What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

Knowledge is generally described as "a justified, true belief", a definition attributed to the philosopher Plato (Benthem & Martinez, 2008). For me, knowledge is tied to a belief, as typically when one knows something, they believe it, and the reason they believe it, is because they have evidence to prove it. To acquire this knowledge, perception is usually involved. Using our senses to experience the world and then retain that information by connecting it to our existing knowledge. This relationship between experience and knowledge has significant personal and global implicaRons, for example when it comes to fake news.

An hourglass allows us to perceive the passing of Rme. Its uVer simplicity, however, also demonstrates how easy this concept is to understand for everyone. It is part of common knowledge. However, Albert Einstein, challenged this idea with his Theory of Rela,vity, where he determined that Rme was relaRve, which meant that the speed at which Rme passed depended on personal references, experiences, or context (American Museum of Natural History, 2023).

 

One minute can be marked by a clock, and everyone with a clock can measure it in relaRon to seconds or hours. The fact that a minute is sixty seconds, and those seconds occupy a parRcular space in Rme, is proven knowledge and therefore we believe it and follow that logic. However, one minute someRmes does not occupy the same space in Rme in everyone’s reality, and that is where personal experience appears. We can generalize that "one minute is short". However, every situaRon changes what we see as true. For example, if we put our hand for one minute over a fire, we will think that a minute is relaRvely long, but if we spend one minute watching our favorite movie, we will acquire the knowledge that a minute is quite short. During those two situaRons, the minute was objecRvely the same, however, we perceived it differently. The understanding of how a minute feels is based on the moment you find yourself, and your experience, that is why Rme could never be absolute, no maVer how our lives are ruled by the same seconds, minutes, or hours.

The photo of my parents’ wedding reminds me they were once young. But it also tells me, how they have gone through a life it is now my turn to live. I see them as a source of experience, and knowledge, my biggest referents.

 

Observational learning is a concept that involves learning and acquiring knowledge by watching the behaviors of others over time (DeBell, 2020). This type of learning serves as an example where personal experience is not linked to knowledge directly, because in this case, knowledge is 4 acquired from foreign experiences. When we are young, we tend to copy what we have around us, we search for a referent, mainly our parents, to guide us through what is right and wrong. But even as adults we sRll learn from others. This is an inevitable and at the same time efficient human behavior. Thanks to it, we do not have to experience everything by ourselves, because if we had to, we would not have time for anything else. That is why we acquire knowledge from the rest, we learn from their mistakes and make sure they do not happen to us, this process of knowledge acquisition is saving us from commiting those mistakes ourselves. Additionally, it is a reciprocal interchange because people learn from our experience as well. Some experiences may serve as models of what we should aim to do or be, and others of what we should not do, but all will provide knowledge as valuable as if personally acquired or experienced. Acquiring that knowledge will serve us as a model to plan our personal experiences, avoiding those that we saw were not valuable.

One of the things I like about Post-Its is the variety of uses they have. I can write down things I do not want to forget, and when I no longer want them, I peel them off and they leave no trace.

 

Serendipity is one of the concepts that best explains the relaRonship between personal experience and knowledge acquisition. The Post-it is an example of an invenRon gone wrong, that at the same Rme helped to solve another problem. What was intended to be the discovery of a strong glue ended up being a sticky substance that stuck but was easily removed. It is the unpredictable that leads us to be curious, to experiment, to create, and to find something that 6 may or may not be what we are looking for. It was thanks to experience, that Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver, discovered the Post-it (Post-it, 2023), if this would not have been the case the concept of a sRcky note would have taken a lot of time to get to someone’s mind. The concept of trial and error that our brain uses to acquire knowledge is the basis of serendipity, where error is what gives us the knowledge, we need to get to something important. In history, we have fallen into unforgivable mistakes such as the Holocaust that allowed us to advance in terms of discriminaRon. However, we continue to commit the same mistakes. That shows trial and error sometimes does not work as it should in creating common knowledge.

 

The relationship between personal experience and knowledge is significantly close. Serendipity, or the concept of learning from errors; observational learning or learning from foreign experiences; and the Theory of Relativity, or the importance of experience to interpret concepts, show us the mulRdirecRonal relaRonship between knowledge and personal experience. Knowledge is acquired through personal experience, in the same way, knowledge can determine what experiences we will have next.

American Museum of Natural History. (2023). Einstein: Time is Rela,ve (to Your Frame of Reference). Retrieved from American Museum of Natural History:
hVps://www.amnh.org/exhibiRons/einstein/Rme/a-maVer-of-Rme#:~:text=In%20the%20Special%20Theory%20of,on%20your%20frame%20of%20refe

 

Benthem, J. v., & MarRnez, M. (2008). The Stories of Logic and InformaRon . In D. M. Gabbay, P. Thagard, & J. Woods, Philosophy of informa,on.

 

Canva. (2023). Free Stock Photos . Retrieved from Canva: hVps://www.canva.com. Consulted 10/5/23.

 

DeBell, A. (2020). What is Observa,onal Learning? Retrieved from Water Bear Learning: hVps://waterbearlearning.com/observaRonal- learning/#:~:text=ObservaRonal%20learning%20is%20the%20process,they%20imitate% 20behaviors%20of%20adults.

 

Post-it. (2023). History Timeline: Post-it Notes . Retrieved from Post-it Brand: hVps://www.post- it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/. Consulted 10/5/23.