The Nature of Knowledge
Part 5 of ‘Surrender to the Mystery: On Knowing and the Power of Not Knowing.’
What is Knowledge?
Our relationship to words is the result of our relationship to the concepts they represent.
One result of this is that many people use the same words, but mean different things by them, which results in miscommunication and disconnection.
Relatively few people delve deeply into the concepts behind their words and so they have only a shallow understanding of the words they use.
When most people say they ‘know’ something, they are unaware of the fact that they are misusing the word and that they actually don’t know the thing they think they know.
Most people confuse knowledge with belief.
As someone who dearly wished to answer the big questions, knowing what it means ‘to know’, or ‘knowing how I can know I know’, or understanding ‘what actually can be known’ were all important questions for me.
Unfortunately they are not easily answered.
For that reason an entire branch of philosophy, Epistemology, is devoted to these basic questions.
