Knowledge Construction Quotes

Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.

Facts themselves do not give knowledge

Knowledge signifies things known. Where there are no things known, there is no knowledge. Where there are no things to be known, there can be no knowledge. We have observed that every science, that is, every branch of knowledge, is compounded of certain facts, of which our sensations furnish the evidence. Where no such evidence is supplied, we are without data; we are without first premises; and when, without these, we attempt to build up a science, we do as those who raise edifices without foundations. And what do such builders construct? Castles in the air.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.

In reference to right answers - Knowing is a process, not a product.

Well, part of it is a longstanding belief - it's been in our education establishment at least since the 1930s - that somehow children should be allowed to discover knowledge for themselves, that they should construct their own knowledge. This has surfaced most recently in connection with mathematics instruction, where the idea is that they need to discover how to add for themselves. Rather than being taught how to add, they should construct this knowledge on their own.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.

Coining a term is not the same as creating a field!

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.

And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer.