How you know what you know.

This is going to be one of those philosophical types of posts.  Mainly, it is about a branch of philosophy known as epistemology, which is the study of knowledge.

Is it possible to really know a thing?  You might get deep into this subject and have that kind of question pop up.  Therefore, a bit of opinion will color what you believe to be true.  How could it not be the case, if the whole idea of truth itself can be disputed?

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to posit that we have pretty reliable indications of what is true and what isn't.  Esoteric discussions about what is really true or not true are out there in the weeds.

Consequently, there cannot be a situation in which "my truth" , "your truth", and "the truth" can be true all at the same time and also different from each other.  But you hear the terms sometimes thrown about out there as if it were a valid thing.  One example I can think of is in the movie Passion of the Christ, where Pilate tells his wife what "his truth" is.  In that case, the truth and "his truth" would both be true if what he said was true.  It is a movie though, and so it isn't necessarily "the truth", since Pilate may not have ever said any such thing.  The point?  I don't know.  Only this: that words can be malleable, but the truth is not.

The use of words may get you closer to truth or further from it.  Largely, it would be a matter of the intent of the one who communicates the words and what the intent of those words are.  The intent could be to inform or deceive.  In other words, if a person knows what the truth is, and says something that contradicts this, then clearly the intent is to deceive.  Why else use words that way?

I like to say that truth is a slippery thing.  If you think you've got it, maybe you don't.  In other words, you can believe a thing quite strongly, but find out that what you believed was wrong.

So how do you know?  You have to have a way of knowing that gives reliable answers.  Such a way can be derived from a study of knowledge, and how we know what we know.

Science can do this.  Science gives a procedure for determining truth.  But is science always reliable?  Not always, as great scientists have had their work superseded during the course of time.  It reminds me of what I heard about Einstein when his theories superseded Newton's.  Basically, Einstein was contradicting Newton ( why this is true is beyond the scope of this little essay ).  Does that make somebody a liar then?  No.  It just means that knowledge advances with more knowledge.

Let's say that Newton and Einstein were contemporaries.  Who do you believe?  How do you determine who's right and who's wrong?  If you depended upon the reputations of each, you'd have a big problem, now wouldn't you?  In other words, there has to be more than one way to skin that cat.

If Newton and Einstein were also politicians, then it would be a matter of who is more powerful.

But what if the wrong guy prevailed?  The truth wouldn't be served, but the winner would be.

Could science give more reliable answers?  Yes, provided that the rules of science were followed.  But politics and rules don't necessarily mix.  Nor do politics and truth mix.

Politics may be able to force a situation to be accepted as "right" even if it is wrong.  But science is not that way.  When it is, it ceases to be science.