Question

Suppose I didn't know what observations would lead me to accept a proposition as true or reject it as false. Would it necessarily follow that I do not understand it?

Answer 1

Normally, when people are presented with certain things, some would just jump into conclusions because they would be led by their previous understanding, knowledge, their existing values and belief systems thus might end up in wrong conclusions. There are other people who wouldn’t act at all because they would doubt everything that they observe due to the fear of the unknown and the fear of failure. Thus, the ambiguity of the message that is being observed might cause some trouble in preventing one from understanding it depending on the context, time period and one’s background. So, in order to assess a stimulus as true or false, one needs to make use of one’s critical reasoning and the consequence of that message, action or phenomenon. Thus, it would also require one to use one’s ethical principles in deciding whether to follow something or reject something.

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