When I read this prompt, I immediately think of the Bible, the Holy text of Christianity, because of its myriad versions and interpretations and its relation to me as a Christian.

To know something is to have an understanding of its concepts, often to a standard where it can be understood by others if explained to them. But this transfer of information is precisely where information, and thus knowledge, can be lost.

The Bible is a compilation of texts written over centuries, detailing the Story of Jesus Christ, and God’s teachings, but it wasn’t all written at the same time and by the same author. Each of these authors would’ve interpreted the experiences they viewed differently, due to their application of their own senses. Modern science shows us that our senses can be easily flawed, and illusioned. Donald Hoffman proves this in his TED Talk via the use of optical illusions, of which there are hundreds you can try on YouTube. These views align with Descartes, who came to the realization that his senses couldn’t be trusted, and that the only knowledge he could be sure of was his existence. Take the Gospel (story) of Jesus Christ’s life in the Bible: 4 accounts of the same life, all including their own takes of information, and analysis of the events that occurred. If someone had remembered wrongly along the line, what would that mean for the future of the religion? It would be untruthful, built on misinterpretation – causing severe doubt and loss of faith, ruining trust for billions who follow the religion.

Add to this the effect of language. The Bible was mostly kept fresh in the minds of people by speaking about its stories, before most of it was written in Greek, especially in the time of the New Testament. From there, it was kept in Latin by priests for a long time, until its eventual translation into world languages. But there aren’t always smooth translations, and those who do not speak Greek or Latin can’t fully interpret what was written as solid knowledge, only as a translation into their common tongue. For instance, certain words like: “l’appel du vide” have no direct translation. Yes, the words may be converted to their equivalent – in our case, “the call of the void” – but they don’t translate the meaning of the metaphor. Nor do they convey the same feeling that those who understand the phrase as part of their mother tongue would. You can see here that there is a problem of experience. Every being’s unique upbringing allows for unrepeatable experiences to be felt as our influences from family, culture, education, community, society and many more factors carve particular values into each of us – forming individuals. This changes the way we interpret information, in a way that we can never truly know what another knows in the same way because we will never share all of their values and memories.

To summarize, while there may be certain truths that we can share, such as mathematics, we can’t know the same experiences and interpretations of other as they are unique to their senses and values. In this we find that our knowledge is limited to our experiences, influenced by our specific values and can even by altered by language and faulty memory. Therefore, I am inclined to admit that there are truths and states of being that we can never achieve or replicate, and thus never know.

Ivan Sproats.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to go to Barbados for a holiday. I made a few friends, did quite a few things and got to experience a non-European culture. My point here is, Barbados has a mixed reputation internationally- government corruption, crime, violence and cost of living being highlighted. On the other hand, there’s my experience of Barbados: the people I met, the things I did and the places I went. In short, facts versus personal experience.

Barbados is on the whole a poorer country than many, with 14% of the population living underneath the poverty line. As well as this the crime rate lies also at 14% , and there is a 4x higher likelihood children die at childbirth. The facts show that people generally live a worse standard of living compared to the UK.

However, taking in my own experiences from Barbados I can see the other side of these facts shown. While people generally had less, smaller houses or more basic meals, people were happy to make do with what they had. My friend Green makes the effort every Friday to take his daughters to the beach in Holetown. Also, though the crime rate was high, I never felt unsafe at any point in Barbados, and Andy always told me it was the ‘gangstas’ who you’d get in trouble with, and only if you looked for trouble besides. Overall, from my experience people- despite having less- were happy with what they had, even on the bus people smiled and even sung songs with one another: you wouldn’t see that on the tube?

To conclude, I believe the relationship between knowledge and personal experiences is that they can further the depth of one another, and provide greater insight into the true outlook on knowledge.

Knowledge, belief and opinion may seem similar at first glance, but upon closer inspection, the three are vastly different. Knowledge is something that can be empirically proven is true, while belief and opinion do not necessarily rely upon facts.

For example, believing in a deity. There is no concrete proof that gods exist, and yet 85% of the world’s population are adherents to a religion with a supreme being. This is where belief comes into play. Believers can only have faith that their numen exists. They cannot touch, see or feel them, in spite of their desire to feel a superior presence in their lives.

Having faith in a higher power can bring a sense of security to a person, not just in turbulent times, but also from every day-to-day life. It implies that everything happens for a reason- a comforting thought to some. However, this takes away the accountability of people’s actions, choosing instead to blame a corrupt being (read: Satan). rather than their own reprehensible choices. In short, belief can often times be unfounded.

Opinions are like belief in that they can often be formed with no real logic behind them. A prime exhibit of this is prejudice. The literal meaning of the word -in Latin- is ‘prae’, meaning before or in advance, and ‘judicium’, judgment. Overall, it means to judge something before truly knowing it. Opinions are also hard to dispel or criticise, as people become defensive when they are told they’re wrong. It’s important to remember that challenging the idea is not attacking the person.

Knowledge is an amalgamation of both facts and opinion, but they both have to be true. If they aren’t then it is false knowledge in that you wrongly think you know something through either ignorance or misinformation. As Sir Francis Bacon famously proclaimed; “Knowledge itself is power”. It allows us to understand and advance, which is where it differs from beliefs and opinions. If we were constrained by what we thought was right, we would never get anything done- we would be in perpetual disagreement with one another.

Everything is knowable to an extent. Things that we are certain are knowable are mainly personal to us or knowledge that we acquire through personal experiences, but it is very easy to state that some or most things are knowable because for something to be classified as knowable we need to have some sort of knowledge on the topic regardless of what the background context is. For example future is unknowable as we can predict what would happen but we lack certainty therefore, yes certain things are completely unknowable such as the true emotions someone might be feeling. For example, we will never know for certain what someone is feeling or experiencing unless they say it, and even then, they could be lying. All we can do is assume, based on their body language and facial expressions or our intuition which ultimately is enough. We don’t need to have any prior knowledge about what the person has experienced in order to depict how they might be feeling.

The picture I have chose to portray my idea is of a Russian cartoon that used to be a part of my childhood many years ago. I used to watch this cartoon every single morning before school and although I did not understand many of the words that were being spoken, I still made use of the knowledge I had at the time of words that have been taught to me by my father and other members of my family and understood from the actions of the characters what was taking place. Besides that, as I mentioned above we don’t have to have any prior knowledge in order to be quite confident in what we believe is true in this case.

There are other instances however, such as the future which are different. To conclude, I do believe some things, an impressive amount to be more exact are unknowable. We don’t know everything and we will not know everything. Even if we thought we were certain about a particular subject, we could be wrong and that depends on the source we acquire our information and knowledge from as some sources may be more reliable than others.

Are some things unknowable? Do we know what’s happened in the past? Can we know what will happen in the future? We can imagine: will we be able to hyper-loop from England to Australia? Will cars fly? Will a world exist underground? Can we call a pod to transport us from A to B by just a tap? That’s what the kids in the picture imagined the future to be like. Fast forward twelve or thirteen years, are these notions still a figure of child imagination or is it a reality? I can say hand-on-heart that I am yet to see an underground society or have a smart pod pick me up and take me to school everyday, but who is to say that that can never happen?

Children have a much more active imagination than adults. As we grow up, we learn more how the world works, adapt to our environments and therefore lose our imaginative and creative elements. People in creative professions develop personal systems to stay creative. A regular, day-to-day person develops a subconscious routine of how to navigate through life, which becomes their norm. As cognitive misers (being lazy) we have a tendency to stick to these routines because: we know them well, they become effortless and we feel comfortable doing them. This is why we lose our creativity as we age.

However, although this may be the case, we still don’t know everything. We can’t know everything. The kids in the picture had high expectations of a world that you can power by your fingers. Those kids now haven’t necessarily seen this world, but, those kids (in another twelve or thirteen years) might. No one can say it can’t happen, because no one knows.

Are some things unknowable? Maybe. Here is a photograph of my Dad I found at my Grandma’s house tucked away, his name is Matt; and this photograph was taken in 1995 when he graduated college in Worthing, West Sussex. At this time, he was half-way through the 90s, about 23 years old. Will I know all about his life during this time? I can ask him, and he can give me infinite detail: for example, he’s told me the story of living in Islington in London during this time, when his neighbour’s flat was firebombed. As well, I can ask about his friends and who they were, what their jobs were and how they were to him. Like Tom Tang, who owned a Chinese Takeaway. Take his other friend Matt, they both robbed a laundrette when they were 18 and my dad has told me how he died suspiciously in Hong Kong in 97′. Given the stories he’s told me, I can get a good understanding of how his life was back then, but can I truly know all of it?

I can say for certain that I will never know everything he lived through during the 90s, not every day to detail. How he felt, what he saw- what he doesn’t want me to know. I won’t ever know. Say he’s forgotten about some events; he can’t talk about them and therefore it is unknowable. Even this photograph, can I ever know who took it? My Dad doesn’t remember, nobody in the photograph does. Sure, I could check archived CCTV footage, interview masses of people who may have witnessed it- but at least in one case alone, nobody will have documented or remembered it. I can hear about and know a lot about the life he led during that decade, but I won’t hear about the other half of that time. The stories I do hear however, could be false. The majority of sources are memories of other people, which are often false or exacerbated. I can’t take this as truth then. So, given the fact that some details no longer exist, and that many of the other details can be fallible due to the nature of these sources: therefore, yes, some things are unknowable.