ou yang 's talk on 18th may 2008

Penang, 18 may 2008 - Ou yang wen feng, the veteran writer and also theologist, is having his talk titled " how do you know that you know?" in Han Chiang College. It is a very pondering and interesting topic lead to the people's interest in getting on to know more.

Ou yang started his talk by wondering the people on what is knowledge and what do you really know and how do u know that you know? There are alot of interesting example given, like : how do you know the speaker is ou yang wen feng and not kok liong? how do u noe it is true or not?

In the aspect of philosophy, the 3 qualities of truthfulness, beliefs and justification are to shown that wheter you really know something or not.

For example, truthfulness- the capital of malaysia: if you say you know and tell that the capital of malaysia is Penang, then it is not the truth and that shown that u dont really know. On the other hand, if u tell that KL is the capital of Msia, then, you shown that you know it because it is the truth.

Belief- if you say that you know something may be true but u do not actually believe, that means that you are not actually knowing whats going on because you are unsure of it. For example, you said that ou yang is tonite speaker but u dont actually believe it.. then..how do u think? meaning that you dont really know who is the speaker rite?

Justification- If someone said that Lim Guan Eng will be the CM of Penang b4 the election, and he did really won the election, but when asked, the person may not give an explicit reason on how u get to know it or may be by giving reason like: i dreamt bout it or i guess or any other inexplicit reason. Then, do you still think that the person actually knows it or he got it right just by luck?

Basically, people tend to believe what they know is truth under the power of the authority. People tend to believe the sayings of the authorities especially in religion and political aspects because their power overwhelming the people and are not to be questioned.

There are possible that we know what we know and also possibility in not to know what we actually know. And sometimes we think that we know, but we do not actually know. Very pondering rite? That's the evolve points of the topic.

Ou yang also gave a very fun example that saying we actually do not know what is being the truth as we may just having a dream together that we are having the talk and meet in the dream, or we are actually all in the laboraty where under certain experiment... we may not know as the situation tend to be so real..

so, we easily lost ourselves in wondering what is the truth that we really know..
or we do not know?

Do you understand?

dedicated to my fren,
kar ying ( i think u may wish to attend also rite? so here to share wit u as u cant make it to attend the talk ;p)