Why Do Research?

Abstract

To research is to search again, to take another, more careful look, to find out more. We take another look because something may be wrong with what we already know. Is research necessary? Isn't plain old common sense enough? At times it is. But that it may be enough is no guarantee that it must be. We must recognize that it is possible to be right for the wrong reasons. For instance, it used to be common sense that the world is relatively flat; anyone could see that by just looking. But "just looking" does not always yield valid conclusions. What the research attitude presumes is that the first look and every later look-may be prone to error, so that one must look again and again. differently and thoroughly each time. Each method of investigation may have its own particular limits. We must try to make ourselves aware of these limits so that we can transcend them or at least not be taken in by them. As the nineteenth-century American humorist Artemus Ward once said, "It ain't the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so."