What is knowledge anyway? A visit to the Shanghai Natural History Museum
Going to a museum is always an interesting experience. But even more so when you go to a museum in a country very different from your own. As I was living in China, not speaking Chinese, there are only so many ways to get to know China and the Chinese people. Museums make for a very interesting place to visit. For several reasons. I’ll try to show some things I saw during my visit to the Shanghai Natural History Museum, to show some of these reasons. Most have to do with how we experience knowledge and ideas about museums, what we expect and how we interact with the knowledge presented.
How to present knowledge?
Knowledge is something valued by pretty much everyone, it is important in every culture and every nation. Yet what knowledge is, and how to present it to other people to learn from it, is less consistent among different people. We all know something, and most of all we think we know what knowledge is. But let’s be very clear about one thing:
Thinking that you know the truth, and how things work, is naïeve.
What you consider the truth is what you’ve been taught, and is very much dependent on how you are educated, which place you grew up and what you’ve experienced in life. There…
