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!