There are only two ways in which humankind can produce knowledge Essay

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 - Essay Example I will take passive observation to mean knowledge acquired through discovery but in which the knower do not influence the phenomenon they are studying. Active experimentation is whereby the knower participates in creating or producing knowledge. The title presupposes that humankind can only discover or create knowledge. I am going to argue that there are different approaches to produce knowledge in addition to passive observation and active experimentation as evidenced by the various areas of knowledge and ways of knowing. In order to understand whether we discover or create knowledge and whether there are other ways of producing knowledge, first we need to understand what knowledge is. Lagemaat (2015, 23) defines knowledge as â€Å"justified true belief† (Lagemaat, 2015, 23). From this definition, arise three concepts that need explaining: truth, belief and justification. Truth is what distinguishes knowledge from belief. People hold many beliefs depending on their cultures some of which are superstitious hence not everything that people believe is knowledge. For example, the Greeks believed in myths such as odyssey to explain extraordinary events such as earthquakes. Such beliefs even if the Greeks considered them true cannot be true and as such are not knowledge. For it to be considered as knowledge what one claims to know must be true otherwise, it may be true or false. Since we cannot be 100 percent sure that what we know is true, a degree of certainty is acceptable hence something is true beyond reasonable doubt (Stuart, 2000). Belief is to believe what you claim to know as true is true (Stuart, 2000). It is having confidence or strong conviction that what you claim to know is true. For example, if you hold the truth that telling lies is wrong, then you should have the conviction to say that you know that it is true. For Lagemaat, belief and knowledge lay in a continuum ranging from the impossible to certainty hence there is