Man has long been concerned to come to grips with his environment, and to understand the nature of the phenomena it presents to his senses. The means by which he sets out to reach these ends may be classified into three broad categories: personal experience, reasoning and research.
1/ Experience: Does itself subsume a number
of sources of information that may be called upon in a problem-solving
situation. The first source of experience is the one know to all people, a
person may thus draw upon his own individually accumulated knowledge and skills
derived from different encounters and acquaintances with facts and events of
his environment. For example, a child repairs a puncture in a bicycle inner
tube speedily and efficiently because he has done it several times previously;
an adult anticipates the problems and difficulties of buying a house because he
has gone through the procedures before. Beyond the corpus of this personal
knowledge, a person may seek the use of a wider or different experience of
others. Often, this is related to people in one's immediate circle; a child
turns to his parents or teachers, an adult consults a friend or a colleague. If
this fails, a person may search out answers beyond his immediate circle to
other sources which we may designate as "authoritative". This may
include recognized experts in particular fields. For example, a leader or a
figurehead as in a religious community.
So, in our endeavors to come to terms with
day-to-day problems, we are heavily dependent upon experience and authority;
which should not be underestimated in any sphere of research because they
provide us with a richly fertile source of questions and hypotheses about the
world through it must be remembered that personal experience is a form of
"common-sense knowledge" and thus has its own limitations. For
instance, the layman's knowledge or consideration to knowledge is based on a
loose and uncritical manner while the scientist's view is based on a more careful
and systematic study. Whatever, the hypotheses he formulates, he has to test
them empirically. The layman generally makes no attempt to control any
extraneous source of influence when trying to explain an occurrence. The
scientist, on the other hand, is conscious about the causes for a given
occurrence and resorts to different procedures to isolate and test the effect
of one or more of the alleged causes. Finally, there is a difference of
attitude to relationships among phenomena. The layman's concern with these
relationships is loose, unsystematic and uncontrolled. The chance of occurrence
of two events in close proximity is sufficient for him to predicate a causal
link between them. The scientist however displays a much more professional
concern with relationships; and it is only as a result of rigorous
experimentation that he will postulate a relationship between two phenomena.
2/ Reasoning: The second category by means
of which man attempts to comprehend the world around him is
"reasoning". It consists of three types: deductive reasoning,
inductive reasoning and the inductive-deductive approach. Deductive reasoning
is based on the syllogism which consists of a major premise based on a priori
or self-evident proposition, a minor premise providing a particular instance,
and a conclusion, thus:
All planets orbit the sun:
The earth is a planet;
Therefore the earth orbits the sun.
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