Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Epistemology of Knowing the Other
Deborah Court, Randa Khair Abbas
ABSTRACT:
Epistemology underlies everything we do. Research methods and methods of data analysis, the planning of school and higher education curricula, the evaluation of students’ learning, and even the numerous stories, presented as factual, that appear every day in news media: all of these are underlain by assumptions about what knowledge is, and how knowledge can be discovered, verified and advanced. Knowledge, of course is not just facts. In Michael Polanyi’s brilliant exposition, Personal Knowledge (1958, 1962), he shows how facts, values and experience are intertwined in the ways persons know. The knower is inseparable from that which is known. In this presentation we will ask a relatively unexplored epistemological question, what does it mean to know another person? “I know Mr. Smith,” we can easily say, “He works in my office.” This kind of knowing is acquaintance, familiarity, neither deep nor particularly meaningful. There is a proverb in Arabic that teaches that as long as one has not shared a meaningful personal experience with another, then one does not know him. In this age of the migration of peoples, of multicultural populations, of interpersonal and intercultural dissonance, it is incumbent upon us to explore the kind of personal knowledge that means the knowing by one person of another. This should be a cornerstone of work to advance multiculturalism.
keywords: epistemology, knowledge, multiculturalism, other, personal