| | I have been thinking about writing about this for a while, but since
I’m busy with GRE and my classes, I didn’t really actually write
anything about how I feel about the notion of “knowledge.”
By
definition, (in which I extracted it from dictionary.com), knowledge is
“acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or
investigation; general erudition.”
OK, so first of all,
knowledge has to be facts. So, what is fact? “A truth known by actual
experience or observation.” All right. No wonder science has been so
valuable to our society. Because it presents FACTS! Right? What a big
word.
We, as people in the society, tend to think that “big”
science is hard rock and it’s SO true that it can’t be changed.
However, little do people know how most sciences work and how some
“facts” in the past became invalid and inaccurate as time goes by.
Oh,
I don’t have time to go through all these but let’s look at how
sciences work first. A lot of people think that Newton was THE ONE
genius who CREATED the laws of motion. (Well, I’m not saying he wasn’t
a genius. He was!) Yet, it’s very important to note that way before he
published all these theories, there were other mathematicians working
on similar issues, providing a base for Newton to work further on it.
After all, science isn’t magic. It is an accumulation of works.
And
it’s important to know that science works its way through experiments.
Experiments include first of all creating of a hypothesis and
attempting to prove it through tests. And who conduct those tests? Yes.
Humans. As scientists are also humans, it is very likely that there
will be errors occurred.
One of the examples is how estrogens,
a kind of medicine women take to regulate their menstrual cycle, were
claimed by scientists to have the function of reducing risk of heart
attack few decades ago. Ten years ago, some OTHER scientists said it
was a totally wrong concept. Instead of lowering the risk, it raises
its risk. Now other scientists said it doesn’t have anything to do with
heart attack.
I wrote about this because a lot of people in
the public tend to trust science so religiously that they’ve never put
a skeptic mind on things that scientists said. And yeah, not only our
society has a hierarchy of class, gender, and who knows what, but also
a HIERARCHY OF KNOWLEDGE.
Some types of knowledge are generally
considered to be more VALUABLE than others. For example, what a
physical scientist said is more credible than what social scientist
said. Oh and hey! It’s more NEWSWORTHY to quote a medical doctor about
a certain kind of disease than to quote a sociologist about a social
problem. Because you know what? Medicine is BIG SCIENCE! It’s constant.
And it’s the TRUTH.
Our society has long been giving
less-than-needed attention to certain branches of knowledge, especially
if it is related to humanity and social science. Now, is it only
because we social scientists can’t give you guys a formula and
therefore, no one will think what we study is also science?
Come
on. Don’t be silly. We do experiments just like any other scientists
do. And if you think physical science is veracious; you gotta know
social science works just like any other sciences.
And I feel
almost morose. If our society put knowledge into a hierarchy, then
human knowledge is forever limited because then some branches of
knowledge will never be able to expand the way they should.
Period.
*Sorry
if I don’t explain myself clearly. I could have written a really long
paper just on this topic but this is really for my personal interest
ONLY, so please try to live with this. Oh and yeah, please respect
sociologists!
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| | Posted 10/2/2007 1:09 PM - 82 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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