While I was reading chapter one of Sensoy’s “Is Everyone Really Equal?” a quote which struck me as intriguing was “The power of dominant knowledge depends in large part on its presentation as neutral and universal.” This is a point worth investigating, and one which I am not foreign to. When I was in high school, I took a class called “The Theory Of Knowledge” and this class discussed the intersectionality of ways of knowing. In other words, what we consider knowledge comes from a multitude of internal sources, and they are often weaved together. In the instance of scientific knowledge, this subject is not free from this influence. Ideally, the scientific community would like to draw knowledge from reason and logic, two of the TOK “Ways of Knowing.” As Sensoy pointed out, this is impossible. Funding, career dependence, and a variety of emotional factors come into play, and this influences the outcome of research projects. Sometimes, this will mean researchers will alter their outcomes to produce something with greater transformative academic knowledge, as opposed to more mainstream academic knowledge. This idea is further investigated in a research paper I read when I was in high school. It is an investigation of falsifying data in research, and says about 2% of researchers admit to falsifying data, and 33% to some form of improper practices.

Despite the clear evidence that there is data falsification even within the scientific community, the information published is more often than not taken at face value and with complete trust as being unbiased. People will cite scientific research without knowing the credentials of the researcher (which I am ironically doing at the moment citing the above research), and this creates a perpetuation of the knowledge being considered neutral. This is not the case, and brings to question the theory that the scientific community solely promotes positivism.