A Few Thoughts about Thought

Have you ever thought about your thoughts? About how you know what you know? The study of where knowledge comes from, that is, what our source or sources of knowledge are, is call epistemology. Now I am no philosopher, but I have been thinking about this topic lately. As far as I have been able to discern there are only three categories that our knowledge of the world around us can stem from: experience, reason, and authority.

I'll start with experience. I'm using the term 'experience' to describe our interaction with the physical world. When we walk outside and find that it is raining, we have learned something about the weather of that particular day. When we put a pot of water over fire, we discover that, after time, the water will boil. When we strike a pane of glass with a hard object such as a stone or a stick, we find out that glass breaks. There are countless numbers of things that can be learned from direct experience and observation. The scientific method relies on just such a principle. The scientist devises an experiment in order to observe some sort of condition, interaction, or situation that he wants to learn about. Plant A grew taller than Plant B when compound X was added to the soil of former. The scientific method attempts to systematize what we all do on a daily basis, namely, learn about the world around us through direct observation.

Now, there is another part of experience that is equally important to mention and that is our emotions. Very little of what we experience in a given day is unaccompanied by our own internal reaction to it. You might be very excited by the rain if you are a farmer with dry fields or you could be irritated by it if you have a long walk to the post office and have no umbrella. Boiling water is nice and can produce feelings of contentment when accompanied with tea leaves and a little honey. Boiling water poured into your lap, however, would not produce those feelings of contentment. The emotional reactions that we have to the various things that we encounter in the course of a day are themselves a kind of raw fact, much like the raw fact that water boils. Simply because we have some degree of control over our emotions (and some people have less control than others) does not change the fact that the emotions we feel are important bits of information about the world. If you think one thing to be good and another bad, that is possibly just your opinion. If something makes you happy and another disgusts you, your happiness or disgust are facts in and of themselves.