How Do We Really Know Things?

Critical Thinking: Ages 12+ Read A− A+ how do we know? How Do We Really Know Things? The Four Sources of Knowledge Every single thing you believe came from somewhere. Let's become knowledge detectives and find out where! When someone tells you something — "sharks never sleep," "your cousin got a new puppy," "it's going to rain tomorrow" — have you ever asked yourself: how do they know that? It turns out almost everything we know comes from just four places . Let's meet them. 👀 Observation 🧪 Experience 📚 Accounts 🧠 Inference 👀 1. Observation Observing means noticing something with your senses — seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, or tasting — without it happening to you . Example: You look out the window and see that it is raining. You didn't feel the rain — you just watched it. That's an observation. 🧪 2. Experience & Experiments Experience is different — it happens to you or because of you . An experiment is when you test something on purpose to …