Oh no… the nature and truth and reality. My brain hurts enough already.
How do we know what we know? Is knowledge necessarily true? Should it be? As we construct knowledge, where is the rigour around the reality or truth of that knowledge?
Some truths from the film included:
“It was common knowledge that towns of a certain size have a witch.”
“They say when you meet the love of your life… time stops. and that is true.”
“A true version or an elaborate one involving a fish, I’d choose the fancy one.”
All of these quotes speak to our ability to take ideas as truth and add them into our knowledge construction as easily as facts or figures. Before the printing press, knowledge was largely communicated and shared through oral story telling traditions. Throughout history there have been many “truths” that have later become fictions.
The world is flat.
The sun rotates around the earth.
and some closer to home: Homosexuality is a psychological disorder.
These ideas or theories were held as truths with a certain amount of support for their validity. If we can know fictions and hold them as truth, and fictions can be taught and trained as readily as truths (or perhaps even more so since they can be “fancy”- engaging or emotional), how does that impact learning theory? Or are learning and truth and learning and reality independent?
Positivists argue that there are truth exists and we just need to discover it. I see knowledge as context driven, culturally influenced, and relative to the individual.
Hi Dave
Mine too (brain hurts already). Can we ever know what is really true? Here’s another example of a truth that isn’t so true – the idea of lack of perceived gravity when an astronaut is orbiting the earth. People call it “weightlessness”, when actually it is “freefall”. The astronaut is falling so quickly that she just feels weightless.
As you know, the “truth” lies in people’s perceptions. They will cling to that perception until they are given compelling evidence to the contrary. Even then, some people still cling, because they cannot stand the idea of disconnection from their reality. Fear overides reason.
In a society so driven by the remnants of religious dogma, (and not so remants in the States) it is no wonder some people still cling to irrational ideas about homosexuality. It is a fascinating disclosure about who they are and their choice to buy into their indoctrination. What it is NOT is information about you.
I totally agree with you that knowledge is context driven, culturally influenced and relative to the individual. In fact, I would venture that knowledge is useless and nearly un-learnable without context. Can knowledge even exist without context?
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a noise? If a person expresses an opinion and their partner isn’t there to hear it, are they still wrong?