Descriptive Knowledge - Acquiring Knowledge

Acquiring Knowledge

People have used many methods to try to gain knowledge.

  1. By reason and logic (perhaps in cooperation with others, using logical argument).
  2. By mathematical proof.
  3. By the scientific method.
  4. By the trial and error method.
  5. By applying an algorithm.
  6. By learning from experience.
  7. By intuition (getting them from the subconscious).
  8. By an argument from authority, which could be from religious, literary, political, philosophical or scientific authorities.
  9. By listening to the testimony of witnesses.
  10. By observing the world in its "natural state"; seeing how the world operates without performing any experiments.
  11. By acquiring knowledge that is embedded in one's language, culture, or traditions.
  12. By dialogical enquiry (conversation). See Gadamer, Bohm, Habermas, Freire, on dialogue, learning and knowledge acquisition/negotiation: http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-dialog.htm
  13. By some claimed form of enlightenment following a period of meditation. (For example, the Buddhist enlightenment known as bodhi)
  14. By some claimed form of divine illumination, prayer or revelation from a divine agency.

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Famous quotes containing the words acquiring knowledge, acquiring and/or knowledge:

    “There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”
    —Denis Diderot (1713–1784)

    “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “All knowledge is ambiguous.”
    —J.S. Habgood (b. 1927)