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Anarchic, Constructionist and Critical
| click on the paragraph you want to display | "A way of seeing is a way of not seeing" |
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As Ann Oakley states: "A way of seeing is a way of not seeing". We cannot see everything, when we look in one direction we are automatically missing the opposite direction. We are always missing something. However, we still need to look, to learn and to know. We still need a way of seeing things, or else we will be living in a personal disorder and complete denial of the world around us. We need a way of seeing in order to see, we need a way of thinking in order to think and we need a way of knowing in order to know. And it is our awareness of our way of seeing and our way of thinking and our way of knowing that gives rise to the more important awareness: our awareness of what we are not seeing, and not thinking and not knowing. Here lies the importance of articulating a personal epistemology. A personal epistemology is the outcome of a way of knowing, a bias toward a certain direction. And this bias is the consequence of a personal history that evolved surrounded by one or more cultures, surrounded by specific meaning making schemes that the person internalized in order to make sense of reality. Articulating a personal epistemology is not an articulation of what an epistemology should be, it is not an articulation of the 'true' epistemology. Articulating a personal epistemology is an articulation of the potentials and limits of the kind of knowledge that we are likely to generate, articulating a personal epistemology is setting the stage for other personal epistemologies to complement ours by showing them our limits. |