The field of knowlege is extremely interesting to reflect upon, but at the same time extremely hard to grasp. The debate on what counts as valid knowledge in a “information-” or “knowledge-” society has been going on for some time now, and the difficulties of reaching consensus on the subject illustrates especially one highly interesting point: what should count as relevant knowledge is entirely up to us to define! There is no predefined core that we all have to rely on; we all employ different sources and kinds of knowledge in our life. The mentioned “knowledge debate” is of course primarily related to some kind of institutionalized schooling, but that is not an issue for me here. What concerns me, however, is how I can make myself able to combine different kinds of knowledge in my actual life, and enable myself in a better way to make sense of my lived-in world. I permit myself to have opinions on things I do not know very much about, but that is the beauty of not knowing very much about anything: I am not obligated to take a stand, but is able to wonder about things and play with it.
All of us, even if we don’t always give ourselves credit for it, know a lot of stuff. But I have a notion that most of what we know don’t fit with what are labeled “scientific” knowledge. We cannot always explain everything we know; when challenged we cannot always argue very well about what we do. Still, this knowledge seems to work somehow; even if our knowledge does not follow the strict rules of science, it gets us through the day. Being a researcher on educational science, this is a special interest of mine. It seems to me that “scientific” knowledge and “everyday” knowledge are fundamentally different from each other, not just because science mostly operates with theoretical [1] issues while we in everyday activity are oriented towards some practical activity, but because scientific knowledge always only will be a part of everyday activity. Science is always just a part of the world, not vice versa.
What I will try to do on this blog, then, is to employ different fields that traditionally have been established as scientific and pull them down, make them relevant for my life. But if you do this, you might say, if you deliberately take scientific knowledge out of its context and make more or less personalized stories about it, what makes this different from traditional and personal “mythical” knowledge? Maybe nothing, I would say. Why do we need everything to be “scientifically” true all the time? The text displayed on this website are not answers in the scientific sense of the word (and not in any other sense of the word either, for that matter), it is not written to be part of any debate or discussion. It is not even meant to be contested as it us, the only purpose for its existence is my need to formulate a personal understanding of things I know and things I have experienced.
What research has shown us for decades is that no scientific knowledge is fixed once and for all. There is development in almost every aspect of our life, in society and in the natural world, and what we now take for granted has been contested and argued about in earlier times. What we often see if we start to examine the history, or genesis, of different kinds of objects or procedures in our world, is that what shaped them in their development is often accidental and arbitrary. I think this is an extremely interesting point, because this means that things did not have to turn out as they did. Things can always be different than they are. For me, this represents an optimistic view on life; I think if we can understand the development and history of things, we can be able to change them. What could, or should have been, are just as interesting as what actually is. We are not stuck with anything, and that is what makes my project here meaningful: my world and my life are what I decide it to be. By scrutinising thoughts, reflections, objects, events from my own view, I can wonder about things meaningful to me, and hopefully enhance my own arguments and meanings .
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[1] Even if science often is investigating some kind of practise (at least in the social sciences), scientific activity is a practice in itself, and scientific activity is based on having a distance to the object under scrutiny. When this “scientific distance” is applied the object necessarily is transformed; it is not contextualised in the same way as it originally was, and it becomes an object under “theory”
