Duplicate this page before you start, and write all your answers in your own copy.
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Why this lesson matters for your essay. Three of the six titles for your own exam session, May 2027, ask about exactly the kind of knowledge you will look at today.
Title 2: If values change over time, how can they, nevertheless, continue to guide the pursuit of knowledge? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.
Title 3: In the production of knowledge, how can knowledge be reliable if it is built on assumptions? Discuss with reference to the human sciences and one other area of knowledge.
Title 6: In the pursuit of knowledge, what value is there in exploring the paradoxical or the counterintuitive? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.
Nothing on this page answers any of these titles. But every case today is real, named and dated: the kind of evidence an essay needs. Look out for the 📌 marks, which show where a case connects to one of these titles. At the end, you will decide what the cases let you say.
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Before the break, you asked two questions about knowledge of people. Does a result still hold when someone else runs the study again? And what does a study have to take for granted about people before it can begin? Today there is a third question: what are researchers allowed to do to people in order to find out? The answer has changed over time, and when it changed, it changed what could be known.
flowchart LR
A["Lesson 1<br/>Run it again:<br/>does the result<br/>hold up?"] --> B["Lesson 2<br/>The person in<br/>the model: what is<br/>taken for granted?"]
B --> C["Lesson 3<br/>What may we<br/>do to people<br/>to find out?"]
The set-up: the experimenter (E) tells the teacher (T), the real participant, to give electric shocks to the learner (L), who is an actor in another room. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
To what extent are the methods used in the human sciences limited by the ethical considerations involved in studying human beings?
Open the sections below as we work through them together.
