Organizing Principles

One organizing principle is context: we interpret and perceive things based off of the situation they're in. An example in the packet of context is when a world-reknowned violinist played in a metro unannounced, barely anyone noticed or recognized him. If he had announced his planned concert in a large concert hall though, the context would change, and people would then perceive him as a famous, talented musician, whereas the people in the metro perceived him as a nobody violinist. My own example of context often takes place in my HL English class when we are analyzing excerpts from novels. We received a passage recently from a novel that none of us had read, and we had to write a commentary on it. When I first read this excerpt, I perceived it quite differently than after when I learned it was about a soldier with shellshock. My interpretation of the passage completely changed once I learned of the context of the story.

Abel's Man is Measure, Chapters 3&4

3. To see, 'what is the case', what is required?  Please define each term.

 To see "what is the case," requires context, inference, concepts, experience, and interpretation. Context is the circumstances and situation-what's going on, inference is the use of logic to try and understand a situation, concepts are what are gained by inference-general ideas about the context, experience is the act of taking in a situation with your senses, and your interpretation is your final idea and feelings about a situation.

4. What did Nietzsche mean by 'the fallacy of the immaculate perception'?  How does psychologist, Joseph Jastrow prove this point?  When have we done this in class?

What Nietzsche means by "the fallacy of the immaculate perception" is that everyone perceives things differently-each act of seeing and perceiving something isn't necessarily the only one or the correct one. Psychologist Joseph Jastrow proves this point by using a common drawing of either a duck or a rabbit, depending on one's interpretation. We did this in class during the TOK perception test.

7. What does Abel mean when he says, "to perceive is to solve a problem"?

When Abel says "to perceive is to solve a problem" is that when we perceive things it's a lot for our brains to process and take in, and what we do end up perceiving is culmination of what our brain expects and the patterns it put together through sense perception-so we solve the problem of what we are actually perceiving. 

8. What is the role of social conditioning in determining how things 'naturally look'?

The role of social conditioning in determining how things "naturally look" is that there are certain conventions in society that are familiar to us-"each society relies on its own visual schemata." Additionally, if something, like a common image in art, is passed down through a culture it can appear natural to those of that culture, but very unnatural to those foreign to it.

9. What is significant about the Durer rhinoceros story?  How was the influence of 'convention' influence perspective drawing?

What is significant about the Durer rhinoceros story is that Durer was able to make a woodcut of what he thought a rhinoceros would look like based off what people in his culture said it looked like, and his own imagination. The influence of "convention" was influencing perspective drawing because artists had a lot of trouble drawing in perspective until they applied conventional knowledge like geometry to it. 

11. What does Abel mean when he write, "believing is seeing"?  How may this point be seen in the study of the natural versus the social sciences?

When Abel writes "believing is seeing" what he means is that sometimes a belief or hypothesis is so intense that it leads to certain perceptions-like if someone believes something hard enough, they begin to see it. Also, if someone is told to expect something, they perceive it the way it was expected rather than how they would have originally perceived it. This point may be seen in the study of the natural versus the social sciences because if something previously had previously occurred in nature, scientists are bound to believe it could happen again-and can perceive things that aren't actually there because of this belief (like the supposed Vulcan sighting), and in the social sciences researchers have been found to have a bias-so they expect things of certain people after subconsciously judging them, causing them to perceive their subjects' actions differently than if the researchers were completely objective.

Reading Reflection on "What every baby knows"

1.) Inferential learning mechanisms are the learning tools that baby's are believed to be born with. They allow the baby to have initial "theories" about the world it has been brought into, and they allow them to change and rework those theories based on experience. Additionally, these inferential learning mechanisms give the baby the learning capacity necessary to build upon its theories.

2.) According to this article, as a child gets older, it has many changes made to these inferential learning mechanisms. When a baby is just born, it is able to recognize and imitate facial expressions, even though it can't recognize its own face in a mirror. It even begins to recognize and prefer voices. One-year-olds have the ability to understand peoples' actions and emotions; they see how other people react and feel about things and believe that they should feel similarly. They also see how others handle and interact with certain objects, and know that they should do the same. 14-month-olds don't have the ability, however, to understand that people may desire different things, like 18-month-olds can. So even with a 4 month difference there is a still a huge gap in mental development. Although, children don't have the ability to understand that people can believe different things until about 4 years old, which is when they actually begin to understand their own mind and the minds of others. All of this is different in the case of children with autism, as their learning progression is significantly stunted.

3.) There is a quote from the article that basically sums it up, "Babies are like little scientists continually overthrowing theories that no longer fit the evidence." Their theories about the world that stem from their inferential learning mechanisms are like scientific theories: they are changed and rewritten as more about the world is learned and experienced. They analyze the world as scientists do, and by changing and rewriting their own theories they become more intelligent about the world as time passes. Psychologists have learned an unbelievable amount about babies in these past 30 years, and we've learned that they're smarter than we think.

Intuition & Knowledge

What is meant by "reading thin slices"?

What this means is that when people perceive just a small amount of something, quickly, such as a picture of a face briefly flashed on a screen, they automatically "read" it and gain some sort of interpretation or judgement about it. 

Explain intuitive expertise.

Intuitive expertise is when someone who has been doing something for a long time and could be considered an expert at it, retains a sort of subconscious expertise in the same area that allows them  to be able to do things intuitively, just because of their experience with it. For example, cooks now how much of certain ingredients to put in their meals without measuring it-they just know intuitively what will result in a better meal, but they can't explain how they know exactly to people outside of their area of expertise.

What are the perils of relying on intuition?

The perils of relying on intuition are overconfidence and fear of the wrong things. When people rely on their intuition, but end up incorrect, they tend to say that their intuitive answer was "close" and it was reasonable enough to  not be considered exactly wrong. This is an example of overconfidence due to reliance on intuition-people feel they were right because it's what they initially felt. Fear of the wrong things includes fearing what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear, fearing what we cannot control, fearing what is immediate, and fearing threats most readily available in memory. Most of these fears are illogical, and take over our minds instead of the other things that actually pose a danger to us, but we fear them because of intuition. For example, people in the US are more scared to fly on planes because of 9/11, yet they aren't afraid of driving when car accidents have a much, much higher death rate than airplanes. 

Is intuition a fair justification for mistakes made in decision-making? Give reasons and examples to support your answer. 

I think in some cases, intuition could be a fair justification for mistakes made in decision-making, but definitely not in all. I think every person should try to combat their intuition with logic in order to avoid making these kinds of mistakes. For example, in the Diallo case, the cops made a rational decision based off of what they were seeing and their training (though 41 shots seems excessive). But in the case of  the 8 year old boy not being able to fly since he was a baby because of his name, people should have logically realized that this 8 year old boy was of no threat to them, and was just a victim of his name. Their intuitive fear of someone with the same name as a terrorist getting on their plane should have been eradicated once they analytically and logically looked at the actual situation. 

Hidden Assumptions

1.) I found my results to be true, for the most part, but I found the test itself to be ridiculous. The first test I took-the skin tone test-said I had a slight preference to light-skinned people. The reason it said slight preference is because my fingers pressed the wrong keys a few times since the test purposefully got them used to pressing a certain key for a certain topic. It has nothing to do with an immediate, unconscious preference, but simply a trained finger. It's almost as if the tests were trying to make you come out with racist results. For the second test, which was on gender and sciences, I got slightly to no association between gender and sciences. I could predict the results of my tests based on how many times my fingers slipped, so I was neither surprised, pleased, or angry.
2.) No I don't believe the tests say something about me that I should pay attention to. I know my views on the topics presented, and I don't think this style of test is designed well enough to properly display those views; as it's based on an immediate response from a twitchy figure. I think maybe if this way of answering questions was oral, or somehow unable to be manipulated by repetition, the tests could be more trustworthy.
3.) No I don't think these tests are valid. I don't think it's that easy to determine someone's unconscious preferences, as there's a lot of human error when taking them. I questioned the test's validity the second question #1 appeared, so I didn't really care what my test results would end up as, since either way they wouldn't be because of a mental analysis, but keyboard errors.
4.) One example of a general attitude that I find to be very common in culture is often in shows: the depiction of the rich, and well off as white people and the ne'er-do-wells/gangsters as black people. This shows white people with "superior" attributes, and black people with "bad" and "inferior" attributes.  I'd say that these attitudes toward these two races are generalizations that most certainly formed stereotypes. I think a stereotype is formed from a generalization, so the only way to distinguish between the two is by seeing which comes first. At first, there must have been a generalization that "gangsters" are mostly black people, and that must have eventually formed a set stereotype that has infiltrated shows and culture.
5.) In order to combat jumping to conclusions in general, to deal with this "rapid cognition," we need to    get used to knowing when we jump to conclusions. We have to basically train ourselves to recognize when this "rapid cognition" normally takes place, and allow ourselves to step back and properly analyze the situation. This will help to combat jumping to false conclusions, by trying to prevent ourselves from immediately judging something. I would argue that this is impossible, but able to be diminished. I don't think it's really possible to stop rapid cognition completely, but it can be combatted through calmness and recognition of situations through experience.

What is TOK? Why TOK?

What is TOK?

TOK is, by definition, the Theory of Knowledge . It's the subject that takes what you know and makes you question how you know it. It joins together all aspects of our lives, whether it be academia or home life, and makes you wonder about them completely. 

Why TOK?

TOK allows us to gain a greater understanding for our beliefs and actions. It lets us analyze how and why we do what we do. With TOK, we are able to formulate our own methods of thinking. 

Self as a Knower

     One way of knowledge that I feel reflects who I am is emotion. I tend to be overwhelmed by my emotions in life. For example, there was one particular day last year that I remember being exceedingly happy, and I let that positive feeling dictate my actions. But if I'm angry or aggravated, I know that negative emotions shouldn't rule my words or actions, so I don't let them. Even in my short experience as an IB student so far, I have felt stressed at times due to not immediately understanding a math problem or something, and therefore can feel a surge of emotions like stress and frustration. In addition, aspects of TOK analyze our emotions and what they mean, and how we know and can identify them. I find this really interesting and look forward to those kinds of activities in the future.
      An area of knowledge that I feel also reflects who I am is the arts. I am a creative person at the core and I deeply enjoy reading, drawing, singing, and music in general. As much as I love mathematics and history, I don't feel that they could represent me as a person like the arts can. The arts can hold many subcategories and can branch off into many subjects, and that shows how I have many interests and enjoy dabbling in many subject areas. As a new IB student, I find myself drawing when I need to relax after a long school day, before working on homework. Though I am unable to do IB Art due to taking two languages, I am in the Art Club, and the arts still serve as as place of solace. In TOK, we are able to ask ourselves how we know something is part of the arts area of knowledge, and I even tend to do that on my own.

http://boywithmeese.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4pon17