Thoughts, Knowledge and Actions Our thoughts play a big part in all we do; these thoughts affect what we know and this in turn creates actions, which influence everyone around us. In referring to thoughts Santosh Kalwar once said, “We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” Our thoughts determine actions, and these actions are what change and accomplish things in our life. Therefore, the only way to change our actions or anything is to change our thoughts and how we think. There are two hard questions to answer about thought, but their answers will help us to look at and understand how people act, and they are “What is thought and how does it effects people? Most people never pay much attention to the question “What is thought?” but when they do, they say; “Well it’s just thinking.” In How We Think John Dewey describes thought as, “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.” (6) This means that thinking happens when we consider any belief or piece of knowledge in according with the evidence that supports or disproves it. Most people agree knowledge is what you know. The degree of how much we know depends on how much thought is put into the subject. Galileo Galilei first described his principle of relativity, which states that the laws of motion are the same in all inertial frames, in 1632. However, in 1905, Albert Einstein took Galileo’s theory and stepped it up a notch with his theory of special relativity saying that the inertial frames of reference are relative to one another and that this theory holds for all the laws of physics In addition to this, Einstein’s theory takes gravity into account, which Galileo’s theory did not. This process is defined in the article “Models of Innovative Knowledge Communities and Three Metaphors of Learning” where Sami Paavola et al. state referring to Bereiters model of knowledge building), “In modern enterprises, knowledge is considered to consist of objects or conceptual artifacts that can be systematically produced and developed; in other words, there is a process of knowledge building, not learning.”(561) This means what we know was built from something we already did know. Einstein displayed this when he built upon Galileo’s theory by adding gravity into the equation.
History gave us a prime example of actions being determined by thoughts in the case on one Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s plan to eradicate the Jews all started with one thought. This one thought originated when he was a young man trying to make it as a painter and a Jewish painter told him he