Open AccessON CRITICAL THINKING AND MODERN LIMITS TO HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
Author(s) -
Daniela Şorcaru,
AUTHOR_ID
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international multidisciplinary scientific conference on the dialogue between sciences and arts, religion and education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2601-8403
pISSN - 2601-839X
DOI - 10.26520/mcdsare.2021.5.90-98
Subject(s) - critical thinking , epistemology , psychology , engineering ethics , philosophy , engineering
: We are currently living in a world literally flooded with all types of information, and people have ended up dealing with various kinds of limitations to how much they can or choose to know. We can, thus, identify modern limits to human knowledge falling under (at least) two large categories: either limitations imposed by others (such as authorities, mass media, bosses or leaders, etc), or what we may call self-imposed limitations, i.e. choosing to disregard some information or another, refusing to keep up to date with a state of facts, rejecting scientifically proved data, etc. We are actually talking about outer manipulation (in option A above), or inner manipulation, if we may call it as such, namely the protection of personal comfort even over irrefutable evidence (in option B above). “Ignorance is bliss” (The Matrix, 1999), right? At least for some people. Yet, in this intricate matrix of human knowledge some of us are plagued with an incurable disease: critical thinking. A genuine bogeyman of any authoritarian system or regime, critical thinking is responsible for many glitches in this matrix, always at war against any sort of limitations imposed on human knowledge and rationale. We need to keep critical thinking alive and encourage it, and, in this process, identify the decisive vectors capable of disseminating the concept and its value, as well as its applications in everyday life.