THE WAYS OF KNOWING

 Essentially, the Ways of Knowing are trying to answer the question “How do we know what we
know”
 All knowledge comes from somewhere.
 Even if we say it is innate (comes from within us) we still have to say how that knowledge
appears.
 There are eight different ways of knowing:
 Language
 Sense perception
 Emotion
 Reason
 Imagination
 Faith
 Intuition
 Memory

 LANGUAGE
 Language is defined as a system of signs with meanings.
 Language refer to the mental faculty which allows people to learn and use complex
communication systems.
 These signs include, but are not limited to: letters, pictures, symbols, sounds and
gestures.
 Language is everywhere, some aspects of it may even be universal.
 Language is full of potential problems.
 The main thing you should take from this way of knowing is that we can’t function as a
society without it, but that there are flaws to it.

 SENSE PERCEPTION
 Sense perception is all about how we experience the world around us, using our senses.
 Sense perception is the process by which we can gain knowledge about the outside
world.
 Traditionally these people have thought that we only have five senses:
 Touch
 Taste
 Smell
 Hearing
 Sight
 However, as time has passed more and more senses have been suggested.
 Other senses that is has been claimed that people have included the sense of heat,
sense of pain, sense of movement, sense of balance, sense of hunger and sense of thirst.
 EMOTION
 Emotion is a method of understanding behaviors, feelings, and thoughts.
 There are two important views of emotion.
 Naturalistic view of emotion
 Social constructionists
 Naturalistic view of emotion tells us that emotion is a result of our physical bodies, with
physical causes and effects. Charles Darwin was one supporter of this view. One
interesting implication of the naturalistic view is that emotions are seen as universal and
experienced across cultures.
 The opposite view to this is that of social constructionists. These guys argue that
emotions are socially constructed. This would mean that emotions come from our social
environment.

 REASON
 Reason allows us to form knowledge without relying on our senses.
 Reason as a way of knowing denotes constructing meaning by modifying and justifying
ideas and beliefs based on new or existing information.
 The advantages reason presents to both individuals and society are necessary and
valuable in communication, justification, and problem solving.
 Reason enhances our ability to understand each other, those around us, and in a bigger
sense, the world.
 Reason exists in everyday decision making and problem solving throughout many
aspects of knowledge.

 IMAGINATION

 Imagination conveys truths that reality hides and stimulate us to create new knowledge.
 Many scientific discoveries would not have been made without imagination.
 Problem solving is often the result of creative imagination as well.
 Imagination is often respected as a part of creativity, problem solving and originality.
However, imagination is also distrusted since it is highly subjective.

 FAITH
 When you’re talking about faith, one effective approach is to discuss what faith means.
 This is effective because many people have an idea of faith that is actually only one way
of defining the idea, when there are many to choose from.

 INTUITION
 Intuition is having an immediate sense of knowing, without any prior thinking.
  When we use our intuition, we are relying on our guts, our emotions, and our instincts
to guide us.
 For example, you may come to the sudden conclusion of given fact without any solid
proof.
 Einstein said: The intuitive mind is sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

 MEMORY
 One way of defining memory is as the faculty which allows us to retain information and
reconstruct past experience.
 Memory is simply the recollection of things we already know.