Do you see what I see?

After reading the Fixation of Belief, several thoughts ran through my mind.
First, one argument that is made is that if someone beleives something, and someone else does not, who gets to say who is right and who is wrong. Now this seems like an easy answer, just look at both point of views and see which one has facts backing it up. This is where the problem comes in. Now who is to say, that the facts supporting one's argument are correct, because the other person might not believe in those facts but believe in ideas which he believes to be facts that support his argument.
Second, if one person believes that he is always rights, should he not think that any other person could be always right based on their beliefs. I think point trying to be made is that there is no such thing as fact, there is always a variable that could change an outcome. Facts are what the individual believe them to be, but there are also facts which are believed by the majority which makes others assume they are true.
This leads to the next point, so if every person had their own beliefs, people would probably be in a constant state of war with each other to decide who ultimately has the right befiefs, but this war can never be won. So even though there are multiple people that believe in the same logic of ideas(even millions of people) there are still those who will oppose those ideas with their own.

These ideas seem to make everything way more complicated than they need to be but if people did not challenge these ideas then we would never learn anything new, or different approaches to different problems or situations.

Steven Lippman

Some insight on several of the readings dealing with Americans not knowing information about American History and science deals with "American Exceptionalism" which is a term that describes how Americans see themselves as superior to other cultures. I think because we have so much technology which expands our range of objects and activities, it does not allow us to concentrate and study the fundamental subjects in which our country and lives are based on. I also think that another reason for the low scores on basic tests deals with the fact that we learn some of this information once maybe twice throughout our school career. I cannot remember the last time I had enough free time to sit down and just look over the constitution. Plus there are many other activities that I would rather be doing, or things that provide more satisfaction. One more reason that people do not score well on these subjects, is because these two areas (Science and Civil Knowledge) and specialized subjects. There are people that are payed to be experts in these fields, so if I am not getting paid to study science ( and I believe science to be one of the worst subjects on the entire planet) then why would I want to waste my time learning about something I really do not care about. I would much rather spend my time learning about a subject I am interested in.

Steven Lippman