VERSUS 
Chosen PTE: “There are only two ways in which
humankind can produce knowledge: through passive observation or through active
experiment.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
MY chosen PTE was chosen because it is an interesting
concept to explore in my opinion. We, as humans, rely heavily on knowledge and
the acquiring of knowledge, but what this question is asking is asking is to
explore the idea that there are only two ways of acquiring knowledge: through
observation and experimentation. My initial approach to this was to investigate
whether there actually was more than two ways of producing knowledge. But this
did not help much because as I was exploring the internet I wondered, what is
defined as knowledge? Is it the ability to be able to know lots of information
about a single thing? There is a general idea which is shared across many
cultures that with age comes knowledge. The core idea of this statement though
is that older people have had more experiences than those of a younger
individual. That would mean that knowledge could also be gained through
experiential knowledge. Some ways of
knowing that I chose to discuss in my essay also include Reason, Faith, Memory
and sense perception. The reason for these chosen WOK’s are because of the
different methods that people acquire knowledge or claim to knowledgeable
because. Like I discussed before, memory
fits into the experiential knowledge as individuals who have had more experiences
have more memories of certain problems or solutions. Reason is also another
way, in my opinion, of acquiring knowledge without the use of experimentation
or observation. If we recall the time in TOK class when we were learning about
logical deductive reasoning, we are able to come to logical conclusions that
make sense, by relating two different statements together. Ex. “I am a human
being” “human beings are mortal” “therefore I am mortal”. The final deduced
statement is true and makes perfect sense to anyone. Probably the most
controversial of them all though is faith. Faith relies heavily on simply
believing something to be true without needing solid evidence. People believe
in God although there is no direct evidence that he is real, but because of
their faith, they “know” he is real. To conclude this blog post I would like to
pose some questions on the topic of my PTE.
Are there any more ways of acquiring knowledge as opposed to
passive observation and active experimentation?
How do we know that what we “observe” or “experiment” is
actually the truth, and not something that happens because of our interest?
I don't know if I completely agree that both Reason and Faith are other ways of producing knowledge, however one that I would suggest is Intuition. Intuition is a fairly interesting topic in this context as it is more of a "gut" feeling, from the TOK website, it is "the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning". It can definitely be argued that our own instincts are influenced by our past observations and experimentations but then again, so can any other Way of Knowledge.
ReplyDeleteYou have a good approach to this question, especially in the need to define "production of knowledge" but also in thinking about what other ways we could produce knowledge. You also need to define "passive observation" and "active experiment." I would narrow down your WoKs so you can really dig in, rather than just looking at them on the surface level (4 is too many).
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