The Importance Of Knowledge And Effective Observation

There is little doubt that knowledge can be produced through active experiment and passive observation. But they are just two of the several ways in which humans can produce knowledge. In fact, it is accepted that there are eight ways in which knowledge can be acquired. These ways are the following ones: Sense perception, Language, Reason, Emotion, Imagination, Faith, Intuition and Memory. Occasionally, knowledge can be produced in some other way, for example by random discovery (a.k.a. serendipity), as in the case of penicillin which was discovered by chance from mold and later gave rise to a whole new category of drugs. Many scientists and philosophers have devoted their lives to researching about the functions of knowledge and how our brain …show more content…
Observations is a means to apply sense perception. By using all our senses, namely sight, sound, smell, touch and taste we come to know the environment, what happens close to us or sometimes far away. In this context, observations are a key vehicle on our road to knowledge. Although observations may frequently appear passive, they are not really passive because they constitute physical responses of our five different senses to various happenings and stimuli. When humans observe, they may appear passive but they are not, since they are responding, though they may not be acting. The final remark I wish to make here is that observation and generally sense perception is frequently linked to conception, which is an important function of reasoning, one of the eight major ways of knowing. Reasoning includes questioning, inducting, deducting, forming hypotheses, organizing experiments, thinking, imagining, conceiving and many other cognitive tasks. Needless to say, forming testable hypotheses and carrying out active experiments have been a key path to acquiring knowledge. Hence the frequent mention of experiments and their association to …show more content…
A good place to start looking at the nature of knowledge production is with the concept of Reactivity within them. The use of Participant and Non-Participant Observation methods in Psychology and Sociology gives us a lot of information about the approaches of understanding culture. Emic and Etic perspectives are crucial to the one who produces the knowledge. Emic approaches would propose that the most valid understanding can be gained by joining the culture, being within it, and have an individually internalized understanding of that culture, it could be argued that this constitutes ‘active experimentation’. Etic approaches propose that in order to develop a valid understanding a researcher needs to stand outside of the culture, therefore they will not be influenced by the cultural biases of a person within the culture. This would constitute the passive observer position within the