Theory of Knowledge Sample Essay

1484 Words6 Pages
Theory of Knowledge Essay Subject: Theory of Knowledge Name: Boyan Dinev Session: May 2013 In what ways may disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural and human sciences? Theory of Knowledge Essay Disagreement and knowledge are almost always connected with each other, as gaining new knowledge for the world goes through a lot or research and proving or discarding many theses. The disagreements on a scientific issue can occur on many levels – there may be and argument on the way the experiment was conducted, scientists might disagree on the certain thesis for a given problem, they might discard a thesis because the evidence is insufficient or even if there is absolute lack of such. Scientists may also question the logic their colleague used to obtain the new knowledge. There is another level, though, at which disagreement may occur – scientists might not have arguments to the methodology, that new knowledge might occur, but might have something against the person that found the new knowledge. This type of disagreement would not help forward science, but can, in fact, slow it down. Still, just the fact that different scientists have different points of view and different rationalization of the factual knowledge, which creates arguments between them, cannot prove with certainty that these arguments can push the natural and human sciences to the next level, where new knowledge is gained. Thus the main ways of knowing involved in this topic are reason and perception. Reason is the ability of the mind to store knowledge and facts, to rationalize these facts and thus use them in reasoning on a specific topic. The reasonable argument always has facts to support it. An example of an event which helped the pursuit of knowledge in the area of Biology is Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species, and in particular the origin of humans. In his
Open Document