"There are only two ways in which humankind can produce knowledge: passive observation and active experiment". To what extent do you agree with this statement?

I’m inclined to agree with this statement to a large extent. My definition of passive observation is “to watch something that is happening without attempting to influence it,” and my definition for active experiment is “to change something in a situation (consciously or not) and see how the result is affected,” both of which cover all of the ways (I can think of) to produce knowledge.  

To use the real life situation we discussed in class, B.O.B thinks the Earth is flat.

A knowledge question for this RLS could be “To what extent does Sense Perception distort belief in the natural sciences?”  A possible answer: It depends on which part of the natural sciences.  When, for example, observing flowers grow, sense perception is more likely to confirm belief in the natural sciences, since the eyes can observe that a plant has gotten taller, or that flower buds have started to appear.  But as science advances, the subject being observed or experimented on have gotten incredibly small (subatomic particles) or impossibly large (galaxies).  As science gets to those extremes, it’s harder for sense perception to work without contradicting natural sciences.   Sense perception may be more persuasive to people though, because it’s how they collect data for themselves, even though it can be wrong.

Bringing B.O.B and his situation back to passive observation and active experimentation, both sides of the argument user active experiment and passive observation to argue their point, which would support the idea that these are the only two ways humankind produce knowledge, though it is only one example. B.O.B uses passive observation to observe that since he can’t see a curve in the horizon, the earth is flat, while Neil DeGrasse Tyson uses knowledge of active experiments to know that the Earth is curved.