Monday, December 14, 2009

Reasssoonninnngggg..

I found an website comparing deductive and inductive reasoning.
We had talked about this a couple weeks ago in class when we did that extremely difficult puzzle that I couldn't solve.
Enjoy!!

Deductive vs. Inductive Website

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Logical Fallacies

So, we were told to find a logical fallacy in class, and I kinda did. I didn't see something that was a logical fallacy but in construction, we had a good discussion about one. We were talking about tin telepathy and whether or not we believed it to be true. There are many warning signs to recognize logical fallacies, and a major one is confirmation vias. If a twin finds out that their twin was say in a car accident and they hit their head, if by chance, the other twin got hit with a ball in the head, they would certainly remember that once they found out about the accident. If they had not found out about the accident, they most likely would never remember the pain in their head. Confirmation vias is when you know something happened to someone or something, and you remember or create an instance in your mind that would not have been a big deal otherwise. In my opinion, twin telepathy is fake and there is no real imformation to support the idea. If they could, perhaps, prove it with tests and true studies, then maybe I would believe this. The red flag, warning sign, of confimation bias, has led me to believe that twin telepathy is not true.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

True Beauty.

Beatiful dance!

Do we perceive this as beauty or do we perceive this as dance and reason that it is beautiful?

This goes along with when we were trying to decide what we perceive and what we reason.

Perception AND Reason

I know we have been comparing perception and reason, and trying to choose which one is better, but I can't honestly make that decision. They are both so important in gaining true knowledge and I don't think you can seperate them and still learn much. Not only do you need those two, but you need language and emotion as well, because all of them need to work together to fix each others' flaws. As we said in class, your perceptions can deceive you and need your reason to decide what is real and what isn't. For example, the optical illusion(in my other post) with the lines that appear crooked, but are really straight, you need your reason to decide what they are, as your perception is telling you they are crooked. However, you can do other visual tests to figure out if they are straight, which I guess is only using your perception and not your reason. All in all, I think you need all four ways to gain true knowledge because they all work together to detect false information.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Perception---Deception


Are the lines straight or slanted?
Obviously at first glance, your mind is telling you that the lines are slanted. But after a close examination, you could probably tell that the lines are actually straight. This is a perfect example of your perception decieving you. I would love to say that perception is better and more important as a source of knowledge than reason, and I do believe that to a certain extent, however I realize that your perception can be false. Before our tok class I would have easily argued how great your perception is, however after all the optical illusions, I am not so sure. I still believe that you need to percieve something before you can use your reason to rationalize it, however without your reason, you would believe false things. If I didn't reason that the lines are actually straight, I would have believed that they were slanted, because that is what my perception told me. So which is really better? I think you need both to work together or it will be nearly impossible to gain true knowledge.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Language vs. Thought

A question that came up in class one day was what comes first, a thought or a language? Can you have a thought without knowing a language? I definitely believe that yes, you can have a thought without knowing a languge. A child thinks before they can speak a language, although they also have understanding of a language before they can speak it. However, I think that you can have thoughts in the form of pictures rather than with words, you percieve things from the moment you are born, and from that time on, you must therefore have thoughts of the things you percieve. Though it may be difficult to convey your thought without a language, I don't think you need the language to have the thought. Certainly though, a language makes it easier to convey your thoughts to other people even though language can easily be misunderstood.
A thought must have come first because someone had to think up the very first language, even if it was pictures drawn on a cave, it was still a language. And from there, the languages grew and became the words that I am using right now. Language is a very useful tool though it is still easily misunderstood and there are many different forms of language and the definition of a language is not a sure thing, it is still a useful tool which resulted from a thought.


Now I'm not even sure if this made any scence to anyone other than me..But I hope so!

Friday, October 23, 2009

Selective Mutism

I had never heard of this before, and I found it very interesting! This clip is about selective mutism, where a child can speak at home perfectly fine but will not under any circumstances speak in public. Language can be a very confusing matter!

Selective Mutism

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Language

If your language is confused, your intellect, if not tour whole character, will most certainly correspond.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1863-1944
I must agree with this quote, as I believe that language can, at times, be a barrier for learning. Language is very easily misunderstood which therefore causes issues. When people are speaking a certain language and can understand each other of course it is a great was to accumulate knowledge, however, there are many problems with gaining knowledge through the language. As we know, not everyone all over the world speaks the same language which means that we cannot all understand what each other are saying. When this occurs, people can try to interpret what the other is saying and confuse their words and then pass on false knowledge. This continues to get passed on and therefore people are not gaining any true justified knowledge, even though they may believe it is true. When groups cannot understand one another because of a language barrier, their whole groups become confused and their characters can change because of this "knowledge" they accumulated. Also, when people talk and act like they have knowledge it can get in the way of people observing nature, and everything around them, and people stop learning things naturally, rather they simply wait for someone to teach them new "knowledge". Language can also cause many other problems and therefore is a barrier to learning true knowledge at times, however that it not to say that it is not sometimes a great way to accumulate knowledge. All things considered, I would certainly have to agree with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Who knew there were so many languages in the world??