Is Objective Knowledge Impossible?

773 Words2 Pages

To understand something you need to rely on your own experiences and culture. Does this mean that it is impossible to have objective knowledge?

In philosophy, an objective fact means a “truth that remains true everywhere, regardless of the situation, and is independent from human bias or emotions”. Whereas, a subjective fact is one that is “only true under certain conditions, at certain times, in certain places, or for certain people”. If you rely on your own experiences and culture to understand something, it is generally considered to be subjective knowledge, as it brings the involvement circumstantial situations. It is not impossible to attain objective knowledge, however, because of the ways our knowledge is gained.

Total objective knowledge is attainable, for example, when reading non-fiction texts for factual information to acquire knowledge on something. However, to understand something solely through objective knowledge does not allow for a full comprehension of that subject. Through objective knowledge, you are gaining pure textual information of a particular subject. In Physics class, when studying Hooke’s Law, I may have the knowledge that “the applied force is equal to the spring constant multiplied by the amount of extension within the spring” from my textbook. This is objective information because I am absorbing new information with no prior experiences or room for possible biases. But in order for me to understand the concept, I must gain the experience by applying this concept to problems. I can have knowledge about Hooke’s Law, but have no idea how to literally apply the concept. In order to understand something, you need to rely on your experiences and culture; but it is still possible for objective knowledge ...

... middle of paper ...

...and communicate with each other. Very rarely do we solely rely on our own experiences and culture to validate something as knowledge. For instance, when someone writes a paper on the “biological behavior of bats”, do they simply rely on their experiences? No! While you may draw from your experiences of hiking in the woods, you would also draw upon the experiences of others. These other sources of experiences may be recorded in books, journals and videos or television shows. Or when we do a project on human psychology, you often interview many people on their experiences, rather than draw from what you, personally, might have experienced. This comes to show that, for anything to be objectively credible; you can never solely rely on your own experiences. However, once you start to draw from the experiences of others, you come much closer to gaining objective knowledge.

Open Document