My knowledge has been developing from the day I was born and I still am continuing to gain knowledge. The first ways in which we knew anything were through our parents. They were there the day we were born, the first steps we took, and we followed the movements on their mouth to produce our first form of words. They helped us develop the first ideas of basic words like cat, dog, food, drink etc. Also, a lot of our views towards society or anything controversial starts from an opinion our parents make. We might first agree with their opinions, but later down the road after we gain more knowledge, we might realize that our opinion now changes on that view.
Continuing down our road of knowledge, we have our second encounters: our teachers. They are the foundation to learning. We could not know the complicated solving mechanisms in calculus without first knowing that 2 plus 2 IS equal to 4. Our teachers’ opinions affect us in just the same ways as our parents’ opinions did. They may say a bias statement and we could believe it. And like before, our opinion can be manipulated by a greater knowledge and thus change.
The most important way in which we have come to know what we know is through experience. There is no way to prove something wrong when you experience it at first hand. By experiencing something, you are able to form your own opinions from it without being influenced by other’s opinions first. To me, this is the purest knowledge we could gain.
It's hard to say exactly how we can be sure of things, but I definitely agree that a very important way of doing this is experience. It helps take away the bias that we might already have from other people's opinions.
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