TOK Essay 1-There are only two ways on which humankind can produce knowledge: Through passive observation or through active experiment.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
Knowledge is something that helps us to make sense of the world around us. In other words, knowledge enables us to interpret and understand the phenomena we encounter, which explains why it acts as one of the fundamental requirements of civilization. In fact, most of the prominent leaps in civilization in the past were accompanied by prominent leaps in knowledge. For example, the invention of the steam engine kick-started The First Industrial Revolution while the discovery of electrical power led to The Second Industrial Revolution. Therefore in order to sustain the current rate of development, we have to generate knowledge based on the unknown phenomena we observed.
There are multiple ways to generate the knowledge, but the statement above classifies the construction of knowledge under two categories, which are passive observation and active experiment. Passive observation means that the observer doesn't interact with or deliberately influence the event when it is taking place, which permits the event to develop naturally. However, the nature of observation allows the observers to interpret the event based on their senses or tastes, As a way of knowing, sensory perception is not always reliable, which means that “passive observation” is still a subjective way to generate knowledge. On the other hand, active experiment is based on the scientific method, where experiments, data and variable controls play a big part during the investigation. The experiments are designed to target on specific areas of the research, and the observers might even interact with the reactions to optimize the outcomes of the investigation. Therefore, unlike the passive observation approach, this method allows the observer to manipulate the events, which enables the researchers to look at one specific field in depth. Moreover, the active experiment approach relies more on logical evidence such as data and graphs, which means that it is a more objective way to generate knowledge. However, before the society accepted the more neutral approach (which requires the existence of firm evidences) to generate the knowledge, our ancestors relied more on other WOKs (ways of knowing) such as imagination and sense perception to explain the phenomena and hence generate the knowledge. Therefore the given statement is the condensed view of knowledge generation in modern day society, but there are more ways to generate knowledge other than the two mentioned approaches.
Imagination plays a big role in Indigenous Knowledge System to explain the phenomena that cannot be explained using the existing knowledge, but the one may ask: How does imagination produce knowledge in this specific field of Areas of Knowledge? To what extent is imagination irreplaceable as a tool to generate knowledge for our ancestors? Nowadays Imagination is relatively undervalued in producing knowledge because of its irrationality; on the other hand, our ancestors exploited its irrationality to interpret the events creatively in different ways. For example, Australian Aboriginal groups created their own astronomical calendars through interpreting the sky. Advanced observation technology was not available at that time for the indigenous groups, and hence imagination became their most reliable tool to draw the meanings out of the randomly distributed stars. One popular idea among the Guringai people was the “Emu in the sky”, in which they connected a group of the stars as the representation of an Emu, a common bird that shared the territory with the Guringai people. Historians have discovered that Emu had some mythical implications in Guringai culture, it also appeared in many Guringai legends such as the story of Daramulan. Therefore in the context of Guringai culture, Emu escalated from an animal to a worshiping symbol that represented the mighty force of nature. Hence when they observed some natural phenomena that they couldn't explain, including the special arrangement of the stars in this case, they would use their imagination to establish a link between the events and the mythical objects. Imagination allowed the indigenous groups to overcome the shortage in knowledge and meant they could interpret the nature based on the shared knowledge within the group. In fact, increasingly, indigenous knowledge is being recognized as understanding the processes and relationships of the nature. Recently it has been given the term “traditional ecological knowledge” with the acknowledgement of the observation and reasoning. Usually reasoning is viewed separately from imagination due to its rational nature as a way of knowing. In this case, however, imagination provides key evidences for the reasoning process due to the limitation in logical approach; without imagination, the reasoning procedure cannot be carried out. To a certain extent, I think that imagination is the primary and original way of producing knowledge.
On the other hand, the major limitation of imagination as the way of generating knowledge is that it can sometimes become too personalized, and it is influenced by the dominant worldview the one subscribes to. Similarly to the Guringai people, the Wardaman people also gave the same junction of stars a graphic representation. However, since there was no implication of Emu in Wardaman culture, they perceived the same region of the sky as the head of the lawman. The Guringai people and the Wardaman people, in this example, possess different bodies of knowledge, specific to their surrounding environments. Therefore their interpretations of the sky are predominantly influenced by their different beliefs and experiences, which reveals imagination’s subjective and biased nature as a way of producing knowledge. Moreover, imagination does not require firm evidences or logical explanations, which means knowledge generated in this way cannot be tested, and therefore does not explicitly explain the reasons behind the phenomena, most of the time.
Passive observation is an improved version of imaginative observation because it limits the influence of irrational thinking. However, in modern days, passive observation is only the beginning of an investigation process. Active observation is required to test or improve the conclusions drawn fro the passive observation stage. Active observation requires the researchers to influence, or even manipulate the ongoing event to create different scenarios that they are targeted to investigate. However, unlike active experiment, it allows irrational behaviors from the tested samples. This is evidenced in the Area of Knowledge of Human Sciences. Most research in psychological is based on this method and the investigation of Stockholm Syndrome is an example that illustrates its application in real life. Stockholm syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken in Stockholm. During the robbery, the victims who were held as hostages became emotionally attached to their captors and even gave them assistance later on. This abnormal behavior was broadcasted live on TV and quickly engaged the attentions of the researchers. However, the actual footage and information from the crime scene was limited, which caused some differences in the researcher’s hypotheses. To test these hypotheses, the researching team decided to run a simulation which was based on the actual event. However, they had full control of the situation this time, which allowed them to take an insightful look at every individual’s behavior throughout the different stages of the incident. Some of the stages are repeated more than one time to give the researchers a more detailed look of the participants. If only the passive observation approach was applied, the researches wouldn't be able to see the situation in depth, and the occurrence of random errors would affect the conclusion of the study. Active observation gives researchers more freedom to interact, or even change the neutral situation, which helps them to investigate on the areas they intend to look at. The major drawback of the active observation is approach is that it is hard to maintain the neutrality of the event once the foreign intervention is introduced. If the isolation of the event is interrupted, the conclusion obtained from the observations can’t be applied to the actual situation. Therefore the degree of intervention in active observations is a problematic issue that prevents us from obtaining the real reasons behind a phenomenon, which directly influences the degree of accuracy of the knowledge generated from them.
Generating knowledge is a broad process that involves different fields of study. Passive observation and active experiment are the two most recognized ones due to their prominent advantages. However, other methods such as imaginative observation can also be applied to produce knowledge, and they can be more effective than the mentioned two approaches in specific areas. Hence to choose what method to apply to optimize the process really depends on the nature of knowledge we intend to generate.
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