19/2/11

THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

"A man with only one theory is a lost man" - Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1900

Bertolt Brecht

The three elements that make up Knowledge as Justified True Belief are; truth, belief and justification.

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Truth brings up the questions of 'How can we ever be sure that what we think we know is true? 

and

What if our knowledge is based on lies, how can we tell what the truth is?

The main difference between truth and belief is that truth is objective and belief is subjective. This means that belief is personal and not as certain as truth is. The main difference between belief and knowing is that, when you know something you're certain, but when you believe something, you're not.

The three beliefs are vague, well-supported and beyond reasonable doubt. Your belief must be justified in the right way. A persons belief may be true, but we cant say that they know because their belief have not been justified the right way. Therefore, in order to say you know something, you must justify your belief in the right way.

H-O-W - - D-O - - Y-O-U - - K-N-O-W - ?

You can't know for sure, can you?

the four ways of knowing in dialogue:

"Someone told me" - Language

"I saw it" - Perception

"I worked it out" - Reason

"It's obvious" - Emotion

There are different LEVELS OF KNOWLEDGE; what we claim to know is usually second-hand knowledge. This means that is has been passed down and less reliable because we don't know the original source.

Albert Einsten

There's a difference between knowledge and information. Information, if pieced together properly can help us gain knowledge. However, if we do not have previous knowledge or an understanding of the information we are told, we will not gain knowledge. Someone who has a genuine knowledge of a subject, means they have an understanding of the information together, not just memorized information. Today, with the amount of internet access to all the information can be overwhelming and even though there is a lot of information to read, we may not understand it, resulting in us not gaining knowledge in that subject.

Another fact to remember is that just because we be an 'expert' in one subject, does not make us an expert in all subjects. E.g Albert Einsten; he was a wizz at maths, but not so much in other areas of knowledge.

21/2/11

MEMENTO is a movie FULL of TOK key words. No wonder they made us watch it today. However, I wasn't exactly forced, it was an amazing movie!

Source: Google, Memento Polaroid

It's a movie about Lenny [main character], seeking the murderer and rapist of his wife. The problem he faces is that he has short term memory loss. He is then forced to write down key events in the day and take a polaroid of objects like his car. The movie has two parts to it running simultaneously. The colour film is in reverse order, working from the last event in the film to the first. This was done to create confusion to the audience, like the main character Lenny feels trying to piece together who murdered his wife. The second part is in black and white, however this runs in chronological order. He has to figure out who to trust and he explains how memory is not reliable.

The two main characters that the audience jumps trust is between Teddy and Natalie. The audience gets to see what these two characters are really like, but because Lenny doesn't have time to write down what they are really like, he forgets. Natalie is the character who takes advantage of Lenny's disorder to help with her own problems. She tells Lenny to NOT trust Teddy because he is the killer and Teddy tells Lenny NOT to trust Natalie because she is using him to her advantage. They are both right in saying to trust neither Natalie or Teddy, but Lenny doesn't see this.


Lenny talks about how he and people in general shouldn't trust memory because they can be distorted. He talked about how he is CERTAIN of some things like the feel and sound.

15/2/11

Richard Linklater

Waking Life; Richard Linklater 
An animation film to stimulate the thoughts and questions of life. The actual animation is distorted, representing that life is not perfect and distorted itself. The characters in Waking Life bring up matter's in a simple way to understand philosophy. It gets you asking yourself questions about what is life? Who and what should we believe? etc.
Asking all of the questions is the building blocks to postmodernism. It's about questioning the things we usually do and interpreting it from a different perspective. We try to make things different, using unconventional media. For example, instead of the usual writing in blogs, we add urls. Instead of urls, images. Instead of images, movies and so on. We try to think outside the box, which is what IB tries to drill in our minds all the time. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! You don't want to be doing what these people are doing..just a quick side note; you need to show sources, but how are we meant to show sources on an image with a URL longer than the blog itself?

Google Images; Outside the Box

All of this questioning leads to deconstruction of an idea. That is, how do we know that the American's landed on the moon? This is where deconstruction comes into play. We pick apart the evidence, negative and positive, and make a judgement on the evidence.


In the animation, Waking Life, the characters talk about how language was first formed. It was first formed to connect to one another, communication. Then the sounds turned into words, which are just representative symbols. I mean, how do we know if our communication is clear? How do I know, that you understand what I'm trying to convey?


When we are listening to someone speaking about love, subconsciously, our brain brings together our knowledge and understanding of love, to piece together what that person is talking about. So, how does memory represent knowledge? Our senses, trigger a recollection of memories that make us remember certain knowledge we have learnt. This is why studies say when making notes for exams, use colour! Because colour, visual aid and stories are a way for our memory to link back to our knowledge for future need. Watch this clip for a visual understanding!

And this leads onto, if we have no memory or experience of something, do we have knowledge of it? The answer is for you to find out! But I figure, without experience, how can you learn? Because even googling knowledge, is an experience in a way. We may also mix up our memories, so then how can we be sure what we remember is real? For me, I mix up my dreams and reality all the time, sometimes i'm unsure if my dream was real or if my reality was a dream. In simple terms, for example, if I have a dream that I've told my best friend that I secretly still believe in santa, when I wake up, or even an hour later, I'm unsure if it actually happened.

Knowledge can also get a little bit fuzzy when it comes to people's memories because of course, everyone has different experiences. This means there are a wide variety of opinions and perspectives, which is why it's always good to keep an open-mind, because you may learn something from their experience!

In Waking Life, an odd character says,

"No matter how many colour crayons you have, it's what you do with them."

'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost is a poem, that expresses a similar meaning. That is, TO TAKE THE UNTAKEN ROAD.

Jean-Paul Sartre; You'll learn about him in a paragraphs time..

This is a belief called existentialism. People who follow existentialism believe that the road, path, choice etc. untaken usually turns out to be the most interesting and beneficial. However, the world would end in a disaster if everyone followed this way of living, because our world would be a mess if everyone is living in the now and not the future. A french philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, believes in existentialism. He looks pretty wise, does he not? [Above image]


I'm just going to through this word in here: Paradigm; used to describe distinct concepts. I'm not entirely sure what this word means or relates to yet, but hopefully in the future it will make more sense.


Important name to remember, NOAM CHOMSKEY. He is a US philosopher who commentates on social political life. Once again, my understanding is not clear, but will develop [so I hope].

11/2/11

Sometimes, because there are so many uncertainties in our world, we have to reply on

Judgement

than proof.

Good judgement relies on a balance of open-mindness and skepticism.

When relying on judgement, you might find yourself tipping one way or the other, too gullible or too guarded. To determine whether knowledge is reasonable is through evidence and coherence.

Martin Luther King; Mugshot

..for a belief to be reasonable, you need to support it with evidence. Just because you can't show evidence that something isn't true, doesn't mean it is true. Argument ad ignoration is when you believe something is true because it hasn't been proven wrong.

In TOK, it's really important to look for the positives and negatives of evidence.

It's common for people to only look for the evidence that supports their beliefs instead of the negatives and positives. This is known as confirmation bias.


Another way of determining whether knowledge is reasonable is through coherence. This means, do the beliefs fit in with todays understandings of things? Instead of believing in something straight away that is less likely to be true [aliens], make sure there is a good amount of evidence supporting it.


Beliefs matter so much because they affect how we think and how we behave. French philosopher Frances Volatire said,

"People who believe absurdities will commit atrocities"

Egyptian Revolution 2011

This quote is too true, think of the issues currently going on and issues of the past, revolving around extremists. I was watching the world news the other night, and the rivalries in Egypt came on screen. The recent resign of the Prime Minister has countries surrounding and including Egypt, that extremists will emerge during the weak transition from one leader [Ahmed Nazif] to another [military]. Diplomats worldwide 
recognised that during the transition of power, religion extremists might take advantage of the weak control. This is similar to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The Shah was in exile of his own country and during the two weeks of no power in control, Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious leader took over. This just shows how true Voltaire's quote is, that your beliefs influence your actions.

Iranian Revolution 1979

7/2/11

The five senses;
Taste, Touch, Sight, Sound and Smell.

We use sense perception to help us understand our world.

We rely on our senses for knowledge. If we were lacking in certain senses, it would make it harder to accumulate knowledge. However, perception isn't the only way we gain knowledge. We also acquire knowledge from the four ways of knowing; Language, Reason and Emotion.

Language enables us to require knowledge from others. We are passed down stories, when we are young we are told the knowledge that is known as 'common-sense' and we experience for ourselves, which we bundle up into our brains.

We also learn from our emotions, e.g gut feel. This isn't as accurate as perception per say, but it still gives us a general understanding of the world we live in. The problem with relying on emotions for knowledge is that everyone has a different 'gut feel' or sense of what is obviously 'common-sense' or not.

When trying to figure something out, we reason it. This means that we use our senses to negotiate in our brain, the chances of it being true or false. The problem about reasoning something is that our perception can be off and we may inaccurately calculate something.

In the four ways of knowledge, we question, how can we be certain and trust our ways?

A french philosopher, René Descartes, states that he knows one thing is absolutely certain, we exist.

..right?

Relativism is an extreme way of thinking that there is no absolute truth, but anyone can believe what is true and false. You may think that this works out well, but when you come to other people's beliefs, it starts to get fuzzy. For example, if i say "For me, fairies are real and for you, fairies are not", it can't be true because there is only one true fact. There cannot be fairies existing and fairies not existing at the same time because the both contradict each other.

You may ask, what should i believe? But theory of knowledge is about how you believe. If you are going to support your belief, show evidence by deconstructing the meaning behind it.

So we have slipped into the discussion of

deconstruction, aka. Jacques Derrida's term;

I may as well try to explain it to you. Mr. Skinner's little example to help understand the term deconstruction was this:

If group A philosophers are saying "come join our practice! It's the best!" and group B philosophers are saying "No! come join us! We're the best!", instead of choosing the most appealing group, you have to deconstruct each concept to come to a final decision. In doing this, you break down each theory to find the real meaning behind the theory. Whatever theory you believe in, you have to show evidence.

Tada! And as I said in my previous post, this may be dated 19/2/11 when this was posted, but I wrote this down in my notebook before i discovered the wonders of internet blogging. [A lot quicker and more 'flowy']

3/2/11

DAY TWO..
and i still feel like a rookie.
I'm still not sure how I am meant to be writing this? Formal? Like a personal journel? A summary of what we did in class? Just general thoughts? Who knows..so I'm just going to keep writing until i get in trouble for doing it wrong. :)


In class numbero dos, we did our first philosophical thinking! [does that suite?].. we were questioning, or Mr. Skinner was questioning us as a class, 

"How do we know if a source is reliable?" - Skin dawgs

 And yes, i do like to do it big and red..it shows the importance..possibly? Back to the question though, how DO we know if a source is reliable?

Thanks to google and wiki, we can't really tell if your sources are reliable..unless we double check using other sources a.k.a, books?! The reason we don't bother with the 'double checking' is because how lazy the human race is..we would much rather do a quick google search and come up with our answer within seconds than hours.  If we went to a library, we would be face with big, incomprehensible words.  As Mr. Skinner said, "few of you actually check the reliability of our sources!"


The question is, what is being knowledgeable about? What does it mean? Well, from my novice experience, it is believed that 'being knowledgeable', is organised common-sense. But the real question is, how do we know our common-sense is reliable? Mind-blowing; I know.  But it makes sense..think about it, we have been brought up learning from our friends, family, experiences, teachers, books and especially media, how do we know they are all reliable sources? We don't. We can't obviously just abandon our common-sense, otherwise we would be left in a rather messy confusion. But we can be open to different ways of thinking because our common-sense is full of inaccuracies and cultural biases.


A surrealist artist, Rene Magritte, painted a cigar titled "The Betrayal of Images".  At the bottom of the painting though, it's translated to mean 'This is not a pipe'. What is it then if it's not a pipe? I was turning the image sideways, trying to be a few steps ahead of everyone and see what the image really was.  We all gave up and Mr. Skinner said "This is not a pipe. This is a painting of a pipe."

We were all baffled.. So simple, yet I was trying to find some sort of hidden image.  Magritte's intentions were to confuse viewers and question, if it's not a pipe, then what is it?!


A quote i loved from Mr. Skinner and was so true, is that

"What we see, is not what we get".

Certainty next! 

1/2/11

DAY ONE OF TOK:


Today was our first class of TOK.  We had discussions about the difference between a 'knower' and being 'knowledgeable'.  We look at marking schemes, our syllabus for the year and talked a bit about the TOK final presentation.  Our teacher, Mr. Skinner, talked about how TOK is the most important subject because it is the core of the IB Diploma.  Apparently this diagram is essential for our understanding in TOK?

So far I'm a 'knower', but i don't feel like I know enough about TOK to be considered in that nice little hexagon.


I started off with a journal on paper, but i thought it would be more efficient to blog online because I'm on the computer half the time.  I'm not really sure what we are meant to write in our 'journal', but TOK looks like it's going to be an interesting subject!