In this question I’m going to be exploring the meaning of knowledge, and if we can ever truly know something in order to draw a boundary between things that are known and that aren’t.

To answer this question, we must first consider : what is knowledge? The dictionary defines it as “facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. ” Taking this meaning, we see that knowledge is directly related to experience. In practice, the application of our senses allow us to interpret and know what objects lie around us due to what we’e been told they are called previously, say at school or by our parents. However, this implies we can only know and grasp concepts which fit with our preexisting truths or “knowledge” ( Coherent Truth ). The problem should be becoming clear – how is this knowledge reliable? If I base my knowledge off of what I’ve been taught how do I know what I was taught wasn’t wrong? It needed only to coincide with the teachers’ prior knowledge in order to seem appropriate to teach to me. All over the world, people are raised in different conditions and with different values and different learning processes. Take my painting, for example. I may tell you it is unfinished, but I may be lying because I want it to appear this way. Your social experience and knowledge of paintings and my painting history will have to be used in order to determine whether I am telling the truth or not. This truth validates the knowledge I’ve given you, letting you “know” it as you have evidence for it. In the end, each of you will form a different opinion on whether I tell the truth and thus gain different knowledge.

What I’ve proven is that none of us know things in the same way – knowledge is not a shared in its exact form between individuals – and thus there is no boundary to knowledge. Since we rely on each other’s words, our shared knowledge of their meaning and whether they are telling the truth, there can be infinite interpretations of things we see firsthand and things we are told. It even extends to the imagination. I may know in my mind what something is, but you can’t reliably know if it is the case if I tell you, or exactly imagine and know what describe : there are too many factors of uncertainty.

That painting is my most recent IB artwork, (spoilers, it is actually unfinished!) and I decided to use it since it ties well into opinion and knowledge – visual stimuli always causes great debate and is easy proof that we all see differently, and thus can never know the same things in the same way.

To conclude, if we can’t know things in the same way – our thoughts and concepts are always subjective and influenced – then there is no baseline knowledge and thus no boundary to the interpreted knowledge. We have no way of truly identifying the nature of something in an objective way, thus even the meaning of knowledge itself is speculation. We aren’t limited to what is and isn’t, because we cannot agree on a foundation of knowledge.

Ivan Sproats.