How I know

We looked at modes of knowing in the medieval islamic world, and we saw that theories of knowledge were diverse and widespread. Yet they might feel distant to us. We might not feel as if we have such a mode of knowing, but do we? Can we move about in the world and live our lives without one? Even if it is not explicit or known to us, we will still have a theory of how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is and what good and bad ways of attaining it are.

Obviously the scientific worldview is one thing to think of in answering the question what our modern mode of knowing is, or more specifically what my own mode of knowing is, where we consider something knowledge if it is a justified true belief. The scientific method would be something that justifies a belief; we get information through experimentation and the testing of ideas and after sufficient experimentation and testing we consider it true and thus knowledge. Knowledge is an insight into reality.

Yet while this might be the most common way of thinking about knowledge nowadays, it has some problems, namely of rejecting all that we can not prove the existence of. But not being able to prove the existence does not prove its non-existence. But before I explore this further, I would like to point out that this is not how we live our everyday lives. We might think this way about knowledge in a bigger scheme of things, but when I say I know where my friend lives or that I know what I am eating is not a matter of gaining knowledge through the scientific method.

So this shows us that we have other beliefs about knowledge as well, maybe more subtle ones for everyday life. I think my mode of knowing in this regard is one where I trust my body to extract information about the world in a meaningful way, either through my senses or through my reasoning capacities, although often it will be a combination of the two. I don’t see them as distinct. They overlap and enrich each other. Just how my logic is my reason at work with empirical information acquired through the senses, leading me to more knowledge than the empirical information on its own would have provided and which I could not have reached with my ratio alone.

So I have a belief that my senses give me trustworthy information about the world, or reasonably reflect the world into my mind so to say and that my mind on the other hand can make sense of that information and take it a step further. This is a mode of knowing in which I and my bodily capacities are central. It allows me to live my life without constantly doubting everything, for then I could not live at all.

Yet this is not all there is to my mode of knowing, for it might suggest that I believe I can only know empirical things, but I also believe I can come to knowledge about mathematical truths, metaphysical truths and the like. Which suggests my rational mind is able to operate on itself, but this is not the case. Although some people might think of it that way, I would still use empirical knowledge of the workings of the world to think about ethics for example, and thus in a way it is exactly the same as I described before.

Another thing that seems to go beyond it is knowledge of the unseen, as described in the occult. I think I do have a belief or at the very least an open mind to the possibility of things to exist that are not as yet proved to exist by science, such as ghosts, spirits, the soul and the influence of language and of thought on the world in a physical sense, to name a few. I do not believe them to be unscientific but real in another sense, I think they might be proved by science, either by themselves or by their effects, but science is either not yet able to do so or just failed to look into it seriously or in the right manner.

So part of my mode of knowing are the modes of knowing of the occult and of the mystic. I believe there is more than that meets the eye and that we can get knowledge of these things or gain knowledge through them. I hope to explore this field more myself and to gain new knowledge in many ways to expand my world and develop myself.