How do we know what we know?
Answer the following question using all eight of the ways of knowing. We haven’t discussed these yet—this is an introductory activity—but the terms should be self-explanatory for this activity.
Your response should be in the form of a 400-word essay with individual paragraphs, indented using the Word first-line indent function (see paragraph pull-down menu) or whatever is comparable in your program, double-spaced, 12 point Times or Arial font. You may use first-person “I” for this assignment.
Question: How do I know I am human?
Eight Ways of Knowing
Sense perception: Any of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, by which the body perceives an external stimulus
Language: The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.
Emotion: How do emotions interfere with how we view the world?
Reason: The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically
Imagination: A way of developing knowledge without the help of our senses; second, something that allows us extra scope in understanding concepts, ideas, or phenomena. Both definitions are associated with creativity, and the ability to make a leap of understanding without necessarily knowing how and why.
Faith: It’s important to point out that faith doesn’t necessarily have to involve religion
and can just indicate a close affiliation or trust in someone, some organization, or some movement, such as a parent, a political party, or even a football team.
7. Intuition and Memory: Memory isn’t a ‘primary’ way of knowing. Instead, we use the other ways of knowing to provide us with our initial knowledge, and only afterwards employ memory to modify and enhance that knowledge. Also, memory is notoriously unreliable: how one person remembers something will be radically different to how another person recalls it, meaning that it must be treated with care if one is to build up objective knowledge about a thing.
Intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.