Knowledge Through Passive Observation

Title 2: 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?
Knowledge is an amalgamation of facts, skills, and beliefs. The title appears to imply that there are only two methods of producing knowledge: through passive observation or active experimentation. Passive observation is when the observer makes no impact on the knowledge produced; thereby generating information unintentionally. Active experimentation is when an observer is able to manipulate and determine the outcome of what they are studying; thus it is the knowing analysation of knowledge. I agree with the title statement, and believe that at the root of knowledge

At the core of everyday personal knowledge generation, we as humans are like experimenters and use active experimentation to generate personal knowledge all the time, albeit unintentionally. sensory stimuli gained through passive observationare decoded in the brain to produce unintentional knowledge of observations of a knower’s surroundings, which include basic information such as colours and presence of objects. The sensory information gained are treated as variables, and according to Psychology, the knower actively manipulates primary sensory observations by analysing them in context of previously learnt knowledge known as schemas using reason and logic to produce further inferences and detailed knowledge from the sensory stimuli through subconscious use of active experimentation. This process is the primary basis of the attribution theory in psychology, which states that humans want to understand why people perform actions and use previous knowledge to attribute reasons to their actions. Interestingly, I have realised that this method of attribution and gaining new knowledge about others is an integral part of what I do to understand others. Before I met my maths teacher in eight grade, I was bombarded about his infamously strict personality from fellow peers. When I first met him, his gaze seemed to

When I was undergoing puberty, as a normal teen, at one point I began to feel different towards girls my age. I felt more attracted towards them, and a foreign fluttering feeling occurred in my gut as I observed them. Although my attraction towards girls is produced through my genetics, it is still important to consider how this attraction is able to manifest itself. The genes determining sexuality are only able to manifest themselves as feelings from hormones when observation of external stimuli occurs, namely by looking at women, and intake of pheromones released by them through my olfactory organs. When this passive observation is deduced by the brain, it activates the genetics responsible for creating a hormonal rush, and thus result in the feelings of attractiveness. These feelings of attractiveness were then analysed by my pubescent brain and put into context with previous knowledge gathered from peers about attraction to come to the conclusion that the feelings I felt are attraction to girls. This shows that although the personal knowledge of sexuality is present in my genetics, discovering my sexuality which produced my personal knowledge of sexuality was through the process of active experimentation and passive