How We Gain Knowledge

Karl Popper on How We Gain Knowledge:

––Karl Popper: "People think, usually, that we acquire knowledge by opening our eyes and our ears and let the sensations stream into us, and they believe then that we record this like a camera. In my opinion, if we wish to get knowledge, we have to have a problem. It has to be knowledge of something.

We have to find out something. We don't have to wait for information to stream into us, but we have to be inquisitive if we want to get knowledge. If we were passive, we would gain a confused mass of sensations or something like that, which we would hardly be able to understand and to convert into what one may call knowledge.

Quite apart from that, perception is not really, in my opinion, the main source of our knowledge. The role of perception is to inform us about a momentary situation in our environment. But we couldn't really interpret our perceptions without knowing much more about our environment, namely, we know whether we are in a house or whether we are in a glacier.

So we have two kinds of knowledge: this wider knowledge of a frame in which we orientate ourselves, and the momentary perception which gives us information about the situation at that particular moment. And it is only this situation in which we can use our perception. So we have theoretical knowledge and, if you like, the momentary practical challenge to our theoretical knowledge.

And here comes perception in."