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ESSAYONSCIENCEANDKNOWLEDGE

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AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE
Sunday Sunday Akpan
PhD Student - Finance
Putra Business School, University Putra Malaysia
Matric No.: PBS 15141083
Introduction
The words “science" and “knowledge” has been in usage for a very long time. Today, these
words have continued to dominate most discussions in academic, government and business circles
on daily basis, especially on issues that bothers on human, societal and national development. This
goes to explain, in part, how important these words are on the process of human wellbeing, societal
transformation and national development. But until now, there may have been little or no concerted
effort by users of these words to find out or attempt to understand what these words means. Now that
a new paradigm of knowledge is being championed and advanced vigourously to change the statusquo and aged-long stereotyped academic researches, teachings, business practices and governance
etiquettes that have hitherto excluded human wellbeing; these words which play a vital role in
successful implantation of the emerged paradigm, need to be properly defined for proper application.
The remaining parts of this essay focus on past researches and the etymology of science and
knowledge and the writer’s opinion on what science and knowledge are.
Science and Knowledge: Literature and Etymological Reviews
Literatures on science and knowledge are not scarce. But, most literatures are at best an
attack on how knowledge and science should be defined without actually agreeing on a common
definition. For instance, the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” by Gettier (1963) and
subsequently by Grayling (2003), Niedderer (2007) as proposition, has been criticized by Truncellito
(n.d) on account of human fallibilism, yet the most basic questions (what knowledge is) remained
unanswered. The post-positivist or foundationalism (Guba, 1990; Williams, 2001), the constructivist
or coherentism and contextualism (Williams, 2001) and common sense dictum (Floridi, 1993) are all
approaches that acknowledged difficulty in defining knowledge in the history of epistemology.
Except for Salleh and Ahmad (2008) who averred that the meaning of science depend on the period
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of science referred and went on to defined it etymologically to mean to “know” or to “understand”,
science would have suffered same definitional dilemma like knowledge. Therefore, to define
knowledge and determine how we know or understand which is what science means, it is imperative
to consider the etymology of theses word.
Etymologically, Science means to know or to understand (Salleh and Ahmad, 2008). ‘Know’
is derived from gignoskein meaning "to learn, or to come to know". And knowledge was very early
adapted to be the noun equivalent of ‘know’. It will suffice to define knowledge as that which we
have come to know or what we know. Now the question is; how do we know? Or come to know?
Science connotes how we come to know, i.e. a process of arriving at knowledge. This process can be
through sense, perception, reason, emotions, language, intuition, imagination, faith, memory and,
tradition (Musgrave, 1993). Thus, science from the beginning of time was a way of knowing or
acquiring knowledge and not about objectivity, materiality, physical, natural and empiricism which it
has come to be known in the Newtonian-Cartesian explanation of science.
Science and Knowledge: The Writer’s Opinion
Science was originally the ontological and empirical way of having knowledge. On account
that matters are not too straight forward, knowledge is anything we have come to know through
science with uncertainty and unjustification (as in tradition where absolute certainty is not required)
or with certainty and justification (as in what we can personally verify with our senses). By this,
human behavior need not be explained only from purely empirical but also ontological way, as doing
so will only lead to incomplete knowledge of real life events. The basis of my opinion is not only on
etymology (as they are not definition but explanation of words; Harper, 2015) and dictionaries (as
they are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages/words they define; Cortinez,
1986) but on the innate sensory capabilities that are supported by etymological evidences and
personal convictions. In summary, knowledge- what we know can be anything and science- how we
know, can also be anyhow. This, I think defiles any specific definition which may impose a limit to
knowledge and science.
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References
Cortinez, C. (1986). Borges: The Poet According to His Proloques. Fayetteville: The University of
Arkansas Press
Floridi, L. (1993). The Problem of the Justification of a Theory of Knowledge. Journal of General
Philosophy of Science, 24: 205-233
Gettier, E. (1963). "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis, 23: 121-123
Grayling, A. C. (2003). Epistemology. In N. Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell
Companion to Philosophy. (37-60). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing
Guba, E. (1990). The Paradigm Dialog. London: Sage.
Harper, D. (2015), Etymology. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved October 03, 2015, from
Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/know
Musgrave, A. (1993). Common Sense, Science and Scepticism: A historical introduction to the
theory of Knowledge. NY: University Press
Niedderer, K. (2007). Mapping the Meaning of Knowledge in Design Research. Design Research
Quarterly, 2: 2 (April 2007). Retrieved Oct 3, 2015 from: http://www.drsq.org/issues/drq2-2.
Salleh, A. and Ahmad, A. (2008). Human Governance: A paradigm Shift in Governing
Corporations. Selangor, MY: MPH Group Publishing Sdn Bhd.: 12-17.
Truncellito. D. A (n.d). Epistemology. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Retrieved October
03 2015 from http://www.iep.utm.edu/epistemo
Williams, M. (2001). Problems of Knowledge: a critical introduction to epistemology. Oxford
University Press.
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