There is No Reason We Cannot Link Facts and Theories across Disciplines and Create a Common Groundwork of Explanation
Introduction
For long, there has been a conventional conception that there is ‘no reason we cannot link facts and theories across disciplines and create a common groundwork for explanation.’ The implication of this statement is that there should be no impediment to making the already presumed ‘common’ knowledge more common. For advanced, high-level thinking to be a teachable skill available to all, regardless of culture, language, or economic standing. While the concept being referred to in this statement certainly sounds like an ideal state of being, it may also be a sweeping generalization of what is a more complex issue.
Despite the fact that people might ask the person responsible for the factor is possible, it is easier to make statements than to conduct actions that the statement implies. The general nature of the statement in question fails to emphasize whether or not it is referring to the academic subjects. It is also difficult to determine whether it can cross over to find common ground among any school of thought, including those that seem to be in eternal conflict.
There are various schools of thought and areas of knowledge that discuss the theory of knowledge. These areas of knowledge include science and religion, human and natural science. Science and religion serve as a prime example of two areas of knowledge with differing opinions. In the concept of science, discussions are restricted to educational, academic or scholarly matters. On the other hand, religion can be left out entirely if the discussion bases on the scholarly matters. However, the counter-argument for this claim is that religious issues and religion can be looked at from a scholarly point of view in many fields such as theology.
In human science, the human kind has always been searching for explanations for all phenomena they have encountered and formerly found solace in spirituality and abstract theories about the nature of the universe. The idea of keeping a log, or a synthesis of all acquired human knowledge began when humankind began to develop various systems of writing. The concept of the library was most likely born out of this desire to house all the major works of civilization.
As one looks at the process under which human society develops its ideas and begins to keep track of them, it would seem that the human race has always had the desire to not only seek new explanations or additions to old ones, but to be able to refer to them later on, to share ideas between specialists of different fields and through this collaboration, we would advance beyond the boundaries of the hunting and gathering lifestyle.
The counter claim for the conception of human race is that to this day, it remains beneficial to be able to collaborate with fellow specialists and when such collaboration occurs, it seems that humanity has no limits to how high it can ascend in terms of education, technology, and even future evolution. Moreover, it is possible to link facts and theories across disciplines for the bests of all human knowledge because this kind of collaboration links human science and natural science to innovation and social evolution. In explaining the human science, arts and music are elemental in the presentation of the correlation between facts and theories.
Discussion
This discussion presents the arguments for the claim that there is a distinct relationship between facts and theories in explaining a common groundwork of explanation across various disciplines. In this context, there is a relationship between the facts and theories of human and natural science (Chisholm11). For instance, in human science, the relationship between the facts and theories of religion, art or music relate to the concepts of natural science such as technology or innovations.
Religion was also born out of the same concept of simply coming up with explanations for life on earth. However, when doubt became commonplace and the desire for understanding remained, people began to seek another means of acquiring information; this time through processes of trial and error, which can help to explain how things came into being.
For the natural sciences, once science became the next big concept on humanity’s mind, the sky was the limit as far as how much we humans could potentially discover and comprehend. Before long, the concept of knowledge became more than just oral traditions being passed down from generation to generation, and soon started to become an awareness of any number of subjects which can help us gain an understanding of the physical and metaphysical reality we live in. Today, it seems as though humankind is unstoppable and that it very well could stand the test of time and outlive the earth itself.
The point to take away from this is none of our accomplishments to date and for all time will have ever been possible without the sharing of interdisciplinary knowledge as described. Without such distribution of knowledge, there would be no education, and each would have to make all the discoveries of humanity alone.
For the natural and human sciences, it could easily be argued that today’s online encyclopedia trend may be an example of the closest thing humanity has to all current human knowledge, and could therefore be no temporary trend at all. While such online encyclopedias as Wikipedia are heavily criticized as being unfit as a scholarly resource because anyone can edit them, it should be noted that all postings on a wiki page are required to have reliable sources to back up their claims, just as in any academic paper. What is impressive is not only the amount of knowledge that has been gathered by online encyclopedias over the past few years, but the astonishing collection of journals, books and articles which one can find in any wiki page’s bibliography.
The majority of all human knowledge can be found and read by anyone in almost every spoken language on earth. If anything at all is unclear in the articles themselves, one can simply follow embedded links in key words to other pages, which can help shed light and therefore gain a deeper understanding of the topic being described (Hamlyn 13). In other words, virtually anyone from any discipline can discretely learn about topics that are unrelated to their specialty. Therefore, the concept is that having the open sources for information like Wikipedia means that the information originates from various areas of knowledge. That is; it is easy to draw comparisons while explaining the relationship between facts and theories on common disciplines in society.
Conclusion
The concept in question goes by another name as well: consilience. Consilience is the idea that, not only is it possible to merge all seemingly unrelated disciplines into one consensus encompassing all of human knowledge, but that when one seeks the same conclusion found in one scientific discipline through a seemingly unrelated field, the results should be the same, in theory. For instance, if one can prove the scientific properties of one particular elementary particle through empiric data collected through experiments, the conclusions drawn from these findings should also be provable through, say, mathematics alone, in addition to what had already been done. It is true of many fields; physics, for example, is a science, but it is heavily reliant on high-end mathematics in order to draw conclusions from any field or laboratory research.
Nevertheless, since math and physics go hand in hand, does this mean that they cannot operate independently of each other? It is difficult to say, but it is does serve as an example of a combined discipline since any good mathematician could get a good handle on physics with enough time and effort, while the reverse is certainly true of physicists (Parkinson 23). It should not matter what methods are used to measure the physical dimensions of an object. Whether it be through laser point measurements, photo imaging or simple measuring tape, all three practices have merit and are known to be accurate if used properly.
Works Cited
Chisholm, Roderick M. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 2008. Print.
Gulley, Norman. Plato's Theory of Knowledge. London: Methuen, 2006. Print.
Hamlyn, D W. The Theory of Knowledge. Garden City: Anchor Books, 2010. Print.
Parkinson, G H. R. Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Print.
