I wish my signature was as cool as Columbus's

Ok, so for the most part, Columbus’s way of knowing was through what he was told, what he read in the bible, and assumptions that he made about things that he saw for himself. For the most part what we know comes from what we are told, the bible, and assumptions that we make about things we see ourselves. Most people, both in the presence and the past, don’t base their knowledge on scientific knowledge that they have gathered on their own, but rather on things that people have told them. Therefore, I don’t think that our way of knowing is any better. The difference is our technology available. We have new technology available so we base our knowledge on the things that science tells us. In the past, they also based things on what science told them, but they didn’t have the same scientific knowledge that we have today. To answer the question, I ultimately think that our way is not better than Columbus’s way of knowing because we use the same methodology. We base what we believe in on science and things that can be reasoned through logically, and so did Columbus. His chain of thought that lead him to believe that Central America had gold correlated with the common beliefs of the time. Now, due to technology, we don’t believe that to be true. However, some beliefs that we have now are just as likely to be disproven in the future. Also, in class we talked a lot about how Columbus saw things as he thought they should be rather than how they actually were. While this may not be the ‘right’ way of thinking, we still do that today. Stereotypes are one example of this. We assume things about people to make sense of things that we are not personally familiar with. It makes the foreign thing seem more manageable. This is the same thing Columbus did with the mermaid. He used the only knowledge that he had of something to make sense of what was completely foreign. Although he was not actually seeing a mermaid, it was the only thing he could conceive. While technology can change, our basic thought process and way of knowing stays the same, and therefore our way of knowing cannot be any better or worse than it was during the time of Columbus.