Analysis Of The Factors Determining The Quality Of Knowledge
In Theory of Knowledge we always ask how we know the things that we know, but here we want to explore the quality of what we know and to what extent what we know is reliable and valuable. And does the number of people accepting it affect the quality? One of the arguments here is that this could differ in different areas because reasoning and recognition in each area could vary. I would like to use the two areas of natural sciences and religious knowledge systems for the arguments I'm going to make later.
As I said before measuring quality could be different in different areas because we know and understand these areas in different ways, for example, we usually use reason to understand it, but for religious knowledge systems we typically use our faith so we see that we have two different ways of knowing for each of our areas that definitely affect the validity of our knowledge. The reliability of knowledge in natural sciences are based on very logical and reasonable ways. No claims would be accepted without any proof for it and all the knowledge and claims are passed through main stages of tests and experiments. Natural sciences usually follow the "scientific method" for accepting a claim; meaning that for a scientific claim to be considered as true it should pass the stages of this method that goes through these steps:
- Identify the Problem.
- Research.
- Form A Hypothesis.
- Plan Experiment.
- Perform Experiment.
- Analyze Data.
- Form A Conclusion.
- Communicate Results.
Again for the scientific claim it only would be acceptable if the conclusion would remain the same after redoing the same experiment again and again. We see the truth and quality of scientific evidence is very reason based and comes after many research experiments and reasonings. The fact is there no matter how many people accept it, the proven concept is not going to change and would be and stay the same. The low number of people accepting the claims might bring doubt to it in the first stage and make the scientists to double check some facts again but once it is proven it would be submitted For example, it has been proven by science that vaccination is a reliable way to fight and remove many diseases from the world. Experiments have been done and it is proven that is true, and the vaccination program is happening around the world for many years. But on another hand, we have some people who don't believe in vaccination and believe that it is better for children to get resistant against the diseases naturally. They bring up reasons such as: vaccines are loaded with chemicals and heavy metals or so many vaccines so soon will overwhelm the baby's immune system or even some relate autism to vaccination.
All these arguments have been researched and checked all over again; Although that it has been scientifically proven that they are incorrect, but still many people resist on their opinion of anti-vaccination. So the point here is, does this affect the reliability of the scientific fact? Or they are just groups of people who want to stick with their traditional beliefs? In this case, we clearly see that we have a scientific knowledge that its known an proven by reason and accepted by many people; on the other side we have this anti-vaccination movement that has many followers, but we could see that there is lots of false knowledge in their movement. This is a clear example of how we cannot measure the quality of belief with numbers of people accepting it. In a nutshell, as we see in scientific facts if it is tested and proven the number of people accepting it doesn't change the value and quality. The leaves photosynthesis with oxygen and the Earth orbiting the sun are proven facts and numbers of people believing or not believing in it won't change the truth about them. As it sounds simple for natural science to judge the quality of knowledge; it is much more complicated in the area of religious knowledge systems to do that. It is much harder to measure quality by the number of people believing in the knowledge coming religion. Because Religious knowledge comes from faith and that is why it is so complicated to measure it. Faith itself could be different to different people and it’s something inside and personal for each human so it is kind of impossible to measure. Many religious practices are happening just because people believe in them and maybe in some cases, people do not really know why or do not have reasoning facts and claims for why what they are doing. But because of their faith, they will keep doing their practices.
The situation is simple: for most cases, people believe in a religion so they follow the guidelines given by them because they believe if they do not they are going to get punished or if they are good followers they would get rewarded (in this life or other life depends on their religious belief). To argue it we could look at this case about Islam and atheism. I chose Islam because I was raised in Iran that is a Muslim country, Meaning I have a good background information about it. We have many people in the world who believe in certain religions believe in a god or gods and practice their religious rituals. For example, Muslims say prayers every day and fast one month in the year. If you ask them why they do this the answer is because they are Muslim. This is their religion and they believe it is correct and came from the god or gods that created all of us and the world. They believe he/she knows best so they follow what he/she said they should do. Some people for proving their facts actually use natural scientific evidence and say for example that there are proofs that fasting is actually good for the human body. There are arguments both for and against, so here I can't say if this claim is valid or not.
On the other hand, we have people who are atheist so they don't believe in any religion. They do not have any particular practices, and each person has their own reasonings why they do not believe in any religion. One of the reasons they usually give for being an atheist is that faith is not a reliable source for knowledge because you cannot test it. We have a huge group of both believers and nonbelievers in this world, and both have a significant number of people who accept their opinions. How can we say one is right or wrong? There is no good way to say if they are right or wrong by the people believing in them. If we look at this map and other data, we have more religious people than nonreligious people. There is no proof that if their claims are right or wrong and the same with atheist people. It is very hard to have evidence for each case because it all comes from the faith of people because no one has ever come back from death to prove religious claims.
We could even use extremist groups as another example. If they are terrorist groups they believe what they are doing is right coming from religion, and they are acting in the right way as God has told them, and they are good believers and followers and they going to get praised after death. On the other hand, their terrorist acts are visibly ignorant of human rights, and everyone knows their actions are wrong. But we see they are huge groups of these followers (like ISIS), but the fact of many people believing in these activities doesn't make it right. Through the cases brought up in the essay, we could see the quality of knowledge could be determined by many factors such as scientific proofs, human rights, logic or reason and so on. With big groups of people, the quality of their knowledge about something could be questionable, or small groups could have correct knowledge.
After all this, we could argue that although in some cases you could measure the quality of knowledge by the number of people accepting it; At the same time, it could not be correct so we could argue that probably the number of people accepting knowledge is not the best way to determine its quality. there are many other factors to be concerned together from different points that could judge and argue the correctness and validity of different kinds of knowledge. Even these factors could differ in different areas of knowledge as the ways of knowing in each could be different too. Meaning that overall we could see the number of people accepting it is one of the little factors that could judge the quality of the knowledge, and we cannot really name it as the best way to determine the quality.
