is a fact. There are people however that cannot differentiate colors and for them this cannot be a fact. This is quite clear in the area of Arts, where a painting is usually regarded or perceived differently from different people. So sense perception, no matter how important as a way of knowing is and how much influences the way we perceive the world, certainly provide us with interpretations, but sometimes these interpretations may be regarded as facts, when all for example agree that Guernica is a unique