Vocab Mini - Essay

The vocabulary we have does more than communicate our knowledge; it shapes what we can know. Evaluate this claim in relation to WOK Language and one area of knowledge.

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An essential aspect of the study of language in relation to theory of knowledge has been the relationship between thoughts and language. While the predominant theory in the past has been that language is a tool for the communication of thoughts, the idea that language can shape thoughts, or linguistic determinism, has gained more and more merit. The role of vocabulary, the set of words in a particular language, as either communicating or shaping knowledge lends itself to many interesting questions. Ultimately, the vocabulary of a language reflects the paradigms of a particular culture, and therefore provide the framework for what can be known in the context of that language.

There are studies that suggest that differing vocabularies have direct results on what can be known. A common example is differing means of navigation. Guugu Yimithirr, an australian aboriginal language, uses cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) to describe objects' spatial relationships with each other. Studies have shown that members of these tribes can perform navigational feats that were previously considered impossible by humans. This shows how the vocabulary of a language has a direct impact on what can be known. Speakers of languages which use egocentric navigations (i.e. left, right of, behind) are simply unable to discern cardinal directions, while speakers of languages which use cardinal directions can perform these feats with ease.

Another instance of vocabulary shaping knowledge can be seen in the vocabulary of the Piraha people, which limit what can be known in the area of knowledge Mathematics. The Piraha people have only three words for numerical values, one and two, beyond which they use "many". Their limited vocabulary of numerical values has been shown to have impact on their ability to process basic mathematics. A study from the University of Miami showed that Piraha people had a lower level of mathematical process than those who spoke languages who had specific words for specific numerical values. The lack of vocabulary shapes what can be known of Mathematics.

In both of these cases, vocabulary provides the framework of what can be known by speakers of that language. The reason for this can be tied to what makes a language, and the importance of conventionality. Jakobson's Communication Functions lists a 'mutual code' as an essential part of language. Since the extent to which something is conventional is predicated on the societal norms and culture, it's natural that vocabulary reflects the paradigms of the culture in which it operates. This can be seen in the Piraha people's lack of words for exact numerical values, and the use of cardinal navigation in aboriginal societies. The paradigms that govern the thoughts of societies are embodied in the vocabulary used, which are therefore used to shape knowledge.

The notion that our thoughts are predicated on existing vocabulary isn't entirely true, which can be seen in the continuously growing Oxford's English Dictionary. In 2015 alone words that reflect the growing culture of social media have been added to reflect the reality the English language is adapting to. Verbs like "to retweet" and "twerking" were added to reflect the shared knowledge of the world that's constantly evolving. This shows that the causality goes in both directions, and what is known also shapes the vocabulary of a language.

The implications of vocabulary on what can be known can be seen in historical examples of language being used to dehumanize demographics. The most powerful example of this is the dehumanization propaganda used by the Nazis in their mass genocide of the Jewish population in Europe. Nazi Germany being saturated with vocabulary pegging the Jewish people as rats, and most famously a problem, made the humanity of the Jewish people out of the scope of what could be known by the populace of Nazi Germany. This shows that an abuse of vocabulary has direct humanitarian implications, and that vocabulary does have a huge impact on what can be known.

In conclusion, its evident that vocabulary provides a strong framework for what can be known by speakers of that language. Since vocabulary is predicated on its conventionality, it reflects the paradigm of the society in which it operates. While its equally evident that the paradigms of society can influence vocabulary, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that linguistic determinism may hold more merit than it was previously been granted, and that the vocabulary of a language is worthy of study in and of itself, as a lens into how knowers take in knowledge.

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How Shared Knowledge Shapes Personal Knowledge

The knowledge system of a society can be divided into two bodies of knowledge, shared and personal knowledge. Shared knowledge is a highly structured and systematic product of the knowledge of several individuals, and can be divided into the areas of knowledge, and is continually being contributed to by individuals. The thoughts of the individual is known as personal knowledge, which operates by means of the ways of knowing. Personal knowledge contrasts this  in that it depends crucially on the experiences on the individual, while shared knowledge depends on the combined thoughts of societies as a whole. Art is an area of knowledge that is made up of context, content and craft, and bridges the gap between shared and personal knowledge. There are two parties in art; artist and spectator. Each party’s shared and personal knowledge encompass different things. For an artist, shared knowledge is the existing styles, genres, text types and movements, while for a spectator the shared knowledge is the context in which they’re experiencing the art (socio-political context, gallery vs. street etc…)  Art shapes shared knowledge in three ways, the shared knowledge among artists shaping an individual artist's personal knowledge, through artistic influences and social inspiration. Both parties’ personal knowledge is the way in which they perceive their shared knowledge, for example emotional responses or developments in creativity. The shared knowledge of an artist can also shape the personal knowledge of the spectator, through manipulation of an individual's ways of knowing. Finally shared knowledge among spectators collectively shapes the personal knowledge of an individual spectator, through the hype surrounding pieces of art.

An artist's work is a product of several ways of knowing (such as imagination, emotion and sense perception) and can therefore be taken as a representation of their personal knowledge, and an artist’s influences are examples of this shared knowledge affecting their personal knowledge. Pablo Picasso, a famed artist who himself has contributed immensely to the shared knowledge of art, drew from existing bodies of art such as African art, symbolism, and impressionist artist Munch and many others. He later experimented with these by manipulating the angles and figures, and creating more abstract pieces. Here the shared knowledge of existing fields of knowledge and artistic genres, shaped Picasso’s personal knowledge by fueling his imagination. Here shared knowledge affects the content or craft of an artist’s work.

The second relationship is the artists shared knowledge affecting an individual's spectator’s personal knowledge, and is seen in the didactical goals of arts. For example Homer’s Iliad, a greek epic poem that shaped the moral upbringings of young men in ancient Greece. Here the virtues and principles of the society Homer was surrounded by was the shared knowledge, for example the ethics of his society, the history he had studied and the artistic culture in Greek civilization. Here the shared knowledge of an artist, shaped the personal knowledge of the individual spectator, through shaping their reason and intuition of what was right and wrong, through the shared knowledge acquired by the artist of ethics and history.

During the 1960s and 70s, the anti-Vietnam war movement caused a surge of art from those who opposed the war. Here the shared knowledge of a common reality fueled the social criticism of art at it’s time, and affected each artist's’ personal knowledge. Each artist interpreted the war through ways of knowing such as emotion and reason. Pieces of art such as Vietnam! Antonio Frasconi and poems such as Wichita Vortex Sutra by Allen Ginsberg had graphic imagery of the war in their work and Jimi Hendrix’s famous Star Spangled Banner also incorporated aural imagery of war. These examples show that shared knowledge shaped personal knowledge as it affected each artist's’ emotions and imagination, in turn resulting in similar sentiments in the spectators of these works, their popularity being evidence for the success of this shared knowledge shaping the audience’s personal knowledge.

The final way shared knowledge shapes personal, is the shared knowledge of the community of spectators shaping the personal knowledge of a single spectator. This is exemplified through the necessity for context in art’s justification as good or bad art. The Washington Post released a video in which Joshua Bell, a world renowned violinist, played in a New York subway station, and no one stopped to listen. This shows that because the shared knowledge of all the spectator’s were that art cannot exist in this context, the music wasn’t acknowledge as the art it would be if it was performed in a stadium for which tickets would be sold.

The truth is in actual fact more complex that a simple one way relationship. Shared and personal knowledge have a dynamic relationship as they each shape each other in some way or another. Personal knowledge in art shapes shared knowledge through an artist’s work manipulating masses of spectators. In my IB history class we have been discussing the ways in which Stalin maintained his power through propaganda of art and culture. Several Stalinist artists made art that advanced Stalin’s “cult of personality”, to manipulate the masses to indoctrinate them into his “cult”. We looked at many pieces of art but “the Results of the First Five Year Plan” by Varvara Stepanova stuck out to me, as it was the art was clearly a manipulation of facts to indoctrinate the soviet citizens. This mass manipulation is clearly a manipulation of shared knowledge, and as such shows that personal knowledge can shape shared knowledge. However even in this case, the manipulation may have been a result of many other things such as fear and lack of education, more than it could have been about the art’s impact. Ultimately shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge in art, through the shared knowledge of artists providing inspiration for an artist's personal knowledge, the shared knowledge of the artist affecting the personal knowledge through shaping of ways of knowing, and the shared knowledge of collective spectators affecting an individual's interpretation of a piece of work.

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Works Cited:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/allen-ginsberg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html

http://36.media.tumblr.com/603fab3ceedae0e98d745469e60be8a5/tumblr_mlb0x6g4MB1qedj5wo1_500.png

Which way of knowing leads itself to the truth?

Apply this past TOK essay title to WOK Emotion.  Write three bullet points supporting your argument.  Refer to examples discussed in class (12 Angry Men, Derren Brown's list of 20 words, Children full of life, IKEA lamp ad, IDEA Channel's Sad Music video, Mirror Neurons, Disney's Emotion Vs. Reason, EQ Tests,...).

• While emotion and sense perception both provide strong bases for knowledge, reason lends itself to the truth the most as true reason follows logical steps that are independent of corruption or bias. 
• Example 1: 12 anrgy men, emotion allowed the men to reconsider the vote for guilty, however it was their deductive skills that allowed them to reason why they should change their mind. 
• in the Sad Music video, our emotion conjured a belief that was incorrect, and despite our reason telling us that the lamp isn't alive and therefore can't have emotions, we anthropomorphized it and assumed that it was sad. 
• Reason is susceptible to fallacies though, however if one thinks critically about your surroundings and background (using reason) one's skills with reason to find knowledge can improve, while this growth is not there in other WOKs. Emotions are too fleeting and sense perception provides nothing more than empirical data (colour, height, visual aspects), which without reason say very little about the world around us. 

Art Post

I chose the sculpture of the mind because it highlighted many aspects of the complexity of intelligence through the use of a medium that has a continuous spectrum. The rainbow colour scheme that went throughout the skull and into the background spoke to the many aspects of intelligence. Additionally the fact that no colour was expressed more or less than other gave all intelligences equal value.

I think the creator was trying to highlight how many ways of knowing that can be accessed, and how different people excel at others. I consider this to be successfully completed, since the sculpture takes no particular stance, but rather brings to light complexities of intelligence and personality. 

To what extent does actively seeking out justification in fixed paradigms hinder knowledge?

Seeking out justification for knowledge is a useful exercise in determining what of our beliefs is true knowledge. However the usefulness of looking for justification hinges on ensuring that one maintains an open mind. If one is stuck in fixed paradigms and has a closed mind, then actively seeking justification can be hindering to knowledge, and can lead to the solidification of ignorant beliefs.

Due to the subjectivity and complexity of knowledge, and it’s integral role in our lives, the natural inclination is to cling to pieces of information that justify things that we hold to be true. Since knowledge is both what we believe to be true and what is objective truth, everything that we think is true must be actively questioned and justified if we are to call it knowledge. However this active justification also hinders knowledge, since it is often difficult to distinguish what is knowledge and what is belief. Rather than pursuing true knowledge, often actively seeking justifications for knowledge solidifies uninformed beliefs that we already hold. For example, a growing topic of controversy in the media today is the topic of vaccinations. While there is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence behind the benefits of vaccinations, there is still a large and vocal community of people who believe that vaccinations lead to autism and other severe medical conditions. Those who believe this often cite a 1998 study from England in which a doctor falsified results to show a correlation between vaccinations and autism. In this case, people who have fixed paradigms are hindered by their seeking out justifications, because they cling to things that justify their opinions. If they had more open minds, then they would find that their beliefs are in fact not true, and would acquire the knowledge of the benefits of vaccines. However in this case their fixed paradigms renders their seeking of justification useless.

Recognizing our paradigms is key to making justifications for knowledge useful. In IB History we are encouraged to recognize why we analyze history the way that we do, and to go a step further and analyze and argue in favor of the opposing viewpoint. This exercise enables us to not only understand history on a more holistic scale, but also adopt new paradigms that open up ideas that our original paradigms did not, therefore expanding our capacity for knowledge.

In providing a framework for thought, paradigms, however integral they may be, can lead to ignorance and close mindedness if we aren't aware of our paradigms. This close-mindedness means that when we seek justification for knowledge, we may be seeking justification for our fears rather than realities of the world. Justifications of our beliefs are how we tie our beliefs to reality, which in turn justifies them as knowledge, but in a world of so much information, they may just solidify our ignorances. The search for justification must be done in conjunction with an open mind for either to be useful in perceiving the world.