Phrasing the giant: on the importance of rigour in literature search process

Abstract

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only in memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter’s colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

Elbert Hubbard

At a very early age, we start to develop a sense of playfulness. We touch things, we build things, we break them apart. Soon after we begin to utter words. We babble, we squeal, we try to imitate. Music begins to inform our bodily movements. What develops last and continues to develop throughout our waking lives is connections of words. The essential and characteristic features of words used to describe things within and around us are the hardest to grapple with. The same word can be expressed in different ways and could mean different things in different contexts. Literature, being the written expression of words in its various forms, has progressively shaped our world view.

Liberal news outlets around the world have been stressing recurrently that words matter, as the imagination of some politicians’ is set loose and boundaries to what one may say seem not to exist. However, despite this current societal struggle to adhere to facts, namely amid the current pandemic, science has remained irreducible in its systematic approach supported by the scientific method where facts and doubt do co-exist as a process towards the discovery and construction of new knowledge.

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