I thought that Criteria for Accepting or Rejecting Claims was very helpful and useful to me. I never knew that our most reliable source of information about the world was our own personal experience. This is the section I found most interesting. I often thought this myself but I never knew that it was really a valid claim to make. The idea behind this is that all we know is one hundred percent true is our own experience. We base our whole lives around our experiences. This is how our opinions are made. As it was stated in the text, “We accept a claim if we know it is true from our own experience and we reject a claim if we know it is false from our own experience.” The problems with this are that we often do not remember what we actually experienced and only take away what we deducted from the experience. This often involves a lot of inferring.
Like you, I never thought our most reliable source was our own personal experience. I even argued against it for a bit. If a topic about Indonesia came up, I would have relied on what others were saying. I have never traveled to the country or even had an Indonesian dish so my experience is at zero. After reading about suspending judgment though, I have held off on believing what I hear until I do a little reading. I like how you mentioned that we do not remember our experiences as a whole, only a snapshot of it gets in our memory. Then we guess what else went on.
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