Balances between Personal and Shared Knowledge

"A balance between shared and personal knowledge is extremely important in the quest for truth (Oxford, p.38)"

In my opinion, I believe that this TOK nugget is stating that balancing personal and shared knowledge is important as you can discover and use one another's knowledge to understand your surroundings. The surroundings can relate to real-life examples. For example, when people believed that the world was flat, there were many people who had doubts about this theory, thus they made their own knowledge claim, believing that the world was round. Shared knowledge is the base of knowledge, meaning that personal knowledge came from your own opinions based on shared knowledge. In other words, shared knowledge is the base of knowledge as you create a personal knowledge claim to understand and unravel the theories that you believe are irrelevant or doesn't fit in. You can say that Personal Knowledge can also be the "filter", meaning that you can use your personal knowledge to filter out all of the knowledge that you feel that has a different theory. Using your personal knowledge, it would be considered using your intuition or back up your theories based on personal experiences. Although this statement is referring to the fact that you need both personal and shared knowledge to be idealistic and truthful, as you cannot have your theories be considered the truth. For example in Psychology, you have specific areas in your book that illustrates all the facts and information need for the course, although how do you know what they're saying it true? A psychologist has in fact used their theories and investigated them through specific studies. You can see that the they have linked their personal knowledge with shared knowledge as there are many trials based on the same idea that each individual psychologist has studied.