Doubts are something important in describing and finding out the secrets of natural phenomena, even though some of them are not right or do not describe the real problem or solution but they also help in concluding the real true description of natural facts. As I mentioned before doubt can benefit us to reach knowledge in different areas of knowledge, so does it play an important role in history?
History is defined “as the science of the human past or even the past life of all creatures living or lived on this planet”, so it is the connection between our ancestors, and the present generations. it is the way where we can know what happened in the past, that lead us to what and where we are now, it illustrates the major events occurred during a period of time like an evolution, war and the peace agreements between countries.
Doubts about discovering United States of America, researchers said that the Australians were the first people who stepped into America, others said Indians existed before Australians, but on the other hand when Christopher Columbus discovered America and found that the Indians were there he concluded that his doubt was right about America, over here doubts and testing them was really helpful and showed who were the Indigenous of America.
Furthermore, a lot of doubts were published about the death of the German commander Hitler, some say that he shot his wife then killed himself, others say that he poisoned himself then his wife killed herself, others say that his consultant killed them both, but after researches and investigate the accident, researchers found that what is true from all these doubts was that he poisoned himself then shot himself and his wife where sitting dead next to him also poisoned, these different doubts helped in investigating his death and also let all who were supporting him know the way he killed himself so they all know the whole truth about the leader who they cared about. So history shows a good relationship between doubt and justification of historical facts and events to know who were in America when it was discovered, and how did Hitler died after assigning different doubts, then search for evidence to illustrate one of doubts as the true doubt to gain more knowledge about historical events.
Another area of knowledge can be proven by doubt, and it is modified by using these doubts about its rules and statements, is mathematics which is “the study of shape structure and quantity, also seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures, furthermore seek for new statements from known definitions through deduction”. As we can conclude from the definition, the truth of mathematics rules is based on deduction which involves trial and error and modifying these doubts to find the most appropriate chosen definitions. Therefore, mathematics rules we have today is the result of a hard work by mathematicians to find the best proof to rules and statements. “Mathematics seems to be an island of certainty in a vast ocean of doubt” (lagemaat, 188), but ancient mathematicians who had doubts about everything in mathematics, they experiment these doubts and by time they reduce the amount of it, to conclude one true fact about a rule.
Furthermore, there is a large major in mathematics which is induction, it is all based on doubts, first we assume that the series or the equation given is true for n=k, then n=k+1, and so on to find the most appropriate rule to solve for the equation given. I have been through a time when I heard about the IB program, so I investigate about it is objectives and differences from the regular education programs, and doubted if it will benefit me and if is it good for my academic progress, or is it only another academic program, but when I test it by becoming an IB candidate, I can recognize that it opened new horizons for me and let me earn better education and extended sciences, also learn new skills, doubt has helped me in the reasoning process of why the IB program is good for me.
As a conclusion, the Persian proverb is true for different areas of knowledge, and we obtain this knowledge in history, mathematics and natural science by doubting things, then investigating the trueness of these doubts to find the appropriate valid one, doubt is important because if there was no doubts in natural science, then scientists will not need to do researches about a specific statement or phenomena to conclude the doubt which is true for this phenomena, also historians search for the trueness of an event occurred in ancient periods of time and come closer to the truth so we all know our true history, because at the end predicting doubts force us to investigate and search more for sufficient evidences to find the truth.
Word count: 1592 References: 1-Ways of knowing, Michael Woolman, second edition. 2-Theory of knowledge, Richard Van De Lagamaat, Cambridge book.
