Knowledge Claims and Knowledge Questions

Background Information

To begin with, knowledge claims are claims that are made within particular areas of knowledge or  by individual knowers about the world; these are known to be first-order claims. Looking into the second-order claims, they are claims made about knowledge, involving an examination of the nature of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge questions, that are dealt in presentations and essays, are simply questions about knowledge that are open and general.

Here is an article on the 'Latest UK flood plans fail to address growing risk of flash floods'

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/16/latest-uk-flood-plans-fail-to-address-growing-risk-of-flash-floods  

Knowledge Claims 

When identifying the knowledge claims of this article, it can be stated that the first order claims, which are the claims about the world, include four major points within this story:

- Southern and Eastern England were hit by a flash flood

- flash flooding occurs due to climate change

- the overloading of the sewer and drainage networks contributed to the overflow of the flash flood and are very important to maintain

- a 2007 disaster occurred, which led to the creation of new laws in 2010 for the use of sustainable drainage systems

When identifying the knowledge claims of this article, it can be stated that the second order claims, which are the claims about knowledge, include three major points within this story: 

- scientific and geographical knowledge is reliable

- understanding of the disaster can come through proven scientific research, investigation, and analysis

- statistics of previous disasters or chances of upcoming disasters is done through scientific research

Knowledge Questions

Bad: How can we forecast the occurence of a flash flood?

- bad because its cannot use any scientific research, as it is will only trigger discussion and the opinion of others.

Bad: In what other ways does climate change impact a city?

- this question is bad, as it only allows to list off other disasters caused by climate change, rather than exploring specific causes of climate change and the reasons of its disasters to the environment; not much knowledge can be explored.

Better: In what ways does our background scientific knowledge of global warming help in avoiding such disasters of rising sea levels?

Better: How does the media or technology have an effect on our understanding of global warming in regards to gaining knowledge from the media?

- despite their similarity of relating to climate change and global warming, they all seem to lead the reader to scientific exploration and reasoning, better distributing knowledge.