Okay, a few notes from my books (respectively):
Knowledge acquisition:
Intuition - intuition involves using your own personal judgment and making explanations for things. Relying on intuition means you just accept your explanation without thinking about it, and not questioning it. There are "numerous cognitive and motivational biases that affect our perceptions". An example of this is illusory correlation where you might concentrate on two events that you think stand out, and believe that one caused the other, when in reality, other factors may have. Intuition however can be a great source for ideas for an experiment or research (Cozby, 2009).
Authority - accepting conclusions on faith is not part of the scientific approach. Just because that person is in a high position, doesn't justify them being correct all the time. It may be worthwhile looking into the credentials of the person and checking facts before accepting conclusions made by them (Cozby, 2009).
Pseudoscience - please look out for this garbage, it appears to be scientific when in reality it is not. Examples of pseudoscience are:
* hypotheses are not testable (all hypotheses in science MUST be testable)
* scientific tests that are reported may not have used scientific methodology and "validity of data is questionable"
* evidence provided is "anecdotal or relies heavily on authorities that are so-called experts"
* ignores evidence that goes against their claims
* uses scientific jargon to try and sound credible
* vagueness, "appeal to preconceived ideas" (fallacious), and it tries to "rationalise strongly held beliefs"
* they never revise their claims
(Cozby, 2009)
Tenacity - tenacity is when information is repeated constantly and we tend to just accept it because of that. It almost works similarly to the availability heuristic - when you hear something so much you think that 'that's all there is' when that's not actually the case (Davis and Smith, 2005).
Authority - while I have already discussed it above, the problems with authority and tenacity is that those individuals who have accepted this information based upon the use of tenacity and authority, when faced with conflicting evidence, they will often dismiss it or find some way to discount it (yes the textbook actually says this, I'm not joking). You never know if the knowledge gained from these two ways are true unless you check for yourself (Davis & Smith, 2005).
Experience - (I would like to add first) experience is great for occupations, no doubt it is a great practical way to learn and apply skills you have learnt in the classroom. But when it comes to experience as a way to support an assertion, it is not valid. Everybody sees the world differently, and as I say a lot - ask ten people to describe a situation, and those accounts will all be different. It is inconsistent and how are you supposed to know the truth? Culture and past experiences are the main effects (Davis & Smith, 2005).
Reason/logic - while I personally think logic is good in some ways, in that it requires critical thinking and well, logically deduces things, logical syllogisms can be misleading. Logical syllogisms alone are not strong, thus they need evidence/premises. It takes the form of a major premise, a minor premise and conclusion. The subject of the syllogism and the different ways it can be expressed usually determines if it is 'logical' or not (Davis & Smith, 2005).
So that's a wrap for the first major points. If I have cited wrong or you want to question something or something doesn't make sense, please comment or hold your peace.
Next up is what the scientific method actually is