They're Out There...They're Everywhere

Please use this post to share Knowledge Questions from your daily life.  Troll the halls for moments of knowledge, identify the situation that prompted your thinking, and extract a first-rate KQ.  Please share two for Thursday morning.  Happy fishing!

The Empty Toll Booth, or, Be Your Own Lemming

Now that we've begun our head-long dash down the path of Knowledge Questions, stop and regroup a bit for Thursday.  Read this guide to Knowledge Issue Extraction, then read two articles from 3 Quarks Daily or Arts and Letters Daily (links to which are on the right under TOK Links) and write a post that contains a) a real-word situation; b) a weak knowledge issue; c) a strong knowledge issue from each article.  Be sure to indicate from which article each situation and KI comes.

Man Helps Dog Bite Victim

You'll know it when you see it, right?  For next time, please find, share here, and explain one example for each of the following terms: consistent, inconsistent, valid, invalid, and ambiguous.  Your examples should either be published or overheard (no fair setting the stage).  If the latter you may use pseudonyms.

For tomorrow, toddle off to Oxford and work through this logic tutorial on consistency and validity.  Once on the site, follow the Tutorials link, then select Tutorial One.  Continue until you finish Exercise 1.4.  Having completed this, consider (in writing) how the skills this tutorial develops help you understand and tackle the puzzles and paradoxes from the previous post.

Logic--Huh! Good God! What is it good for?

Setting aside ontological arguments for the moment, let's begin to sharpen our logic skills.  For Tuesday, please tackle these logic puzzles.  Work patiently and with a pencil, reasoning out the consequences of each statement and, where appropriate, its speaker.  In your post examine the ways your thinking changed or developed to accommodate this task.  What was most difficult?  How did you arrive at the answers?  If you get angry at logic, take a break and read this.

What if they held a blog party and nobody posted?

We've begun to define the course together and as your last posts show, you have a strong grasp of the ways we are thinking and approaching both issues and knowledge.  For Thursday morning, let's all take Jane's advice: post a question that you would like us to tackle together.  Delve into your bags of thinky awesomeness and pull out a stumper.  We'll chew on some of them together on Thursday and use that process as a way of beginning our relationship with formal logic.

There's Something Happening Here

What it is ain't exactly clear.  For Tuesday, please write a one paragraph (approximately 500 characters) course description for TOK.  Think about what we do, how we do it, and why we're here (in the course, not in existence.  That's a different course).  If you wish, this could also be an opportunity to suggest reshapings of the course: describe what it is and what it could or should be.

Only Uncertainty Is Certain

For your first post in our consideration of Experimental Science as a way of knowing, please transcribe your science quotation, then provide a close reading of the text, along the lines of our group work from today.  Patiently follow your ideas to their ends, and embrace multiplicity of meaning.  Do this writing for Thursday morning.  For next Tuesday, please read and respond to the post below yours from the first round (if you are the final poster from the first round, respond to the first post).  Augment your classmate's reading with your own analysis, both of the text she provides and of her close reading.  Critique, refute, reinforce, explore.  We will pick up the discussions in our next classes.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

Taking the wonderful Colossal as your source, choose an exhibit in which the artist employs some form of creative re-tasking: the use of an object, idea, pattern, material in a way other than that for which it was originally intended.  Consider in your writing the ways that your knowledge of the medium's original purpose influences your understanding of the piece(s) the artist has created.  Please come to class ready to discuss the work you select, and paste a link to the work into your post (if you click on the title of the article in question you will be redirected to a discrete page).

Who's In Charge Here?

Let's think about free will (follow this for a new reading) and how we choose (you'll need an hour for this one).  Do some writing for Tuesday morning in which you reflect on the decisions you make in the process of decoding these implications.  NB: you're writing about your observations of the ways you are thinking, not just what you are thinking.  To what extent are your understandings decisions that you control?  Are you in command of the knowledge that you create?

The Truth About Lies

Carrying on from our discussion of objective and conveyable realities, consider the following musings on the role and nature of Art:

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
-Pablo Picasso

“Art renders accessible to [those] of the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their predecessors and also those felt by their best and foremost contemporaries...[Art] is a means of union...joining [people] together in the same feeling. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them...A real work of art destroys in the consciousness of the recipient the separation between himself and the artist, and...also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.”
-Leo Tolstoy

For your Thursday post:
In one of your other classes, find a lie that makes you realize a truth. Identify the feelings with which it infects you, and consider the nature of your knowledge. Is it subjective? Can it be both subjective and universal?

Do You See What I See?

By now you should have constructed a definition for Forensic Epistemology.  As an expansion of your work, you might read this definition of epistemology, one part of an incredible resource for all things philosophical.  For Tuesday morning, please read this interview with Errol Morris, in which he discusses the objective reality of photography, among other things.  In your post, please engage Morris' position by considering whether there is something more objectively real about a photograph of a scene than about a scene its self.  Consider, also, his discussion of the rules people have constructed for and around photographs.  Are there those with which you agree?  How does this interview affect your views on photography?  How about on the existence of objective realities?

Let's Get a Sense of Knowledge

For Thursday morning, please consider sensory perception as a way of knowing.  Share two examples of things you know as a result of your senses.  Try to consider different senses, and to evaluate how subjective your knowledge is in each case.

Nice Knowing You

Today, please begin by thinking and writing about what you mean when you say, "I know."  Does the phrase's meaning change in context?  Is it always true?  Are you ever wrong, and if so, why?  Take your time; explore knowing.