21/3/11

The Problem with Language and Meaning
is that information can be miscommunicated because people have different meanings for words, which leaves us with an wide variety of meaning. Information can also be misinterpreted if the person communicating the information does not make sense. Therefore, we must not be too vague when describing or giving information.

This is an example of how information can be miscommunicated

Is What Your Saying, What You Mean?
In contrast, if you are trying to define where hair ends and baldness begins, it's such a wide range that it is hard to pinpoint the beginning an end. If you are trying to explain information in depth, you may end up not meaning to say what actually came out of your mouth! I actually find this to be a major problem for me, especially when it comes down to writing essays. I understand the information, but I find it hard to put all of this information onto a page, which will then make sense to the reader. For example, if I'm writing the essay, my brain may be ticking over all of the information and thinking that I am putting it down on paper, however, I may end up only writing down half the stuff I think of, making it a difficult task for the reader to understand. Unfortunately, when for example, a teacher reads my essay, they think I don't understand the topic. Whereas, I do! I just don't know how to communicate it clearly whilst getting my ideas through. Therefore, if you go into too much detail, you can end up contradicting yourself, or making no sense.


How Can You Make Sense of a Sentence If You Don't Understand a Word?
Earlier, I mentioned this. What I mean is, if you don't understand the meanings of some words in a sentence, it will still affect the way you understand it. It may end up with a different meaning! For example, I'm in spanish continuers, but I still find it hard to understand sentences because there are words, which i don't know. It's not necessarily a 'vocab' word, meaning like the word "chair", but more of a verb that changes its meaning with the conjugation. So not only in foreign languages is it normal to have different meanings for one word, in English too, there are multiple meanings for one word. This is also similar to the poem, Jabberwocky, in "Through the looking glass". People describe his poem as a jumble of meaningless words, but the truth is Lewis Caroll uses a combination of English words to create one word. Novels are also made up to a certain extent. The plot's are created from life, but theories may be made up. Therefore, Caroll's combination of English words are fictional, but not nonsense.


This can become quite complicated when you narrow it down to:
How Do I Know What You Call Red, Is What I Call Red?
Because everyone has different meanings of one word, understanding someone else's language, in the same language, can be a challenge. Not only are people's definitions of words different, but of course, their perception. Their perception will then affect their definition. The simple way to think about it is:

RED

PINK

The ink on the left (red) is darker compared to the ink on the right (pink). If the person you have stated to this agrees, then you know that you have similar definitons of the colour 'red'. If they disagree, then you know that they have a different perspective or definiton on the colour 'red'.




The other problem that then arises is, What Are the Limitation's of Definitions?
How are we meant to describe to someone without the sense of sight, the colour red if it doesn't connect with the other senses. What I mean is, if you can't hear, feel, smell or taste the colour red, how are you meant to describe what it is? A way of describing the colour difference to a colour blind person would be to compare the intensity of the colour's. For example, because red is darker than pink, it would have a stronger intensity. The way I would describe colour to a blind person, is possibly through their other senses. For example, describe the colour through different textures, so the blind person could feel different textures of objects and relate them to colour's.

25/2/11

Class Discussion ¿?¿?¿?¿
After watching the movie momento, a few questions were raised..


How important is memory?
Memory is important because without it, how would you understand terms like irony?

"He is as smart as a soap dish"

Irony is the saying of one thing in order to mean the opposite. It contradicts itself.

Without a sense of memory,you can't understand irony. This is because if you have no recollection or understanding in an area of knowledge, how can you simply make jokes about it? If you can't connect irony, that means you don't understand the basic knowledge you need to understand. This shows how problematic language in action, can become. However, in every culture, there is irony. The problem may arise when trying to translate this.

Some Problems of Knowledge..

what is a knowledge issue?

A disagreement on knowledge

how trustworthy are our senses? more reliable than our emotions and language, however we should not rely completely on our senses, but a mix of perception, language, reason, emotion. 

how can we justify logic? by comparing our logic to other sources such as people's opinions and finding the right way of justifying our information and knowledge. 

how reliable our are feelings and emotions? they are not certain reliabilities, however they do have a part in our judgement. A mix of emotion, perception etc. will help us find a clearer understanding.

The list of questions we can ask ourself goes on..However we have to find a balance of questioning, to not become to skeptical. We then base our questioning on reality.

Source; Google Images,
Catfish Movie

CATmeowFISH

How do we know something is authentic? Is it real or not?

You know what is real through your own experiences and what you have been told or found out for yourself. You rely on sources such as your experiences, language, perception, culture, internet, media and 'experts'. The problem is that these are not reliable sources on their own, so you have to take information from each source to gain a deeper understanding. If you really think about it, you don't know if something is real. That is, if you're willing to question reality. How do we know that we aren't in a dream right now? Because we feel..however, in dreams, we can still feel and it does seem real. It's only when we wake up, that we realise we were in a dream. How do we know we aren't in a dream within a dream? Like the movie 'Inception' provokes? We don't know. But to keep ourselves not too confused, we believe we exist and we believe we are living, that we are in 'reality'. Otherwise, we would end up in a spiral of unanswered questions, that not even 

'experts' can answer. So for our own reassurance, we know something is real if we have evidence from experts or if we use our judgement the right way and can prove it right.

How do we know what we know?

We know, what we know again through perception, language, reason, emotion etc. We rely on the mix of sources to give us a balanced answer. Through language, we listen to people's stories [authorities] and believe them most of the time without second thought. These authorities are teachers, family, culture, news and so on. We believe what they say because they are wiser. However wisdom is just uncertain knowledge. So really, we come back into this loop of not knowing the full certain truth. So in reality, we don't actually know the 100% truth, it's constantly changing. Although, we can find the answer that is most probable to be the right answer.

How well do we know people? How we know them?

If we are talking about people as in presidents etc., we can know them through a variety of sources e.g books, internet, language and perception. If we are talking about people as in friends, family, acquaintances, we know them through perception, language and in some cases, the internet. Most people judge others through appearance and language. In the movie 'catfish', Nev judges his thoughts on Angela and Meg by their photos on facebook. The question is, how can he be sure that these people he has never met, actually look like the photos they have posted of 'themselves'. In the real world, you are attracted to a person through a 'physical action', which is appearance and the way they act [body language], however Nev didn't get to experience this. SO , how did he know if their was actually was a connection? Well his first 'connection' with Meg was through he phone [language]. In reality, moving onto the next level of a relationship is through an emotional bond, but with Nev and Megan, it was using words like 'babe' and 'cutie'. During their nine months of contact, they built up this anticipation of meeting each other and they felt based on their minds projections [unreliable and false].

Gaining knowledge from the internet? Is it reliable?

Even though the internet is said not to be the most reliable source, we still use it. WHY? Because its fast, accessible and simple to type in some key words and get pages of answers! However, these answers may not be right, we still read them, take it in [or not] and use these answers. Another problem with using internet as a main source for information, is that there is so much of it, we may not take it all in! therefore, we are not gaining knowledge in an area, but information in bits and pieces. Information isn't so valuable to us if it doesn't connect in our brains and become knowledge. BUT! We can build knowledge from bits of information stored in our brain during later experiences. This is similar with facebook or any other social networking website. We gain information [it may be false] about someone, which is then stored in our brain. The more we look at their profile and pictures, we learn more about them. HOWEVER, similarly in 'Catfish', all of this information we are learning through their profile etc. MAY NOT BE TRUE. So we are teaching our brain, false information! THREE BIG DOTS FORMING A TRIANGLE [therefore], the internet is not reliable, but we still do gain knowledge, true or false.

I Say No More.