John Dewey holds the view that what is certain knowledge one day may not be the next.?

Question

Can you recall an example from your own life experience where you thought your knowledge of something was positively true only to find out it wasn't?

Answer 1

I thought I could trust my first wife.

Answer 2

So many times that I began to learn that History is full of examples of the fact that "knowledge" is at best a tentative conclusion about observable phenomena. The Sun revolves around the Earth, the Earth is flat, etc., etc. One of the facts that we have come to understand is that absolutely everything is constantly changing, so therefore the idea that we can have knowledge that is certain and unchanging is a fantasy. There are certain scientific truths we have deduced from observing first the Earth, and then the Universe, but even these cannot be relied upon to not change or be modified. Our thought seeks something to hang on to that is "still" in a moving world, but as everything is in motion , this is a frustrating pursuit. Dewey is in agreement with many throughout human history, especially many in the Far East, and this point of view is now held by more and more as we broaden our perspective.

Answer 3

Believing something to be true, even strongly, is not the same as being able to _know_ that it is true. There is a branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of "how do we know what we know."

People often fall into the trap of believing falsehoods because on some level, we WANT to believe what we believe, and we confuse that strong desire for something to be true, with certainty that it is.

One example is religion. ALL religions are ultimately inherently based on faith, but nearly all religious people (with the exception of some who may be going through a crisis of faith) also inherently believe their particular religion to be "the" real and true religion. Obviously there is no way to prove the correctness of a religion, but most believers still feel some degree of certainty to their beliefs.

I don't know that I can really agree with John Dewey, for the above reasons. What is true or false does not change, only our belief of whether it is or not. We can better judge how certain we _should_ be by looking objectively at the reasons _why_ we believe something to be true. Unfortunately for us emotional humans, the objective part is the hard part.

Answer 4

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. That my parents were infallible. People were certain that the universe revolved around the Earth at one point. Certain knowledge is only certain until it is proven false.