Final Post

The course has been a eventful series of reflection over matter that I never had reflected about before. At first, we approach the course with questions and wonders about why are we seeing this and that and the more we progress into the course, the more we understand the relation between everything. This is what strikes me first in these few weeks and why i'm sharing it first thing. The themes combine two groups, one related to the philosophical world such as the understanding of Knowledge and the theory of science a group rather abstract in a way. With difficulties to grasp  the true understanding, even though one understanding isn't the answer. And the other group is more something concrete. With different approach and understanding but in fine a similar definition and comprehension. I used to reflect a lot about everything in my life such as "Why am I doing this that way.." " Why am I thinking that ..." And I usually tried to get a real answer to the Whys. But after studying in some deeper way the philosophical way and the researcher mind set, makes me wonder... Do we really need to find a concrete and unique answer to everything... Open mind is the first step to knowledge.

Knowledge is the biggest part of this course. Even though it was the focused for theme 1, it stayed around and we found ourselves talking about knowledge along the way. Through Research theory quantitative and qualitative methods even for case studies. In a way this was the red wire that joined the themes together. The before work was the hardest part since we didn't have anything to based ourselves on. We had to figure out what was expected and understand the texts. Kant isn't the easiest. What came up through the seminar and the lecture was mostly the assumption made that we do not see with the eyes or ears but through them. I think it has been a really main idea that students remembered because I've seen that on every blog posts I've read. The biggest idea that I've encountered in this text and that a lot of people did as well, was the quote that "Perception without Conception is blind and Conception without Perception is empty".
Therefore our vision over the world and the things with see through our ears/eyes will diverse from each other since our perception will be different and additionally our conception will be too. Knowing that, Deceiving took a whole new meaning for me as well.

The aim of this study for me has been linked to the different theme throughout the course. A better comprehension of knowledge followed by some examples of critique and research in the media world and finished by the different method that one can achieve in order to deal with a complex question. From that, I understand that this is all related to the Master thesis or PhD research. The first step will be to understand. Defining the problem (aka knowledge theme1) and the surrounding that evolves around it. Followed by some research over what have been done in this field, see the different research on it, if there are (Theme 2-3). And then when the research are done and the question became clearer we are ready to invest on our own and make our own research. In order to do that, we will need to choose between the different possibilities offered to us such as qualitative method, quantitative method or case studies (Theme 4-5-6), And then print the research and make the world a better place !

I would like to point out in this final post the matter of the case studies which is for me the best way to explore an unknown field, an unresearched question. This is the most efficient way to research something when the data on the matter are relatively hard to come upon or totally inexistant. Since we do not have any hypothesis on any specific question, we study based on what we see through our eyes and try to grasp an idea, an understanding from something we do not understand or know anything about. As Plato asked, Is knowledge what we know or is it what we know and what we dont know ? Therefore knowing what we don't know is the first step to knowledge. Then we can invest it and try to understand why we don't know anything about.

I would like to conclude that this course gave a better understanding of the mental process when one have to proceed to all the steps for a research and answer a question very complex. Understanding the  surrounding for a better understand before even starting to think to answer the question. Once we do understand everything around and about it, we have done the biggest part of the problem.  Keeping the aim of the study is as important as understanding. Losing the sight of where we are going would end up to have a research anarchist.  Once all is done, we need to find the better approach method for the question, the one that is the more appropriate and the one that will give us the better understanding of the situation.