Personally I feel that there’s no dichotomy between knowledge and imagination. Imagination is needed to create new concepts (ideas) and knowledge, and new knowledge enables further discoveries, functioning as a springboard to imagination. So, whichever way we look or any situation we take into account, there’s always some basic thread, some or maybe very little knowledge, which is a “justified” “belief” and universally accepted so that turns out to be an important reason also to support, which then becomes root to imagine further and discover something new.
So I say, you acquire, you imagine, you generate. It’s not true that knowledge is limited to all we now know, because we can create new knowledge. Imagination is only one way of expanding our knowledge, but there are equally other “ways of knowing” that can help us with this. “Language” can be one way, as it is rule governed, intended and creative and open-ended. The catchiest thing is that everyone agrees to given rules and so a new knowledge could be easily given born to[2].
As the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that, language determines our experience of reality and we can see and think only what our language allows us to see and think. [3] For example, the Inuit are said to have many different words for snow, and their sophisticated snow vocabulary helps them to make them finely grained snow discrimination. As a result, they see and experience snow-covered landscapes quite differently from the rest of us. The same can be dealt through informal reasoning, on the basis of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, it means, ‘after this, therefore on account of this’.
Knowledge can be generated on the basis of reasoning also, for example if a person has read in a magazine that stray dogs bite and we become victim of rabies disease. Now when that person saw a dog on street, he deduced that he should be aware of this knowledge, that if this dog bite me, I’ll get suffer with rabies. This is deduction of logic from a bigger group to a particular, hence is knowledge generated from reason. If we look at the example of The Revolutionary War[4].
In the revolutionary war, the british redcoats by far outnumbered the revolutionary soldiers, the generals of the British army knew the number of troops the American had, however they did not know the conditions of America. The British were not aware of the abundant woodland in America, the Americans had a huge advantage over them because they were used to the woodland and they won the battle. If the British had known about the abundant woodland and had gotten used to it, they might have won the battle. So was Einstein right? Is imagination more important than knowledge?
As our realities become more complex we seem increasingly to prefer imagination, but that preference is culture-dependent. Imagination blossoms when its products are highly valued. Producers of fantasies also operate within political constraints. Imagination can be highly political, as Orwell, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn demonstrated: too overt an attack on the status quo[5] can bring retribution from the authorities, in totalitarian regimes especially. Industries of knowledge may be controlled for the same reason. So the Knowledge and Imagination ratio keeps on changing, as the time passes.
From the above, it would seem that there are several considerations involved in deciding, which is dominant over other. Knowledge or Imagination. Personality, culture and other friendly aspects promote towards the convolution involved in Einstein’s statement. Is imagination more important than knowledge? In an utterly and thoroughly way it depends on whom you talk to, what you talk about, and at what time and space in. ________________ [1] The Interview was published in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, October 26th, 1929.
[2] Lagemaat, Richard Van De. Theory of knowledge for the IB Diploma. P:48. Cambridge: University Press 2005 [3] Lagemaat, Richard Van De. Theory of knowledge for the IB Diploma. P:68. Cambridge: University Press 2005 [4] http://www. squidoo. com/albert-einstein-quote [5] http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Status_quo.
