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Junaid Alam

Victoria Gateworth

11 May 2011

There is no hope of doing perfect research (Griffith 97). Do you

agree?

When investigated closely, the answer to whether a perfect research is

possible or not lies in the very definition of research and the answer is ‘No’.

Research means to inquire and investigate the accessible observations and

information more deeply to broaden the understanding of a certain subject

by fresh interpretations (Research) and to find newer ways that could extend

the scope and credibility of the existing knowledge. This definition regards

the essential nature of the research that humans are capable of: they

depend on a priori information and resources of knowledge to investigate it

further. This is what draws the whole pattern of human history—knowledge

has evolved and has not sprang out of nowhere or never has come to a halt

by some sense of irrevocable completeness. We may like to systematize our

argument by positing two very important factors that indicate toward the

impossibility of a perfect research: human rational process and the historical

facts about how knowledge has evolved.

“The only thing we know is that we know nothing”. – Leo Tolstoy

A little psychological analysis of human rationality suggests that

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humans can only construct their thoughts on the foundations of the

information that they have at hand. They can be intuitive but even then they

can hardly go beyond the landscape of experience. Even the most intuitive

ideas in the history of mankind have been generally comprehensible, which

indicates the inherent finitude of human intellectual capacities as well as the

limits of experience in which those capacities have to develop. Theories are

fabricated on the basis of assumptions that are treated as established facts.

Ideas are born from the union of various other ideas. Different fields of

human activity come together to create multidisciplinary and even profound

avenues of research. All of this indicates the same pattern: the necessity for

something to start with. This pattern leads to the conclusion that if human

intellectual capability is limited both in its flight and experience and the

information available always incomplete and to a degree uncertain, the

product of a research endeavor cannot be perfect. And this is what is also

reflected in the history of development of recorded human knowledge.

When we investigate the history of the development of knowledge in

its different forms, all we can make out is a pattern that connotes evolution

and a gradual accumulation of information on a variety of fields, ranging

from social sciences to biological and physical sciences. Even the most

definite forms of knowledge – that is the physical sciences – have only

managed to evolve with passing years. Neither could it be discovered out of

nothing, nor did it come to a point of immovable certainty—knowledge kept

expanding and even reforming itself, changing earlier opinions and theories
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with what befitted the human experience more. And, after all that,

knowledge has only started proving itself more uncertain. What is definite is

only that had perfect research been possible, knowledge could not have

expanded and developed itself. This can be proven with the help of examples

from various areas of research.

Extensive research has been done regarding the ideas of evolutionism

and creationism and has yet been unable to produce an irrefutable

conclusion except that the evidence for both the schools of thought has not

been ample. There have been considerable advances in the favor of

biological evolutionism even in the fields of linguistics and anthropology and

very plausible objections made by the creationists (Wilkins: “How to be Anti-

Darwinian”) but the limits of human experience – its inability to explain

metaphysical tendencies of human mind on one hand and its incapacity to

prove the doctrine of creationism on the other – have always hampered the

passage to a research that could give perfect and absolute answers. This

indicates how the limitations of our knowledge can kill any hopes of doing

perfect research.

As an instance of a research that was believed to be perfect but later

turned out otherwise, we may consider the theory of gravitation. Newton’s

laws of gravity were only capable of explaining only the phenomena that

were observable in older days, e.g. planetary motion. Only later it became

clear in the theory of general relativity that, although Newton’s laws were
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good enough, they were not perfect (Halliday). As the reach of human

experience expands further, we cannot be sure if there are more

adjustments to be made. This example shows how the scope of human

intuition and experience has become increasingly profound with time and

can only continue to do so. This again shatters the possibility of perfect

research.

Works Cited

Halliday, David, Robert Resnick, and Kenneth S. Krane. Physics v. 1. New

York: John Wiley & Sons. 2001. Print.

"Research." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22

July 2004. Web. 10 May 2011.

The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. 10 May 2011.

Wilkins, John. “Varieties of Opposition to Darwinism”. How to be Anti-

Darwinian. TalkOrigins Archive, 21 Dec. 1998. Web. 10 May 2011.