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Responsibility Of Thought Essay, Research Paper

“A critical thinker, you want to distinguish between correct information, misinformation, biased reporting, and deliberate persuasion in your everyday news of the world. How might you do so?”

Responsibility of Thought

“If Virtue is knowledge, as Socrates claimed, then we are bound to be wicked”(Tivnan 4). For centuries, people have been searching for the ultimate Truth, the Absolute knowledge, only to further submerge themselves in the oblivion to the fundamental fact that there is no single truth, be it spiritual, physical, or metaphysical. The human pride and conviction of intellectual superiority over all other perceived existence pushes the individual in his futile search of the absolute knowledge. Blinded by one’s misconception, one misjudges the information presented by numerous sources. Facts about what one believes to be common knowledge are often subjective in the deliberate intention of persuasion. Faced with the plentiful options, which may conflict with each other, one must employ one’s capabilities of rational and logical thought to acknowledge the many skewed pieces of information and consequently, assume the responsibility of deciding upon what should shape one’s perception and experience, and thus, knowledge.

Just as one is presented with multiple descriptions of a single event, the same consistent inconsistency applies the basic definition of truth. In his book, Reuben Abel proposes one explanation by interpreting Hegel’s definition of truth as its “coherence with other propositions”(75). This is quite a satisfactory answer. After all, a lie such as “cats have feathers which may be used for the production of a more effective dandruff shampoo” would be too easily detected amidst the many sources of information that clearly emphasize the fact that dandruff shampoos are made of chemicals. However, if one were to depend only on the consistency of information, one might find oneself trapped in a world where one’s existence is absurd until confirmed by the media. This would have to be a torture “to ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world”(Ellison 4), and yet, the society constantly refutes the self-aware mind. If I possessed a mind in the ultimate state of contentment with the lack of doubt, I would be a much more frequent victim of the weather’s whims, for even though all three trustworthy-looking weathermen, from the three very respectable weather- specified channels, were so sincere in their forecasts of a beautiful, sunny day in the middle of early January in Poland, after waking to the sounds of a thunderstorm, my womanly instinct tells me to bring a umbrella when I go out. Consequently, that same illogical and untamed intuition screams into my fragile ear, that there has to be more to truth than coherence, which fails to objectively uphold itself in reality.

I fear that, driven by the doubt of my reality, and maybe the demure hope for a good grade in Theory of Knowledge, I have opened the Pandora’s box. Firstly, it should be only expected from me to make an attempt at defining the term “reality” that I am so abundantly using. For the purpose of this essay, potentially revealing explanation to all the secrets of the world, the latter amounts to a society’s system of beliefs about existence, which reinforces and feeds off of such subcultures as business, science, religion and politics. Personally, I cannot help but sadly smile as I notice that in a sincere attempt to find truth I am using an assumption, and what is worse, it is an assumption about more assumptions. I can only begin to imagine the shock and disappointment of the ancient Greeks “whose quest was to discover the enduring and perfect truth, not to reveal the extent to which all societies are built on truths that are neither enduring nor perfect”(Anderson 31). As I utilize my Senior 2000 modem, scanning my mind in hope of finding another option that would allow me to discover truth, I face my intuition once again. If one should trust one’s intuition, it should only follow that sensory perception and experience are the sources of knowledge. After all, all human beings interact with the world through their own experiences of what it is like. The most popular sense is sight and as a gift of nature it should be an objective source of facts. Why would clear vision mislead the eye’s owner, when all he wished to accomplish was to check whether his mother-in-law was following him. Yet, even the supposedly simple task of sight requires context, interpretation and basic concepts. “The fallacy of the immaculate perception”(Abel 35), as Nietzsche referred to it, perceiving something depends on personal datum, for “believing is seeing”(Reuben 39). Ironically, the latter is supplied by experience, which cannot account for an absolute criterion of judgment, because it is created through the symbiotic relationship with perception. Furthermore, truth created through the latter two is further faulted by one’s cultural conditioning. While Edmund, a very enlightened person, finds entering a tram a rather mundane routine that is part of an everyday trip back to his house, I, a member of a primitive tribe from the virgin forests of Poland, may freeze in terror, as I observe yet another human being devoured by this red snake-like creature with multiple whiskers, which secrete fiery sparks. Perhaps, my previous encounters that occurred in my dreams have conditioned me that the red monster or any roughly similar creatures are not Magda-friendly. Yet, as reasonable as it might me that the latter is a form of experience, it has no anchorage in reality. Consequently, I am forced to discard yet another chance for accessing the ultimate truth, for perception and experience do not do it justice.

Yet, in the face of such plentiful instruments with which one can manipulate truth, should one give up on this search, by assuming the position of the popular skeptic doubting the reasoning of every judgment? According to Hospers, “physical objects can be other than they appear, but sense-data cannot, for the language of sense -data is the language of appearance”(75) and the latter is judged by one’s believes. A self-denying, frustrated perceptual skeptic would scream out in disbelief against this claim, for “we are never entitled to be sure about our perceptual judgments? we never are in a position to know that our perceptual judgments are true”(Hosper 57). Ren? Descartes would ardently argue that believing is no way of knowing the truth, for the judgments formed under such conditions are biased. It is much more plausible to think of our experiences as caused by the evil demon, who, with deliberate persuasion, is feeding us with “sense-experiences of sight, touch, smell… without there being a real world at all”(Hospers 59). That might be a probable argument as long as evil demons do suffer from high unemployment rate and have nothing better to do. With all due respect for Mr. Descartes, this is not about knowing the absolute truth, but rather about perceiving. If he decides to argue against believing, than he precludes his whole theory of the very realistic demon. If one is able to convince oneself of anything than, one must exist at that time. Existence is essential for consciousness of anything, yet, it also implies the responsibility for one’s existence, for like any average individual, one is endowed with the capabilities of reasoning and thus deciding what to believe.

A human being restrained by his physical body as well as by one’s metaphysical cannot engulf the entire mystery of the universe. However, one is equipped with various instruments, which, as faulted in themselves, may offer a glimpse of the greater whole. Where, initially, the frequent conflicts between the plentiful sources of truth may have been considered a terrible impediment, I perceive it as the great advantage that allows me to critically eliminate one improper truth over another. Therefore, if anyone were ever to ask me whether amidst all the confusion and incoherence can one ever know, I would confidently reassure him that it is through all the other socially constructed realities that I reaffirm my own, equipping my belief and accepting the personal growth. It is my perpetually active duty as a critical thinker to question and avoid ambiguity as well as the disguised arrogance of dogmatically upholding my belief, founded in fear, that it is that very tenet that is faulted. Thus, shedding my skin of comfort and untested ideologies, I accept the “responsibility [which] rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form or agreement”(Ellison 14) and celebrate the web woven from the diverse realities that become one.

Works Cited

Abel, Reuben. Man is the Measure: A Cordial Invitation to the Central Problems of Philosophy. New York: The Free Press, 1976.

Anderson, Walter T. Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. San Francisco: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990.

Hospers, John. An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988.

Tivnan, Edward. The Moral Imagination: Confronting the Ethical Issues of Our Day. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.


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