For me to answer your questions on knowledge, I have found that by studying the cause of creation I am able gain knowledge of the 'but why'. I have studied Walter Russell's philosophy of 'Universal Law And Natural Science', and married this to the Sermon On The mount, the teaching of Jesus. We live in a mirror imaged thought wave universe, where what we see out there is a clear reflection of our own consciousness. Our senses deceive us 100% of our true nature of who we are. My perception of what I see out there is a reflection of my consciousness, this enables me to change the way I see things, by changing the the perception of my own consciousness. Richard

People not only interpret what they sense differently but can made thenselves to interpret it differently. For example, then unhappy with something we often shift to a point of view that makes it look better. This means that it is aparently possible to see anything you want anywhere, and this is not only a big push for the teory of that "Everthing is an ilusion", but it also means that no two persons see the same thing in the same way, even if as far as our methods of communication allow they seen to do.

Im confused about what "ways of knowing" means.

Verifying obtained knowlwdge is a limited domain, in that there is no "other state" from which to question, test, experiment with what is interpreted as known.
At some point, something must be "given", "believed", established, resolved to a factum, i.e., the cognitum, verum factum (Giambattista Vico).
The whoile WOK attempt probably best serves as a means rather than an end. To search out, test and exhaust your understanding of each epistemology that you can come up with helps to narrow the ready justifications of our knowing.
Eventually, you get to something intuitive "I doubt ergo I am", "I have a tummy ache", "There's a show going on between my ears", "I am all there Is", etc. - whatever. It may lead us to know we are ONLY intuitive or TOTALLY psychotic ("Is the whole world solipsistic, or is IT, Just ME?"). Psychosis might be our evolutionary gift. What gives us our viral push during our eion on the stage. Wouldn't be the first time an advantage ran a species through its course to its end (size, slow metabolism, chemosynthesis...inventiveness to crack atoms, suck in black holes "Looky what we did now! Uh oh! Should have just left that to the ole imagination...PRETENDED I knew it Enough."
Beyond our inate inventive imaginations, where we can wax and wane inductive to deductive, we may seek verification only to stabilize our stance with some other invented monstrosity (the natural world, phenomena, scientific experiment, mathematical interpretation, codes and schemes of other intuitive flashes - religion, ESP, mysticism, extraterrestrials, ancestral memory) so that we can launch again in our next inventive leap while staying tethered to what we imagine as a precious source.
Probably no good for a mark in WOK, huh. Hopefully it's not too derivative. How were you thinking of going?

For Manored, the ways of knowing, as we have been taught in my class, are the ways in which we gain knowledge. They are: Emotion, Reason, Perception, and Language.

For Tim, the broad rode I wanted to go down was what has been mentioned of how humans can perceive according to how they want to. For instance, how people perceive body language.(vague example, not to be used in essay). You said a lot of really cool and interesting things though, and even if I don't use everything you told me, it was still very informative and enjoyable to read your input.

Our sense organs are physically finite. We can discriminate visible light, but we cannot discriminate UV or IR. Yet there is UV and IR light variably reflecting off of all surfaces we see. There are upper and lower limits to the brightness we can see. There is a limit to our resolution (eg we cannot see a bacterium with the naked eye, even though they can reflect and absorb visible light.

Same with sound -- there are upper and lower limits of both amplitude and pitch. Same with ALL our senses -- we have many forms of touch (pain / temperature, vibration, discriminative touch, position sense are all biologically separate senses). Our fingertips can tell the difference between a penny and a dime, but our armpit or back could not.

Wow, nice point, Aedes! I didn't even think of that! I am definitely going to use that after I think on it some more. Thank you!

Glad to help!

The brain does an utterly majestic job of interpretation.

Think about some of the interesting things it does. We physiologically (by this I mean as a normal part of our biology) converge our vision on a single point -- which means that despite having two eyes in different places, we only produce one image. But because of the slight difference in perspective, we interpret depth. We can get by with one eye, because other clues help us interpret depth as well (like convergence of lines, comparison to things of known size, casting of shadows over contoured surfaces, etc), but two eyes are required to truly get this visual sense of depth.

We have two types of photoreceptor cells in the eye. Rods are sensitive to low levels of light, but they're monochromatic. Cones are not as sensitive to low levels of light, but they are red, green, and blue. What this means is that as the level of light gets dimmer and dimmer, we lose our ability to discriminate color. It doesn't mean that the red apple is no longer red -- it just means that we can't discriminate its color so well.

Interesting to point out is that different animals see / hear / feel / smell differently than we do. Owls and opossums can see in the dark much better than we can. Dogs and rats can smell much better than we can. Dogs can hear high pitched frequencies that we cannot. Bats use sonar, i.e. the navigate by bouncing sound waves off of things and interpreting the echoes. Some animals, including crocodiles, may navigate using electromagnetism. Birds possibly have a neuromagnetic sense that helps them migrate.

The world itself is no different. But our consciousness only knows what the brain tells it, the brain only knows what it can interpret, and the brain can only interpret what the sense organs feed it.